Open Referral has been helping the Miami-Dade 2-1-1 Helpline explore new kinds of partnership models that can deepen the impact of their operations while enhancing the sustainability of their program. (In 2017, we reported on the first phase of our … Continue reading
Author: Greg Bloom
New research finds urgent needs for interoperability across health, human, and social service sectors
It often doesn’t matter how clever or well-designed a new technology is – if it can’t easily work with other technologies (and other organizations and people) then it may not accomplish much good at all.
In the last month, three significant reports have underscored this reality – one each from the US (produced by the Social Interventions Research & Evaluation Network), Canada (produced by MaRS Discovery District), and the UK (produced by Snook).
These reports compile a considerable amount of research from across the field of public informatics in general, and community resource information and referral systems in particular. Each assesses a broad swath of organizations and technologies that are trying to innovate in ways that help people in need – yet often struggling to realize their intended potential.
Taken together, this set of research and analysis makes an urgent case that governments, philanthropies, and civil society organizations should prioritize interoperability as a core value of their investment strategies, through promotion of open data standards in general – and Open Referral in particular.
Let’s take a look!
Open Referral’s 2018 Year in Review
We are pleased to share our Year in Review report for 2018!
This was the Open Referral Initiative’s fifth year – and in several ways, 2018 stands as a culmination of all the work we’ve done to date. Continue reading
The Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation: Pilot Report
After two years of development, we’re pleased to share details of our successful Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation pilot!
Initiated in 2016 (see our original post here) and completed in 2018, with support from the Legal Services Corporation and the Florida Bar Foundation, the Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation (FLARF) was a complex project with a simple goal:
We aimed to ensure that accurate information about Florida’s legal aid providers can be reliably updated by those providers in one place – one official record! – and subsequently shared as standardized, canonical open data. (This pilot goal was directly in the service of our ultimate goal: to ensure that this information can be found and used in any given channel through which someone might look for it.)
The pilot phase of this project has concluded successfully!
The FLARF pilot yielded a functioning ‘beta’ system through which resource data can be shared among every organization that receives grants from the project’s primary funders. (This includes about 90% of the legal aid resources in the state!) This information is now accessible to each legal aid provider in Florida within their own case management system – improving their ability to refer clients from one legal aid provider to another.
We’re now beginning work on additional implementations that will make this data accessible through more and more channels (such as through integration with resource referral call centers, medical-legal partnership programs, even just better search results in Google, etc).
Read our complete final report on this project here. Continue reading
Open Referral receives fiscal sponsorship from Aspiration
Happy new year! In celebration, I’m excited to share news about a big milestone in the evolution of the Open Referral Initiative: Open Referral is now fiscally sponsored by Aspiration, a 501c3 organization that provides facilitation and capacity-building support to nonprofit technology initiatives. Continue reading
Our 2017 Year in Review
Happy new year! (We’re less than three weeks in, so we can still say that – right??)
Open Referral’s 2017 Year in Review is available to read here, and embedded below. (See our previous year-in-review reports here in our public document gallery.)
Meet The Human Service Data API Protocols
Open Referral’s Human Service Data API protocols (HSDA v1.2) are ready for use!
Check out our documentation site here.
Use our live developer portal here.
Finally (for geeks and non-geeks): read the report on this phase of our development.
And read more about this exciting new chapter below: Continue reading
Our Video: Open Referral in Three Minutes
Open Referral is grappling with a complex, systemic issue – so we made an animated video to explain the problem and our approach to solutions in just a few minutes.
Check it out here:
The Open Referral Explainer from Open Referral on Vimeo.
Miami Open211 Phase One: Our Report
Last year, the Miami Open211 project set out to demonstrate that an information-and-referral helpline operator can evolve into an open platform — providing machine-readable data as a service to its community — in ways that are both technically efficient and institutionally sustainable.
This project, which began in partnership with Switchboard of Miami, was Open Referral’s first formal pilot with a 2-1-1 provider.
Last week, we submitted the final report for this first phase of innovation. Many thanks to the Children’s Trust of Miami-Dade County, which funded our experiment, and Jewish Community Services of South Florida, the new steward of Miami-Dade’s 2-1-1 service. With their blessing, we are excited to share our findings with the Open Referral community.
See the Final Report document here.
And check out a summary of our key accomplishments below. Continue reading
Talking Open Referral at Stanford’s Data on Purpose
Last month I visited Stanford to speak at the 2017 Data on Purpose conference, sponsored by Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Stanford Social Innovation Review and Digital Impact (née Markets for Good).
From Possibilities To Responsibilities: Unlocking Data and Unleashing Its Potential (Jake Porway et al) from Stanford PACS.
Much of the story I told will be familiar to folks who are already familiar with Open Referral — but this may be the first time I’ve managed to give a proper tour through the wickedness of this problem, and the principles that guide our search for solutions, all in just about twelve minutes. So give it a watch! (My talk starts at 14m40s.)