Good question. What about it?! The Open Referral Initiative intends to establish interoperability and open exchange between different kinds of systems. This entails building on what is currently in use. At the same time, it also entails moving beyond barriers … Continue reading
Archives
How can something that’s free for anyone to use be sustainably maintained?
Great question! To find answers to this question, we need more opportunities to ask it. In Open Referral, we ask: how should this data be open? If resource data is to be published in bulk for free, can premium real-time … Continue reading
What’s an API?
An API is an “application programming interface” which provides instructions for computer programs to interact with a database. For example, you can get a forecast from the National Weather Service by going to Weather.Gov. But the NWS also offers a … Continue reading
Will Open Referral work with this or that vendor’s resource referral software that some organizations in our community are using?
Potentially yes! As an open standards and infrastructure initiative, Open Referral is platform-agnostic. We want to see a world in which there are many platforms that can all interoperate, so that people and organizations in communities can effectively and responsibly … Continue reading
Is Open Referral a Community Information Exchange?
We are not! The idea of a Community Information Exchange sounds great, but as we understand it, a CIE is infrastructure that facilitates the exchange of clients’ personal information among health and human service providers. This is outside of our … Continue reading
Is this really such a hard problem? Can’t AI just take care of it? What about the blockchain???
Many of us, at one point or another, were hopeful that technology would provide quick fixes to systemic problems. Those hopes haven’t panned out. It turns out that some problems are so tricky that they can only really be fixed … Continue reading
Can I load my data into Open Referral? Can I get data from Open Referral?
No, Open Referral is not a database or a platform. We help facilitate cooperation among organizations that do have databases or platforms – so that they can share data effectively. Some members of our network may build tools that enable sharing … Continue reading
Have you seen that XKCD cartoon about Universal Standards? Aren’t standards futile?
Why yes we have seen that cartoon, many times, thanks– but no, it doesn’t show that efforts to develop standards are futile. To the contrary! We encourage skeptics of standards to take a closer read. The XKCD cartoon identifies a … Continue reading
Shouldn’t we have a Yelp for Social Services? Why aren’t you trying to build that?
Lots of people are trying to build Yelp-type applications for social services. That’s not Open Referral’s role. There’s a range of reasons why: First, information about human services is a lot more complex, variable, and sensitive than restaurant data – … Continue reading
Why don’t government or funders require this data as a condition of funding?
Governments and funders do typically require their grantees to report various kinds of data, but it’s generally non-standardized and not specifically about services themselves. As Open Referral has been adopted by more institutions, governments and funders have begun mandating the … Continue reading