March 2015 – Open Referral

Open Referral all over: hacks at Code Across and Open Data Day

March 24, 2015June 29, 2015 Greg Bloom Leave a comment Blog

Last month, during International Open Data Day — which coincided with Code for America’s CodeAcross activities throughout the weekend of February 20-22nd — hundreds of civic hacking events around the world brought together community leaders, technologists, planners, government officials, and more.

Participants identified common challenges and worked together to envision, design, and even prototype new kinds of solutions.

This year, Open Referral turned out to be a popular challenge! Here’s a roundup of some of the activities. Continue reading →

Deep Dive into version 1.0

March 23, 2015January 14, 2017 Greg Bloom 6 Comments Blog

Earlier this month, we published version 1.0 of the Human Service Data Specification (HSDS). Let’s take a deeper dive into it.

What is the Human Service Data Specification (HSDS)?

The HSDS is a format for data exchange, specifically designed to enable the publication of machine-readable data about health, human, and social services that are available to people in need.

HSDS is essentially an interlingua — in other words, it’s a common language that can be used by anyone to enable community resource directories to ’talk’ to each other.

Why did we develop the HSDS?

We believe that development of an open, standardized format is a necessary step in a process of reducing the costs of producing directory data, increasing the quality of such data, and promoting its re-use in valuable ways. Continue reading →

Introducing Version 1.0 of the Human Service Data Specification

March 6, 2015August 2, 2016 Greg Bloom 1 Comment Blog

We’re pleased to announce the release of version 1.0 of the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS, also known as the Open Referral format).

Read the specification here: Google Docs and Github.

The purpose of HSDS is to make it easy for community resource directory data to be exchanged among different kinds of information systems, in order to make information about helpful services easier to produce, find, and use. Continue reading →