Open Referral’s 2024 year in review report is here!
In this report, we summarize all of the significant steps forward in the past year – from a new version of our standards, upgrades to our governance model, and breakthroughs in business strategy across the human service informatics sector. Read more here in the report. (You can browse all such reports throughout our history here.)
This as an important moment to reflect on our achievements:
We launched Open Referral in 2014. Five years later we achieved our first objective when the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (now rebranded as Inform USA) formally endorsed our specifications as industry standards. As of last year, almost every significant software vendor in the human service information-and-referral sector has used or pledged to adopt our standards.
One decade in to this project, we see that standards and interoperability are becoming default attributes of the field – and, more importantly, we see the emergence of new business models, premised on open data infrastructure, which can ensure this critical public information can be sustainably provided to all as a public good. This is what most excites me: not just data standards, but the more efficient and effective ways of working together to produce public goods which standards make possible.
I’m grateful to the many people who have made this journey possible over the past decade: from our many advisors (to numerous to name here, but check the Acknowledgments page in the report), to Aspiration for both mentorship and fiscal sponsorship, to our industry-leading partners at Inform USA, to our technical stewards at the Open Data Services Cooperative, to the members of our community of practice who have stepped up to serve on our Technical Committee as overseers of development of these specifications into the future.
Given that Open Referral has accomplished our primary objectives, I think it’s critical to ask ourselves: where should things go from here?
Of course, there is more work to be done. Getting vendors to actually follow through with their pledges to become interoperable – that will take concerted efforts. And to accomplish the kind of collaborative data management that is envisioned by the strategy of “data federation,” for instance, we will need new tools and new processes.
We’re starting to see glimmers of this future emerging in pilot projects in, for instance, Washington state – where local community organizations are developing their own resource directories while exchanging data with statewide partners like 2-1-1. The need is clear: communities should have tools to enable resource data management by collaborating organizations using different information systems, such that updates (and responsibilities to make them) can be distributed across a federated network. We have prototypes of these tools, but it will take a lot to scale these prototypes into what will need to be globally usable infrastructure.
Is that a role for Open Referral itself? Or should we support our partners in taking that work on?
Furthermore, and more urgently, the world is a more hostile place now than it was a decade ago. Here and abroad, radical fascist movements are seizing power – and have pledged to make life more difficult for many of the very people that human services are dedicated to serve, like immigrants, poor people, and anyone who doesn’t conform to white, patriarchal, heterosexual norms. Should we still be focused on “opening data” about services for people who are now being targeted for oppression? Or does this moment call for radically different responses?
I don’t have easy answers to these questions. The first step is just to ask – and then listen.
Over the coming months, I’ll engage with our broad network of community members, clients, advisors – hopefully, including you! – in conversation about where we are and where we ought to try to go.
I’m very proud of all the work we’ve done: we accomplished what we set out to do. Very few “public interest technology” initiatives can say the same. Yet I remain humble in the face of all that ought to come next.
So let’s take this moment to celebrate, and then look ahead. Join our community forum, or feel free to reach out to me directly.
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