Porosity 2 (PO-2) Card
DBD Cornucopia > Deck > Porosity > 2
Card Details - Two of Porosity
Abbreviation
PO-2
Card's focus
The focus of this card is third-party integration options
Threat to claimants
Luna completes the service without creating, publishing, documenting maintaining and supporting integration points, such as a public API, messaging protocol or batch data processes, resulting in the system being isolated from wider community assets
Threat to claimants
Luna completes the service without creating, publishing, documenting maintaining and supporting integration points, such as a public API, messaging protocol or batch data processes, resulting in the system being isolated from wider community assets.
Some examples of how this threat could lead to harms (negative effects on claimants)
The design recommendations and implications relevant to the card are listed below in the next section, but even those can be somewhat abstract and difficult to think about during practical day-to-day implementation. Therefore, some example harms are provided to complement the more formal research outputs. These examples are unique per card, and are only published on these web pages (i.e. in no other project outputs).
- A charity which helps many claimants to make and maintain claims, cannot easily build automation processes which interface directly with the service, meaning they have to either utilise greater manual resources or serve fewer claimants
- Claimants feel unsupported and alone due to a lack of community support, leaving them anxious about using the service, which their children pick up on, who in turn become upset and distracted at school
The examples are to help understand the threat on the card, not to suppress thinking and innovation. Incorporating these examples exactly, or closely matching ones, should be scored down when playing DBD Cornucopia as a game.
Applicable design recommendations and implications
These are reproduced here from Research Briefing N
Support claimants’ own ecosystems
- Recognise how wider ecosystems contribute to social protection service delivery
For these systems, the 'service user' is rarely just one person and there should be provision for other actors in people's wider ecosystems. Facilitate and aid these existing assets by enabling, encouraging and promoting information sharing, additional user roles with different privileges, delegated access, real-time-integrations, and other ways to involve the assistance of others.
Embrace a wider ecosystem and fuller claimant activity viewpoint for digitised public services
- Legitimise extensibility and customisation of digital infrastructure
Deploy technology in ways that will permit, support and advocate integration with digital welfare by other actors. Provide timely, free and open access to system information, supporting content, and details of upcoming changes and updates to support these efforts.
Design to assist claimants across the full span of their own activities
- Recognise and promote the synergistic effects wider ecosystems can offer claimants
Networks of actors and instruments contribute gains to claimants unrelated to the social protection payment public service, yet can contribute to improving people's lives. Ensure the integration of other actors is not purely transactional, but also provides opportunities to explore other beneficial aspects.
General Notes
Card values (i.e. '2' for this card) are for game play and are not correlated with the severity of harm. This is because threats cannot be ranked directly since they can affect individuals in different ways due to situations and circumstances, or affect fewer or more claimants, or the harms can arise in claimants' support networks and wider society.
The threat description uses a person's name as the "attacker" (i.e. 'Luna' for this card), which can be thought of someone involved with implementation. They could have any role which influence digitisation. So they could be a database administrator, or a copy writer, or a quality assurance specialist, etc, or all of these. Everyone could have some influence on the claimant threat described. The names were randomly selected from those currently most popular as given names for boys and girls (UK Office for National Statistics).
The example harms provided are drawn from the research data (which explored not only parts of existing services but also the effects of possible changes to those), from the author's own knowledge of web application development and testing, the author's own experience of helping citizens to claim Universal Credit (UC) and Personal Independence Payment (PIP), and from suggestions submitted by other people (make a suggestion). The threats and example harms do not necessarily exist in the current UC or PIP deployments or in ecosystems around those services, but they might well do.
All the cards in this Porosity suit are: 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 J Q K A
The other suits in the deck are: Scope, Architecture, Agency, Trust and Cornucopia (plus Jokers).