09-technicaloverview

Technical overview (October 2022)

We decided to use Openfisca as our rules as code platform for several reasons:
* It is a proven platform for legislation as code, especially relevant to government social and financial services and is used in several jurisdictions around the world.
* It is open source which enables us to contribute and extend the code base where needed, and also enables high trust of the platform because anyone else can scrutinise the code as well as the inputs/outputs to ensure high veracity outcomes.
* Openfisca provides a useful framework to delineate eligibility, calculations, variables, changes to the rules over time, and the ability to retrospectively calculate, or measure impact at scale across the whole population. This enabler for population modeling of policy changes will enable far more than just the eligibility service initially planned. It will enable anyone in the community to test and understand the impact of proposed policy changes.
* We can collaborate with legislation/regulation as code experts from the Openfisca community, which is very open and sharing, and values aligned with the Cardano community, enabling greater collaboration between the communities into the future.
* Several of our team has good experience with Openfisca already, so we can deliver more in the time available in this project.

There are two functional products being produced: the reg/leg as code platform (Openfisca with test and deployment suite); and the entitlement service. This blog post will cover the technical update on the platform, and a technical overview of the service will come in another month or two, once the user research is complete we will outline the technical stack for the service (so we can validate our hypotheses for this service and functionality prior to finalising the technical architecture).

See here for a picture of a high level technical overview of an ideal [RaC Architecture](https://github.com/digitalaotearoa/rac-guide/blob/gh-pages/rac-architecture.png).

Image provided with thanks and attribution to Asghar Kazi and Sara Falamaki 

Specifically, the github repository is at https://github.com/govzeroaotearoa
The NZ openfisca code repository is at https://github.com/govzeroaotearoa/openfisca-aotearoa
The infrastructure documentation (including docker files) is at https://github.com/govzeroaotearoa/infrastructure/tree/main/services 
The running openfisca platform with API is at https://rac.g0v.nz