DMN Benefit Toolbox (including the Philly Property Tax Relief Screener)

Use DMN and FEEL to create APIs and Screeners for public benefit rules.

Motivation

The project's founders have many years of experience in a now-defunct Philadelphia nonprofit that was dedicated to helping expand access to public benefits like SNAP and Medicaid.

One crucial ingredient for expanding benefits access is helping people to quickly assess their eligibility for the programs.

This project aims to make it easier to create these assessment tools, to the point where it can be done by savvy subject matter experts with little-to-no formal software coding training.

The Philly Property Tax Relief Screener

As a proof of concept, we've built an API and a screener for several of the tax relief benefits available in Philadelphia.

You can interact with the screener yourself here.

We intend to improve this screener to the point where it is easy to use by the general public. We also intend use what we have learned building it to further the overall project goal of making additional screeners for other benefits easier to build.

Tech Stack

At a high-level, we use a combination of open-source libraries (Kogito and form-js). These libraries rely on Java and JavaScript to visualize DMN models, generate code from those models, and evaluate FEEL expressions for models and forms (screeners).

DMN and FEEL are "low code" open standards which help make eligibility logic more accessible to subject matter experts, and their use is similar in complexity to working with Excel formulas.

Contributing

We're just now trying to figure this out, but I imagine dropping us a line in our Slack channel is a good first step! Our two initial founders are definitely challenged when it comes to frontend/UX concerns, so help in those areas would be especially appreciated! Thanks!