Project
Civichat / OpenFisca Japan
A technical attempt to narrow the gap in access to social support caused by simply not knowing which institutions exist.
Civichat was founded in 2020 to translate eligibility conditions for social programs from natural language into formal logic, and to design a conversational interface that presents the programs available to a person.
In a Shibuya pilot, the company reported in 2022 that it covered 29 child-rearing support programs and 102 childcare facilities, with 6,381 registered users. Rather than a list searchable only by people who knew program names, it began with questions about a person's circumstances to rebuild the entry point to public support.
After municipal pilots and venture-backed commercialization, the work moved to open source when it proved difficult to continue as a for-profit company. The knowledge now connects to OpenFisca Japan, a public benefits-calculation foundation whose published implementation offers simple estimates for 28 welfare and tax programs.
People