February 2016 – Open Referral

Jeff Hogue is the Director of Operations and Community Relations for LegalServer.

legalserverlogo LegalServer is a configurable web-based platform that dynamically responds to the complex, rapidly changing challenges faced by legal service providers who strive to provide effective advocacy to the most vulnerable among us.

In this field of legal services, some of our major challenges involve triage and referral. Every day, many people approach our providers with problems that fall outside of the scope of their work — so our providers are constantly seeking ways to redirect these inquiries with effective referrals to other services. …

For online intake and triage, we can avoid duplicating the effort of compiling resource directory data in multiple silos. Write it once, and let it be read anywhere and everywhere. This is how the World Wide Web itself came to be. Continue reading →

Immediately after a disaster, information managers collect information about who is doing what, and where, and then turn this information into “3W Reports.”

While some groups have custom software for collecting this information, the most widespread tool for this work is the spreadsheet. (Indeed, the spreadsheet is still the “lingua franca” of the humanitarian aid community, which is why UNOCHA’s Humanitarian Data Exchange project is designed around the exchange of ‘flat’ spreadsheet-based data.)

During the ongoing migrant crisis facing Europe, a number of volunteer technical communities (VTCs) in the Digital Humanitarian Network have engaged in the work of managing data about these humanitarian services. They quickly realized they needed to come up with a shared template for this information so they could more easily merge data with their peers, and also so that during the next disaster, they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel all over again. …
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Month: February 2016

LegalServer’s First Take at an Open Referral Implementation

Introducing the Humanitarian Service Data Model