Questions about users and use cases!

[alexsoble]

👋👋Hi there! My name is Alex Soble, and I'm working on 18F's Eligibility APIs Initiative.

I have a couple of questions about this API and what you've learned from building it. Appreciate in advance whatever you have to share!

• Who have the main users of this API been?
• Have you discovered any unexpected use cases during your work on this API?
• Does your work on this API make you think that an official Federal Poverty Level API would be a good thing for the government to stand up? Why or why not?
• Any advice or context you'd want to pass on to a team at the federal level thinking about standing up a Federal Poverty Level API and working on eligibility-related APIs?

Cheers and thanks!

[bengolder]

👋 Hi Alex! @mapsam would be better equipped to answer, but I was around when he started this.

Who have the main users of this API been?

This in particular I don't know. Whoever has access to the heroku instance could speak to whether it saw usage & by whom.

Does your work on this API make you think that an official Federal Poverty Level API would be a good thing for the government to stand up?

Yes I think it was the precise lack of such an API that inspired Sam to make this. More context in this thread

Any advice or context you'd want to pass on to a team at the federal level thinking about standing up a Federal Poverty Level API and working on eligibility-related APIs?

This was an offshoot of the Richmond fellowship, in which we noticed that a lot of safety net nonprofits would defer to some FPL scale with percentage look up tables, and that it might be useful for anyone building eligibility logic for said non profits to have a clear centralized, ideally authoritative, place to get this information. Sometimes these nonprofit services assess eligibility in prior years, not just the current one, and manually calculate or look up the FPL % for each client to determine where that client lies along a sliding scale for service fees.

A related case is that other agencies look for clear guidelines about poverty for the sake of deciding "indigency" to waive fees or offer discounted services. HUD has an FPL scale adjusted by cost of living that was useful on the CA DOJ fee waiver fellowship, in which the CA DOJ improved their fee waiver eligibility criteria to account for cost of living. In short, there are multiple federal standards for poverty that are useful for other agencies and safety-net services.

The situations above don't require an API, but they would at least be helped by a clear, centralized, up-to-date authoritative source for performing and reviewing FPL calculations. Perhaps a "register" might also be an appropriate solution.

For people building software across the safety net, an API or or code library might be helpful for performing the calculations that are often central to eligibility.

[mapsam]

@alexsoble howdy! Hope you're well.

Who have the main users of this API been?

Unfortunately I have no metrics from heroku (on my personal account) since it's not a paid tier. Here's the metrics page 😭

Aside from the lack of metrics this repository marks any activity related to the API, of which there is little.

Have you discovered any unexpected use cases during your work on this API?

None to my knowledge.

Any advice or context you'd want to pass on to a team at the federal level thinking about standing up a Federal Poverty Level API and working on eligibility-related APIs?

@bengolder bless you - your context building is perfect. The only thing I'd add is that this API requires updating the data once per year. As you can see it's two years out of date. The maintenance burden is little but must be done in a timely manner, especially in the case of real-world users relying on responses.

[alexsoble]

Thank you @bengolder and @mapsam, this is so helpful!

If I have updates on this topic from the 18F Eligibility APIs Initiative side, I'll add a post to this thread!

💖