Blog
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[Let’s welcome to the blog Ananya Iyer, Project Manager of the Blueprint Team at Stevens University! Thanks for joining us, Ananya, and thanks to her team and the entire Blueprint project for this successful partnership –Ed.] We are excited to…
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Busting Silos with the Record Matcher: Here’s How We Leverage AI for Entity Resolution
EDITOR’S NOTE: We’ve blogged before about the awkward – and often inappropriate – mismatch between the nature of most “generative AI” tools and the actual needs of the human service sector and the people being served by them. Specifically, these…
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Open Referral UK: A New Home, A New Team: ORUK’s Next Phase Under iStandUK
[Welcome Shelley Heckman to the blog, posting from iStandUK (original post here) about the new chapter of Open Referral UK.] As of April 1, 2026, Open Referral UK (ORUK) began an exciting new chapter under the stewardship of iStandUK. This…
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Our 2025 Year in Review
Open Referral’s Year in Review for 2025 is out now. You can read through it here (and you can browse every Annual Report since 2014 here). This was a really difficult year, and I think it’s important for us to…
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The Resource Record-Matcher: an open source AI-powered directory data collaboration tool
[Welcome Skyler Young of Connect211 back to the blog!] When it comes to human services, comparing apples to apples is harder than you might think. At Connect211, we work with human service referral providers in more than twenty states to “orchestrate”…
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Introducing Open Referral’s Data Collaboration Toolkit
Open Referral’s data exchange standards enable different organizations to share resource directory data among different information systems. This makes it possible for communities to ensure that knowledge about the resources available to people in need can be efficiently managed and…
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Video: an introduction to the Human Service Data Specifications
Open Referral’s Technical Committee has several new members who have recently come onboard, so we organized an introduction to the Human Service Data Specifications – and recorded it, so that this conversation might be helpful to anyone looking to learn about…
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HSDS version 3.2, and documentation upgrade
First off, some official business about HSDS: Upgrade to Human Service Data Specifications: version 3.2 Our Technical Committee has put forth a set of proposed changes that our Technical Steward has bundled into a minor specification upgrade – as announced in…
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Airtable upgrade for Resource Directory Data Management
Since 2018, members of Open Referral’s community of practice have been using Airtable to develop user-friendly, HSDS-compatible resource directory databases. I oversee management of the Whatcom Resource Information Collaborative’s resource data system in Airtable, and we’ve continued to build new capacities…