Porosity 3 (PO-3) Card

Card Details - Three of Porosity

Abbreviation

PO-3

Card's focus

The focus of this card is undermining third party integration

Threat to claimants

Teddy expressly discourages third party service integration either overtly (e.g. banning such integrations in terms of use, making integration illegal) or covertly (e.g. extensibility and customisability not promoted, blaming integrations for problems, failing to maintain integration points such as an API, deliberately breaking integrations)

Threat to claimants

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).

Claimants are led to believe that any third party involvement may, or will, cause problems to their own claims, putting claimants off getting such advice, support and guidance which would have been beneficial to them
Claimants need help but are reluctant to contact a third party because of incorrect information they have heard, but this means they do not know which option offered on a form is the best one to choose, because none match their situation, and do not receive any help to clarify the problem, leaving them confused and worried

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 NO2. Multiple cards reference each design implication.

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.

Acknowledge claimants as people in digital design

Prioritise claimants' interests over system efficiencies
All digital welfare design processes, methods and decision-making should prioritise claimants' needs to achieve best outcomes for individuals rather than system efficiencies. Organisational knowledge and resources should be utilised to this respect including intervening in advance to identify matters that affect claims or what claimants may have forgotten about.

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 systems which support the division of labour with claimants' ecosystems

Integrate accurate specific and contextual primary guidance about making claims within systems and promote secondary professional assistance
None

Design to assist claimants across the full span of their own activities

Accept, permit and encourage direct sole-use, shared-use, assisted use, and indirect intermediated use and proxy use of systems
The nature of activities requires flexibility in how claimants and other actors in ecosystems interact with each other and with state systems, and these can change over time.
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. '3' 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. 'Teddy' 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).