Evidence-first program for policy interchange contracts (PIC), conformance harnesses, and typed rules/process coupling across OpenFisca, PolicyEngine, Axiom, and process platforms.
Sequencing principle: evidence → adoption → specification.
This repository began as a ChatGPT-produced review pack for RaCX (a proposed "Rules-as-Code Exchange Superset"). It was independently reviewed and re-scoped from a proposed standard into working contracts, consumers, studies, and staged upstream contributions — with any community standard extracted later from exchanges that demonstrably work.
Program status (2026-07-14): the original evidence-first and v0.2 implementation tracks are repo-local complete. External maintainer and publication gates remain open, and the planned v1 evidence/maturity tracks are registered in conductor/tracks.md.
views/07_fable5_reassessment_and_pivot.md— current strategy (start here)views/06_fable5_independent_review.md— second-opinion review of RaCXconductor/product.md— product definitionconductor/tracks.md— tracks (mostly archived; see active closeout if any)conductor/NEXTGEN_RELEASE_STATUS.md— release matrix and external gatesconductor/V1_ROADMAP.md— evidence, process-domain, portability, and hardening gates for 1.0, with independent adoption tracked post-v1AGENTS.md— instructions for AI agents implementing this repo
| Path | Status | Contents |
|---|---|---|
contracts/ |
Active (PIC v0.1 / v0.2 work archived) | Interchange artifact contracts: crosswalk, parameters, fixtures, traces, semantics |
harness/ |
Active | Validation / adapter harness |
converters/ |
Active | Fixture converters (OpenFisca ↔ PolicyEngine YAML subsets) |
studies/ |
Active | SNAP divergence; NZ RuleSpec ↔ OpenFisca Aotearoa reconciliation |
demos/ |
Active | Service-boundary mocks + Docassemble OIA clock interview package |
external/ |
Active | Staged upstream packets + ADOPTION_STATUS.md |
subrepos/process-mappings/ |
Non-canonical incubator | Proposed standalone home for source-backed process profiles and optional platform adapters; extraction requires the human gate in #50 |
papers/ |
Active | Coupling companion paper draft; arXiv deferred; see papers/README.md and Project 20 |
conductor/ |
Active | Product, workflow, release status; completed tracks in archive/ |
views/ |
Active | Review documents (ChatGPT 00–05; Fable 5 review/pivot 06–07) |
AGENTS.md |
Active | Agent handoff and implementation guide |
project_repo_racx/ |
Design notebook — superseded | Original RaCX sketch; see its STATUS.md |
conversation/, source_material/, README_PACKAGE.md |
Archive | Originating review-pack materials |
Original six tracks plus the next-generation roadmap are archived under conductor/archive/. Highlights:
| Area | Outcome |
|---|---|
| PIC contracts | Schemas, validator, examples, consumer feedback loop |
| foi-o OIA rules | Merged upstream: edithatogo/foi-o#20 |
| Engine contributions | Trace / missingness / converter issues filed on PolicyEngine & OpenFisca |
| SNAP study | Divergence study scaffolding and candidate fixtures |
| NZ reconciliation | Certified engine-gap (not numeric dual-engine agreement); coverage request openfisca-aotearoa#199 |
| Adoption ledger | external/ADOPTION_STATUS.md |
GitHub roadmap parent: #6. Track issues #7–#13 are closed complete.
- No runtime AI decisions for eligibility, payment, refusal, tax, or administrative rights. AI drafts; deterministic code decides; humans certify.
- Oracle independence: golden fixtures are curated by humans from legislation, agency worked examples, or an unrelated implementation — never generated by the same model that wrote the code under test.
- Fixtures are interpretations, not law: every fixture set carries a versioned interpreter-of-record and a non-authoritative disclaimer.
- Couple through identifiers, never through embedding: rules, evidence, process, and evaluation artifacts reference each other by stable ID.
- No mapping without a consumer: no standard enters any crosswalk table without a working converter and a named user.
- Floats never represent money. Decimal strings everywhere.
edithatogo/foi-o: process-heavy testbed; first PIC consumer (OIA rules module merged).edithatogo/foi-process: deterministic FOI event/replay/OCEL implementation and operational evidence consumer; not the generic mapping authority.- Proposed
edithatogo/process-mappings: incubating undersubrepos/process-mappings/; future home for source-backed profiles and optional platform adapters after an explicit cutover. - PolicyEngine / Axiom / OpenFisca: rules-heavy testbeds; receive fixture/trace/validation contributions.
- Alaveteli (mySociety): process-side upstream for foi-o's state model.
- BetterRules/openfisca-aotearoa: NZ comparative target; coverage gap documented.
- License: Apache License 2.0
- Cite this repository: see
CITATION.cff(GitHub “Cite this repository” sidebar)
RaC Conformance is currently unfunded independent research. AI and automation are used to make research and implementation work more accessible, but they do not make external decisions or replace human responsibility. The maintainer is responsible for understanding and verifying submitted work, reviewing its full scope, and approving each outreach and publication action.
racx_fable_review_pack.zip(not committed): the original ChatGPT deliverable this repo was extracted from.- Git history starts at the baseline import commit; subsequent changes are documented, reviewed work.