2026 OpenFisca Conference —
Policy Innovation & Rules as Code

📅 30^th–31^st March 2026
🇦🇺 Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, Australia
🎟️ Free event upon registration

Day 1: Policy innovation for better public outcomes

Policy making and delivery has largely not kept pace with the increased speed, complexity and pressures of change and changing expectations in a modern, polycrisis world. Civil services around the world have hungrily adopted new methods and technologies, but what is working to drive measurable, scalable and sustainable public good? How might policy as a discipline evolve and transform to become more adaptive, humane and impactful? What can we learn from the past, and might a better future look like that we can work towards?

The Policy Innovation for Public Good event is dedicated to exploring these questions, through international and cross-disciplinary cooperation, bringing together a wide range of civil servants and policy aficionados to share experience, aspirations and bring bold collective reimagining of policy making and delivery.

Venue

INSPIRE Centre, University of Canberra (GPS: -35.238,149.082)

Schedule

08:30 - Doors open
09:00 - Welcome and acknowledgement of Country
09:10 - Opening keynote: Adaptive Policy for Adaptive Systems
Michael Outram, Independent Advisor and former ABF Commissioner
09:30 - Policy innovation around the world
an exciting panel with case studies (10 mins each) from Japan, France, New Zealand, Australia and lessons on policy innovation from the human development sector. Speakers include public servants from around the world, and Bridi Rice (Development Intelligence Lab)
10:50 - Morning tea
11:10 - Policy as a journey
An exciting panel of novel policy methods, frameworks, operating models and innovative use of technology. This panel will also discuss the criticality of looking backwards and forward. Speakers include Suhit Anantula (The Helix Lab), Catherine Althaus (Pracademic, UNSW), Joanna Weaver (Tech Policy Design Institute), Frank Bongiorno (Centre of Public Ideas, University of Canberra), Phillipa Martin (Salsa Digital) and more to come.
12:30 - Lunch
13:30 - Participatory Possibilities
Chris Vanstone (TACSI)
13:50 - Policy cooperation workshop
This session will invite attendees to participate in policy innovation discussions to share and co-create next steps. Each table will be invited to present their key insights and ideas, which will be captured in a post event policy innovation report. Topics will include Participatory possibilities with policy, How to make policy innovation the new normal in policy institutions, What policy infrastructure is required to support modern policy making and management, and How should AI be used in policy making? Note: There will be a simultaneous offsite government to government knowledge exchange event, for which participants will be transported from the Inspire venue at 1pm promptly.
15:30 - Afternoon tea
16:00 - Groups report back on stream insights, with voting and prizes
16:30 - Policy capability innovation: Transforming traditional policy teams to be innovative as usual
Tim De Sousa (FTI Consulting)
16:50 - Final thanks and close

Special gov2gov afternoon

For civil servants only, no matter from which jurisdiction, we organise a special meeting hosted by the Australian Department of Finance under Chatham House Rule for open sharing of difficulties and opportunities in Rules as Code and Policy Innovation in the public sector.

Transportation will be organised from the main event venue to the gov2gov event location.

13:30 to 14:00 - transportation to Dept of Finance
14:00 to 17:00 - gov2gov knowledge sharing side event

Networking dinner

The networking dinner will be the opportunity to meet with speakers, association members and conference organisers. The dinner will take place at the Water’s Edge restaurant. You will enjoy a three course meal, including non-alcoholic drinks and hot drinks, in a beautiful venue on the shore of Lake Burley Griffin.

A bus will be taking you from the conference venue to the restaurant. As there is about an hour between the end of the day’s event and the start of dinner, you will be offered the possibility to join a walking tour of the Parliamentary Triangle area with the rest of the group.

17:00 to 17:30 - transportation to city center
17:30 to 18:30 - group city tour
Courtesy of the GovCMS team.
18:30 to 20:30 - networking dinner

Day 2: Rules as Code around the world with OpenFisca

The second International OpenFisca Conference will bring together policymakers and technical experts to advance transparency, innovation, and collaboration in Rules as Code. The intention of this event is to explore and share Rules as Code case studies, best practices and innovative approaches, and celebrate public and civil society actors who have made strong achievements. OpenFisca is the world’s most widely adopted free and open-source platform to write, provide and support proactive modelling and operational use of Rules as Code. This annual conference provides both a chance to learn from exciting Rules as Code innovation around the world, and to extend our collective vision towards where we need to go.

Venue

Semesters Room, Building One, University of Canberra (GPS: -35.239,149.084)

Schedule

08:30 - Doors open
09:00 - Welcome
09:05 - Starting on the same page: what are Rules as Code and Better Rules?
Nadia Webster, Design Lead for Business Rules, Ministry of Social Development, New Zealand
09:20 - The start and international growth of OpenFisca
Matti Schneider, Executive Director, OpenFisca Association
09:25 - How countries discover and adopt Rules as Code: the case of Japan
Haruko Izuhara, Asukoe Partners, Japan
09:35 - State of OpenFisca: a global tour of use cases and adoption around the world
A series of short interventions reviewing the achievements of OpenFisca community members in different countries and highlighting the new models of the year. Presentations by 🇫🇷 Sandra Chakroun, 🇹🇳 Mahdi Ben Jelloul, 🇸🇳 Sylvain Duchesne, 🇷🇪 Thomas Guillet, 🇵🇾 Ernesto Rodriguetti, 🇨🇦 Maxime Cuillerier, 🇵🇫 Yannick Gooding, 🇯🇵 Koichiro Shiratori, 🇳🇨 Maxime Bollengier, 🇳🇿 Hamish Fraser.
10:10 - Australia’s whole-of-government approach
Sharyn Clarkson, Department of Finance, Australia
10:20 - How Assemblic reduces the cost of implementing Rules as Code with OpenFisca (sponsor speech)
Philippa Martin, Assemblic, Australia
10:25 - The economic relevance of Rules as Code
Tim De Sousa, FTI Consulting, Australia
10:35 - Announcement of a global consultation on Rules as Code
Hakke Hansen, SPRIN-D, Germany
10:40 - The OpenFisca Association’s first year of operation: structuring digital commons
Matti Schneider, Executive Director, OpenFisca Association
10:55 - Morning tea
11:20 - Adoption strategies (fishbowl format)
Discussion with different witnesses on how Rules as Code has been adopted by governments in their jurisdiction. The conversation will be sparked by a presentation by the GovCMS team in Australia, with reactions and insights by delegates from Japan, France and New Zealand. The discussion will progressively open up to audience members as they join the presenters on stage, shifting the conversation to match the interests and challenges of the participants. This practice is known as a fishbowl.
12:20 - Networking lunch

Our afternoon is structured in sequences of 30 minutes that follow along the policy production path: from design to delivery to optimisation. Each sequence will have two parallel streams, allowing you each time to decide which case study is most relevant to your own context.
In each session, you will get a product demo, learn about the context that led to it, discover its results and impact, find out about the teams and collaborations behind those, and hear about future perspectives. After a 10-15 minutes presentation, you will have 15 minutes to share and discuss, maximising learnings and creating lasting connections that will support your own projects.

13:30 - Afternoon programme announcement
13:35 - Designing policies with their digital twins
- How impact assessment with OpenFisca changed entirely a planned reform (Direction for Digital Transformation, New Caledonia)
- How LexImpact uses OpenFisca to model the impact of the finance bill on the budget of the State (Parliament, France)
14:10 - Delivering policies to end users
- Benefit navigator (GovTechTokyo, Japan)
- Eligibility to join the Air Force Cadets (Department of Defence, Australia)
14:45 - New tools for policy modelling
Highlight of recent products from members of the Association.
15:20 - The future of modelling
- Modelling rules to start from zero: radical simplification of law by mirroring results (Koichiro Shiratori, Institute for poverty prevention, Japan)
- Scaling rules intelligence: making AI work for Rules as Code (Possum Hodgkin, Department of Finance, Australia)
15:50 - Afternoon tea
16:15 - Working groups
The OpenFisca Association introduces Working Groups as a way to foster international collaboration. Kickstart this new approach in person and join the conversations! You will have a 3 minutes introduction of each working group, will choose where to contribute for 45 minutes, and will then share your observations with the wider group.
- AI: which use cases are relevant for Rules as Code? Which safeguards must we put in place? What policy for AI-assisted contributions?
- Benefits assessment tools: how to raise public awareness and deliver the simulators to users? How to do community organising to update the rules?
- Mutualisation of tooling: how can we avoid duplicate effort in tools for updating Rules as Code systems? Which systems already exist and should be invested in?
17:20 - Digital commons like OpenFisca are critical infrastructure (sponsor speech)
Henri Verdier, President, Fondation Inria (France)
17:25 - Closing address
17:30 - End of the event