Our community runs on different rules and laws set out in legislation, regulation and policy These rules are often complicated, difficult and ambiguous for customers to understand. The Rules as Code initiative is transforming customer experience by reducing ambiguity and simplifying interpretation to make compliance easy.
Rules as Code focuses on translating the prescriptive rules in legislation, regulation, and policy into code so they can be consumed and interpreted by computers. In the first instance, we have created a digital version of the Community Gaming Regulation 2020. This regulation identifies the conditions for running community games by different charities, not-for-profits and businesses in NSW. We have published machine readable rules in tandem with the human readable regulation, and also made them available via an API.
With the help of this initiative, customers are now able to navigate this digital version of the regulation easily via a simple questionnaire available on the NSW Fair Trading website. This has made it easier for charities, not-for-profits and businesses to better understand the regulation for conducting different community games, such as lotteries, bingo and trade promotions. Furthermore, it informs the customer whether their gaming activity is permitted, and if they require authority to conduct a gaming activity. This single source of truth, will reduce time that customers spend on understanding the regulation and applying it to their own unique situation. For larger organisations holding several hundred games a year, this will translate to compliance cost savings.
It's exciting to know that this is a first of its kind rules as code initiative within NSW and across Australia. This initiative has opened the door for multiple regulations within NSW to be coded using a similar approach. Similar future initiatives will also assist government to reduce regulatory complexities and in modelling regulatory impacts more precisely. They will also help to increase transparency for customers by making the rules present in digital systems openly available for the people and businesses of NSW.
