Category: Pilots

  • The Florida Legal Aid Resource Federation: Pilot Report

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    Greg Bloom
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    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…

  • Introducing Benetech Service Net

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    Clotilde Vasconi
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    This post originally appeared on the Benetech blog and is reposted with permission. As inequality deepens in Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area – in Benetech’s backyard – the crises facing our neighbors in need continue to mount. This is happening despite the efforts of governments, philanthropies, nonprofits, and social good work by technology companies…

  • NYC government publishing open data for municipally-contracted service providers

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    Oonagh Jordan
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    This post comes to us from Oonagh Jordan, a VISTA Fellow with the New York City Mayor’s Office of Opportunity. Oonagh is leading the project management of this initiative. In New York City, community-based organizations that deliver programming at neighborhood sites play a crucial role in administering City-funded programs and services. There is, however, currently…

  • Building Both Technology and Community to Address Homelessness in San Francisco

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    Molly Cohen
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    ShelterTech is currently a 50 member strong all-volunteer non-profit, bringing free wifi and other digital tools to the homeless community of San Francisco. In November 2017, we won a grant from the Mayor’s Office of Housing and Community Development to collaborate with the SF Bar Association’s Homeless Advocacy Project to digitize their bi-annual print-only resource…

  • Maryland Open211: Learning a New Language

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    Josh Pedersen
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    There is a great scene in the 1984 version of Footloose where the high school “punk” Wren (played by Kevin Bacon) seeks permission from the town council to hold a dance. The local Pastor (played by John Lithgow) reminds Wren, the local citizens, and the town council that a dance is fraught with evil and…

  • Hacking on Link With Optimizely And Benetech

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    Kin Lane
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    Open Referral went to San Francisco on Wednesday August 9th to participate in a social good hack-day at Optimizely. In collaboration with our partner Benetech, Open Referral set up as one of the social good projects that 20+ employees worked on for the day.   Overall, our team was strong in front-end web and mobile…

  • Miami Open211 Phase One: Our Report

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    Greg Bloom
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    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…

  • Talking Open Referral at Stanford’s Data on Purpose

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    Greg Bloom
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    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…

  • The Open Referral API project

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    Greg Bloom
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    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.…

  • The Florida Legal Resource Directory Project

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    Kimberly Sanchez
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    [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…