A Floor Beneath Every Person: Design Choices in the First Social Resource Floor Blueprint

The Social Resource Floor is a new blueprint designed to coordinate individuals' access to basic survival resources, such as food, housing, energy, and healthcare, across multiple independent providers. The primary goal is to ensure that financial status does not determine a person's ability to access these essential resources. The first version of this blueprint has been completed, featuring language-agnostic schemas, prose specifications, a reference implementation, and the first adapter.

The key design choices behind the Social Resource Floor are:

1. Contracts first, implementation second: The blueprints rely on a set of language-neutral JSON Schemas as the source of truth. Prose specifications describe the intentions, a conformance suite validates the schemas, and a reference implementation demonstrates them. However, nothing in the repository depends on the reference implementation.

This approach ensures that different providers can adopt the same contracts using their preferred languages, databases, and frameworks without inheriting the original choices made by the designers. The guiding rule is to prioritize interface over implementation, meaning the blueprint defines what a component must be able to do, rather than specifying which product must perform that function.

2. A small data spine: The core data model consists of three main entities:

- Provider: Publishes resources available for distribution.

- Resource: Represents something a provider can supply, such as food, energy, housing, or money.

- Entitlement: Allocates a resource to a subject (individual) and designates the responsible provider for fulfillment.

This minimal data model allows small community providers to easily participate by adopting the required concepts. Additional schema areas include decision, provenance, event, consent, capability, and a public transparency report, making the system adaptable and extensible.

3. Keeping personal data out of the coordination layer: The Social Resource Floor is designed to minimize personal data accumulation, which is crucial for serving vulnerable populations. The coordination layer does not collect any personal information beyond an opaque, pseudonymous subject_ref field. This field functions as an identifier that remains consistent across documents, enabling correlation between various data points.

The resolution of subject_ref into actual personal details is handled by existing systems like civil registries, national ID systems, and credential issuers, outside the scope of the Floor itself. By treating identity as an interface with no provider lock-in, the Floor ensures that personal data remains separate from the coordination process, preserving privacy.

These design choices collectively enable the Social Resource Floor to function as a coordination layer above independently-operated systems, allowing for seamless collaboration among various providers while respecting the privacy and autonomy of each participant.