Welcome to the Syncopate Transparency Hub

About Syncopate

Syncopate is a design and consultancy company that builds digital regulatory infrastructure systems using its DocRef platform.

What is Digital Regulatory Infrastructure?

Digital regulatory systems integrate law and regulation with software and other digital assets in a way that makes them traceable, maintainable and auditable by independent parties.

In designing and building these digital regulatory systems, we want to "show our working". To do that:

• we'll use this site to explain how the systems and processes we have used – whether technological or otherwise – have led to the outputs we have produced. Here's an example.
• we'll also share key assets created along the way to allow you to trace how a system has been developed. Here's an example.

This level of transparency is important even where we DON'T use artificial intelligence. However, we'll also be using AI in some projects for things like:

• generating new regulatory instruments,
• analysing regulatory systems, and
• writing code or other digital implementation assets (which might also include rules as code).

If you have any feedback on what you find here, we want to hear from you, especially if it's skeptical or critical!

Getting Started

We recommend you start with:

1. our overview of how DocRef works and
2. an explanation of AI-friendly MCP servers, what they are, and how we have used DocRef datasets as the basis for these MCP servers.

Next, take a look at this friendly blog post. It summarises our work with the Government Chief Digital Office. Key outputs described in the blog post include:

• a standard for API development in the New Zealand Public Service,
• a consolidated guidance and standards document for identification management and digital identity services in New Zealand,
• machine-readable guidance on how to use generative AI in the public service.

Each of those projects includes a high level project summary and project timeline to give you a sense of what we did and how long it took.

Current Projects

Below is a list of projects covered on this site.

GCDO (Government Chief Digital Office, New Zealand)

Three major transparency packages documenting AI-assisted development of government standards and guidance:

• API Standard - Development of API standards for government services
• Identification Management - Analysis and documentation of identification management requirements
• AI Guidance - Evaluation of AI outputs against government principles, plus a compliance analysis evaluating how this Hub itself aligns with NZ AI guidance

Each project includes a high level summary, a timeline for key prototypes and their delivery, planning documents, and raw transparency materials created during the AI-assisted research and drafting process.

Compliance Analysis

In December 2025, we conducted a comprehensive analysis evaluating how all the AI-assisted work documented in this Hub complies with the NZ Public Service Generative AI Guidance. The analysis found strong overall compliance across all five OECD-aligned principles. Read the full analysis.

Related Work

Building on the GCDO projects above, we've also developed:

• API Catalogue - A cross-government catalogue of New Zealand public service APIs, with a phased data structure and submission process
• Draft API Compliance Assets - Exploratory work on rules-as-code for automated API standard compliance checking (draft/unvalidated prototypes)

More to come

We'll be sharing more details on similar projects in 2026. If you'd like to work on a project with us, please get in touch.