Roles & Responsibilities 

Spongl is pleased to announce that we've dropped some super new reports into one of our Shared Bases!

Here's the link:
 https://airtable.com/appYRKIg2jp7QXeGp/shrBke3qgN649Q4ho

These have been built by aggregating the results of our models for Roles and Responsibilities (R&R).

There is lots of value here for anyone wearing an EHS compliance hat. Please share to that special person in your life (ha, ha).

More details below but the two key takeaways are that the data can be downloaded and is provided under a CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Licenses
A short note about licenses. Our foundational data is covered by the National Archives' Open Government License. All of our adapted information is covered by a Creative Commons license of one sort or another. Our code is open source and on a public repo. The models operationalised by the code and reported here are our IP and covered by a standard copyright. Specifically this means the classes and members of the models which have been built through endless PDCAs (its never PDCA is it? More like do something really dumb until it becomes very obvious rework is needed - or is that just me?)

R&R Models
We've applied our R&R Models across all the laws that are in force across our 50+ Family groups. That's 8538 laws. We've processed 7457 of them so that's well over 80%. Not bad for v0.1 and of course we'll be working to fix the bugs and move towards 100% coverage.

Role
Full details on our Role model are available in our Help docs (link in the Shared Base) so we'll not go into details here. We perform a full-text search for each Role term e.g. ""client"". Search reliability is high but there will be false positives. We are creating a quality measure for this. The report in the resource linked to above shows which roles turn up in which laws and put all this information into a single table. This is useful for anyone wearing an EHS compliance hat.

Role is actually split into two groups - governed and government. We continue to build our government role model, but it already includes key EHS agencies, devolved administrations etc. We think this is a really useful resource for those working in state organisations with legal responsibilities and powers.

Responsibility, Power, Duty, Right (RPDR)
We affectionately call this model Ru Paul's Drag Race. Our model is simple. Government roles have responsibilities (statutory duties) and powers (they can exercise). Governed roles have duties, but laws also afford rights (e.g. to appeal). We search through a law building on the roles we know the law contains and find the RPDRs. This analysis uses quite simple Regular Expressions. We've shared a report showing the laws with duties (D). Let us know if you'd like also to see PDR. So, for example, if you're an importer (role), you can go to the 'supply chain' field and see which laws create duties for importers in each of our Family groups. For the 'Gas & Electrical Safety' Family there are three.

Purpose
Not all laws contain one or more of the RPDR. The purpose might be simply to amend an existing law and no new RPDR are created. We've created a report that provides the % of laws in each Family group with an R or P or D or R. For example, of the 285 climate change laws we've processed 21% have duties, 17% confer rights, 28% have responsibilities and 18% confer powers.

POPIMAR
For those who know. You have to have been around H&S in the early 90s to recognise this model. We've started to operationalise this against the content of legislation. With an emphasis on 'started'. The model will continue to go through PDCA and the results will continue to improve. The safety academic side of me cannot resist looking at these results and contrasting different Families of laws. I'll not spoil the 'fun'. Click through and have a peek.

Final Random Thoughts
The differences between, for example, occupational safety and food safety practice get reflected in the laws that get enacted. As we develop our models we know they will become 'tuned' to the language of the particular EHS domain for which our Families are proxies.

This work will eventually give us the training data we need to use AI in our modelling.

The time taken to process all the laws in a Family is about 15 minutes. With about 50 Families that's two days' worth of work. Going forwards we will align our model updates with our scheduled update of the Family groups.

These models are an important foundation to the development work creating a suite of audit tests and schedules.

Thanks for reading.

Spongl is a social enterprise. We think a vibrant and successful social enterprise sector has an important role to play in fixing the problems that keep EHS people awake at night.
Announcement next week about changes to our plans.
https://spongl.com

DO GOOD, BE HAPPY