Implementing Open Referral with Drupal and WordPress

Abhijeet Chavan is the Chief Technology Officer of Urban Insight, a digital solutions agency that produces platforms like DLAW, a Drupal-based legal aid resource platform. In this post, he describes the recent adoption of Open Referral for DLAW’s legal aid resource websites, which are in use in over a dozen states across the country. Welcome, Abhijeet! –ed

Many organizations provide health, legal, and other social services to people in need. If organizations can publish information about the services they provide in a common format, this data can be aggregated and searchable so that people needing assistance can find right organization for their needs. The Open Referral initiative has developed a data interchange format called the Human Service Data Specification (HSDS) for publishing machine-readable data about service providers, their locations, and the services they provide.

For organizations that use the Drupal content management system for maintaining their websites, we have developed <em”>openreferral-drupal (ORD), an open source Drupal module to make it possible to publish resource directory data in HSDS format. The ORD module was developed as part of the Drupal for Legal Aid Websites (DLAW) project. Continue reading

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