Vocabulary

What is actually true about a person’s life, independent of any system or institution. For example: you know that you lost your job, or had a stroke, or became a parent.

Something that happens in a person’s life that changes their situation, such as a job loss, a stroke, a divorce, having a baby or a move. The event is real whether or not any institution ever knows about it. Depending on eligibility criteria, governments can respond to an event in a person’s life. It’s a government decision – based on law, policy- on whether they will and how. Life-events are a starting point to understand which administrative truths connect and where, but events only enter the administrative world of government when it generates a signal.

Information received by government that something has changed after an event. A signal is not yet verified, or not yet administratively real.

The specific verified facts an institution treats as operative when making a consequential decision about a person’s eligibility for a service. An administrative truth can sit at the data-level in an authoritative or unauthoritative data registrar, and it can be become a service-level truth if verified as true for a service determination. In that case it can be re-used in a service cascade: other services can ‘subscribe’ to the truth and re-use it to make someone automatically eligible for something. Read more about administrative truth in Part 1 of the series “What Lies Beneath”.

A set of programs and services that may become relevant once a life event is validated, shown to a citizen so they can decide what to pursue.

A formally recorded fact that was accurate once, became inaccurate, and was never corrected — treated by the system as if it were still true.

A designated human role accountable for what a system believes about a citizen, whether that belief is accurate, and what happens when it is wrong.

A clear, official record of what the government decided about you, where the information came from, which rule was applied, and who made the call. It shows a track path through the decision and you can carry it manually or digitally as a person. With a consent, a government receipt can also travel across jurisdictions, and if machine-readable, could be read and interpreted to base eligibility decisions on.

The word “system” used in the series “Administrative Truth: What Lies Beneath” means: the full arrangement of institutions, rules, technologies, and people that together determine what a citizen receives, is denied, or is required to do when they experience a life event.

Within that arrangement, this series distinguishes two layers. The administrative infrastructure of the state: the legislation, policies, eligibility rules, and determination processes that govern what happens, whether delivered on paper, in person, or digitally. And the digital infrastructure: the technical layer through which administrative processes are increasingly executed and automated, with its own logic, its own failure modes, and its own governance requirements.

When the series says “the system doesn’t know who you are or what happened in your life,” it could mean: the database does not hold the right record, the institution has not been told, or the arrangement as a whole was not designed to respond to ground truth. Administrative truth is the object that sits at the intersection of all three. It is produced by the administrative infrastructure, held in the digital infrastructure, and consequential for the person navigating the whole arrangement.

The word “system” in my public systemic design “Unbounded Affairs” series is more related to how different worldviews and ontologies interact within the people who act within the things they design. The system is what the system does…

A service cascade is a list of services that cascade from a service determination high up in the service taxonomy. For example, if someone gets a disability determination or is eligible for employment benefits they can qualify for many other services that pro-actively flow from that one administrative truth. Once eligible for X, a person can become eligible for X, Y, Z.

Service cascades are important to define when looking at service design and data-interoperability opportunities, governance and pro-active service delivery. First, because any given determination could have highly inequitable eligibility criteria. For example, if a determination with a large service cascade is locked behind another service determination (ie. one can only get X, if a person already has administrative truth Y).

Second, service cascades benefit from streamlining policy and eligibility criteria to reduce administrative burden on both the citizen and the government worker’s side. Let’s say one administrative truth could lead to accessing 23 other services, but all 23 services have slightly different eligibility criteria (ie. a slightly lower income threshold, or a different house hold composition), then it’s worth looking at coming to mutual agreements for those services, especially when they sit in one jurisdiction, or when they are offered by different jurisdictions.

The ability of an established administrative truth to travel with a citizen across programs and jurisdictions without having to be re-proven from scratch.

The practice of examining what systems already believe about a person before designing a new service or program.

Standard service discovery asks: what does this person need, what is their journey, what are their pain points? Discovery for administrative truth adds a prior question: what does the system already believe about this person, is that belief accurate, and what happens if it is not?

In practice it means mapping the administrative records that already exist about the people a service will affect: which systems hold data about them, how current that data is, and where it diverges from people’s actual situations. A team doing this kind of discovery might find that the main problem is not a missing service but a stale record, a conflicting version of the same person across systems, or a validated fact that citizens are being asked to prove again unnecessarily. It also looks at the question: what happens after an administrative truth is established? Which other services does a person become eligible for (see: eligibility cascade).