Category: Blog
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The Open Referral API project
The Open Referral Initiative’s next chapter starts now! Open Referral has helped over a dozen community organizations find new ways to share resource directory information about the health, human, and social services available to people in need. Our Human Services Data Specification provides a common ‘machine language’ that any technology can be programmed to understand.…
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Our 2016 Year in Review
I’m pleased to share Open Referral’s 2016 Year in Review. (You can browse the document here, download the complete PDF here, or skim through the document embedded at the end of this post.) Continue reading →
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The Florida Legal Resource Directory Project
[Update: This pilot has come to a successful conclusion! Read our final report here.] Legal problems: sometimes you don’t even know you have one until it’s too late. When it comes to people with low incomes, legal problems of various kinds — issues with landlords, family disputes, rejected benefits, etc — can be outright debilitating. Yet while…
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Open Referral in Oklahoma!
This is a guest post from Aaron Bean of Asemio. Welcome, Aaron! We’re pleased to introduce the first iteration of the Oklahoma Open 2-1-1 project, which is leveraging the Ohana platform and the Open Referral format to make it easier for Oklahoma residents to find and share information about community resources that can help improve…
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Welcoming Benetech to Open Referral!
We’re pleased to announce a new strategic partnership with Benetech, one of the world’s leading non-profit software development organizations. Benetech was formed in 1989 and in the time since has developed a series of products that have improved lives and transformed industries around the world — starting with Bookshare (the world’s largest online library of…
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Leveling up: documentation improvements and spec upgrade
Last year, Open Referral introduced Version 1.0 of the Human Services Data Specification — an open data exchange format designed to make it easier for different organizations to share standardized information about the health, human, and social services available to people in need. Since then, a broad range of organizations have used the HSDS to…
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Joining Up Data Standards: the U.S. Data Federation and beyond
We’re pleased to announce that Open Referral is one of the first seven initiatives to be featured by the U.S. Data Federation, a new initiative from the federal General Services Administration, in association with Data.Gov, to promote the effective use of civic data through interoperability. As the GSA explains in its introduction of the new…
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Meet the Open Data Services Cooperative
This post is from Tim Davies, founding member of the Open Data Services Co-operative. We’re really delighted to announce the Open Data Services Co-operative’s new collaboration with Open Referral on the Miami Open 211 project, and on wider developments of the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS). At the Open Data Services Co-operative, we’re passionate about…
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Open Referral for legal services in Illinois: the new IllinoisLegalAid.org
This is a guest post from Teri Ross, Program Director for Illinois Legal Aid Online. Illinois Legal Aid Online develops technology and information to increase access to justice for people in Illinois who may otherwise be foreclosed from it, especially for those who cannot find or afford a lawyer. Illinois Legal Aid Online, or…