Frequently Asked Questions

See our strategic overview here.

See our strategic overview here.

Broadly speaking, people seek ‘referrals’ to resources that can help them meet their needs. Community resource data is comprised of information about health, human, and social services available to people in need — which organizations provide these services, and how they can be accessed.

Some services are provided by non-profit organizations, and other civic or cultural groups. Others are provided by local, state, even federal governments. All of these entities share information about their resources in different ways.

‘Information and referral’ refers to the field in which information about services is aggregated in community resource directories, and delivered (via referral) to people seeking help.

Inform USA, formerly known as the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (AIRS), is an industry association that certifies ‘information and referral’ providers in the US. Inform USA sets standards for ‘information and referral’ services, ranging from operational standards to data standards. Open Referral has collaborated with AIRS / Inform USA from its inception, and in 2018 AIRS formally endorsed our protocols as industry standards for interoperable resource data exchange.

You can learn more about the industry of Information and Referral, and Open Referral’s work within it, in this paper here.

The primary users of HSDS are people who manage resource directory information systems. Of course, these users are themselves intermediaries, working to meet the needs of other users. So let’s back up to look at the big picture.

We’ve identified four primary types of use that are relevant to this domain. Read more here for full personas and user stories.

• Seeking help (service users, clients, etc)
• Providing help (service providers, i.e. anyone helping someone find information about services)
• Administering data (anyone engaged in working with community resource data and the technical systems that use it)
• Research (anyone trying to analyze resource data to better understand the allocation of resources in a community).

Obviously, ‘help seekers’ are the ultimate stakeholders, and we should consider our work first and foremost from their perspective. Aside from this premise, we do not prioritize one stakeholder’s needs above another. Through these distinct perspectives, we set the parameters of our research, design, and evaluation. Our format (and the associated tools) should meet all of their needs.

We believe that the most immediate and urgent objective is to improve the capacities of all kinds of service providers to make effective referrals with accurate information. One of our core hypotheses is that if/when an ‘open system’ meets the needs of the service providers in its community, those service providers will play a critical role in maintaining the accuracy of its information.

Yet we also recognize that an increasingly common ‘use case’ is an individual searching the web. Surely we want to improve people’s ability to find this information themselves. Of course, even given success in this regard, we assume there still will remain a need for trained referral specialists — especially for complex situations in which people have complicated needs, etc.

Finally, when it comes to actually adopting and using open data standards and platforms, we recognize that the primary type of use for our data standards is data administration. In other words, our format and tools must be readily usable by anyone who updates this information and manages the technology that stores and delivers it to anyone who might benefit from it.

Open means ‘free,’ as in ‘free speech.’ We are all entitled to it by fundamental right.

Open means accessible. We have “open access” to things like roads and libraries — these are public goods, and anyone is able to use them. Likewise for our computer technology: open data can be accessed and used not just in one system, but any capable system.

Open does NOT necessarily mean ‘anything goes.’ Books have to be returned to the library, and in good condition. Roads have speed limits. You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded theater. Etc.

Open does NOT necessarily mean ‘free’ as in without cost. Some roads have tolls; all roads need to be maintained. For something to exist in an open state, a lot of energy and resources must go into keeping it so. Those resources must come from somewhere (and, in the case of resource directory data, we don’t assume they will automagically crowdsource themselves).

‘Open’ can mean many things, but at its core, ‘open data’ entails:

• Accessibility: open data is accessible as a “machine-readable” resource, meaning it can be ingested and displayed by computer programs, and presumably downloadable over the internet. (There can be reasonable reproduction costs associated with certain kinds of access to open data.)
• Reuse and Redistribution: open data is provided under terms that permit reuse and redistribution, including the intermixing with other datasets (although open data can be licensed to prohibit changes or to require documentation of changes). There should be no discrimination against fields of endeavor or against persons or groups (although open data can be published with ‘dual licenses’ that specify different conditions for different uses).

Openness entails a state of possibility.

When it comes to public information, data becomes more valuable when more people use it. (Conversely, resource data is less valuable when fewer people use it.) When it’s easy to access and use resource data by any means, it becomes easier for more people to do more things with the data, and as more people do more things with the data, feedback on the quality of the data increases, data about the use of the data can be collected and analyzed — and the maintainers of the data become more critical to the entire ecosystem.

Open Referral’s core question is about how resource data can be sustainably maintained as an openly accessible public good.

A ‘platform’ is an ambiguous term that could mean a lot of different things — here we use it to refer to a system that connects producers and consumers, enabling them to interact with each other. Platforms enable data to be accessed and used in all kinds of ways, including – when a platform is ‘open’ – uses by external systems which can be ‘built upon’ the platform, many of which would not or could not be provided by the platform operators themselves.

By ‘open platform,’ we specifically mean three things:

• A system that facilitates the management, publication, and access of open data
• A system powered by technology that is freely available through open licenses
• A system in which interoperability and integration are the primary design objectives

An API is an “application programming interface” which provides instructions for computer programs to interact with a database.

For example, when you use an airfare finder website – like Kayak or Orbitz or even when you look for flights and fares on Google – these sites can show you information about many flights from many airlines. The data about those flights are not managed within the aggregator website. Each airline offers a “web service” – known as an “application programming interface” or API – that serves data to third-party websites. These APIs enable developers to build applications that connect to other organizations’ databases in order to seamlessly provide data from one system to others.

Think of it this way: websites are for humans; an API is kind of like a website for websites.

By standards, we refer to common ways of doing things. In the case of data standards, that means an agreed-upon set of terms and relationships that define and structure information, so that it can be readily transferred between systems.

With such common agreements, different technologies can ‘speak’ to each other — making it easier to integrate systems, and develop, redeploy, and scale new tools.

For resource directory information providers, the development of standards means that resource data can be published once and accessed simultaneously in many ways. That’s how the internet became the World Wide Web.

Standardizing data across places and institutions also makes it easier to analyze and evaluate data, which makes it easier to understand patterns and trends — including, in the case of community resource data, the health of communities and the effectiveness of our safety net.

Furthermore, the process of developing standards helps to bring stakeholders together. By building a community among users, producers, and service providers, we can accelerate the process of learning and innovation towards our shared vision of helping people and improving the health of communities.

With increasing adoption of open standards for resource directory data, we anticipate:

• Decreased cost of data production (as data produced once can circulate through many systems)
• Improved quality of data (as more use generates more user feedback)
• Improved findability of data through web search and an ecosystem of tools and applications; Decreased cost and improved quality of new and redeployed tools (websites, applications, etc).
• Improved quality of referral services (as patterns of resource allocation shift from maintaining data to delivering data)
• Meaningful use of resource data for research purposes, such as community health assessment, and policy-making and resource allocation.
• Healthier people and more resilient communities.

The short answer is no – Open Referral’s Human Service Data Specifications are the industry standard for resource directory information exchange.

In the United States, Inform USA, formerly know as the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (AIRS) has endorsed HSDS for use as a standard by the Information-and-Referral industry. In the United Kingdom, this has been established by the national government’s standards body.

There are of course other existing standards that are relevant to this domain, such as:

• The W3C’s civic services schema
• The human services domain of the National Information Exchange Model (NIEM)
• FHIR’s HealthcareService resources

Fortunately, HSDS is designed to be an interchange format – which means it can enable interoperability across domains by translation into other standards.

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 collective action problem, which is only further entrenched by each unilateral effort to solve the problem by competing to ‘beat’ all other standards. Collective action problems can be solved, however, by cooperation! If a new standard is designed to enable interoperability among other standards – voila! We can have many different but compatible standards.

Open Referral takes this cooperative approach. Instead of one standard that ‘beats’ them all, HSDS is now an industry standard for resource directory data exchange – the only such standard for exchange, but one designed to enable cooperation across any system using any other relevant standard for any other purpose.

Well, we don’t yet know the right solution! We’re just not going to wait around any longer for it to be figured out. So we’re taking action.

Essentially, we are asking: how should this data be open?

This is a wicked problem that requires a lot of different people working together to learn about possible solutions. We believe that the best ways to address wicked problems tend to emerge from the insight and creativity of those who directly experience the problems.

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 by lots of people working together over time.

To be more specific, the community resource directory problem is a supply-side problem – there is not a reliable supply of accurate information about services – which means AI tools are uniquely ill-suited for solving the problem, because their quality is directly dependent upon the quality of the data they are supplied.

There are a number of factors that limit the reliability of organizations as sources of information about their own services:

• Organizations might not designate the responsibility for managing all of this information to any single person.
• Organizations sometimes submit information about services that is vague or not entirely accurate.
• Organizations are asked to update their information so many times in so many different community resource directories that they get confused or frustrated.
• Keeping this information up to date just isn’t a high priority when organizations already have more clients coming through its doors than they can handle.

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 supply of directory information as a condition of funding.

Great question! If resource data is to be published in bulk for free, can premium real-time access via API require a fee? If the market won’t fully cover costs of its production in this way, should the government subsidize its production? We have outlined various models for answering this question in the whitepaper featured in this blog post here.

Of course they are! We think it’s important for this information to be accessible to a whole ecosystem of services, and for the foreseeable future, call centers will be an essential component of a healthy ecosystem.

Lots of people are trying to build Yelp-type applications for social services. That’s not Open Referral’s role. Resource directory data should be itself a public good, freely ‘remixable’ by anyone, not trapped within any one company’s interface.

Open Referral recognizes the existence of a diverse array of taxonomies that are used to describe types of services, organizations, and people for whom services are available. Given that such categories are inherently subjective – whereas Open Referral’s Human Services Data Specification only describes factual data – we do not prescribe a specific taxonomy.

The 2-1-1 taxonomy is widely used among certified providers of ‘information and referral’ services, as well as some government agencies. For some purposes, it is a very valuable tool for precisely categorizing types of services. For many organizations and most users of community resource data, however, it is a significant barrier — first, it is a proprietary artifact, and second, it is difficult to use without technical training.

No. Open Referral is not a database or a platform. We help other organizations evolve their resource databases into open platforms.

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.

No. We recognize that this is a local problem that should entail local solutions.

Open Referral is not a platform and we do not collect or distribute resource data ourselves. Our primary objective is to help communities answer this question for themselves.

We are not! Open Referral focuses specifically on information about service providers themselves – public information about organizations, not sensitive private information about people.

Potentially yes! As an open standards and infrastructure initiative, Open Referral is platform-agnostic.

The Open Referral Initiative is a network of people and organizations working to promote the accessibility of information about health, human, and social services — i.e. community resource directory data. The Open Referral community is primarily assembled in our Forum.

Open Referral’s primary product is the Human Service Data Specifications (HSDS, AKA ‘the Open Referral format’) – a set of data exchange protocols that enables resource directory data to be shared among heterogeneous information systems.

The Open Referral Initiative does have a 501c3 fiscal sponsor: Aspiration.

The founder and lead organizer of Open Referral is Greg Bloom. Greg’s leadership in this project emerged from his work on the DC Open211 project, first described in Towards a Community Data Commons, published in Code for America’s 2013 book Beyond Transparency.

Our governance model is structured around three activities: 1) a semi-regular Assembly open to all participants, 2) convenings of diverse stakeholders in Open Referral workshops, and 3) ad hoc ‘workgroups’ which develop proposals for review and approval by the community at large.

Our simple rule of thumb is rough consensus and running code.

Learn more here in the documentation of our governance and process model.

As an open network, much of Open Referral’s activity is driven by voluntary contributions from participants who share our vision, use our specs and tools, and contribute back to the community.

Open Referral receives grants and other charitable contributions managed by Aspiration, our 501c3 fiscal sponsor.

We are committed to working on projects that are aligned with the values of Open Referral, and which are strategically relevant to our mission. Read more about our approach to partnership development here.

Open Referral is both the name of this community of practice, and also the shorthand name of our format for community resource data (which is technically known as the Human Services Data Specification).

Open211 is a name that has been used by various groups and organizations in various contexts over the years.

You can contact Greg Bloom (@greggish | [email protected]), the founder and lead organizer of Open Referral. Alternatively, you can reach out via the Community Forum.

Open Referral is working to build tools that can help people produce and verify accurate resource directory data. You might be able to quickly get set up with a free resource database by deploying the Open Referral Airtable template.

You can start by testing the viability of our format for your context. That may entail mapping your database’s schema to the Human Services Data Specification.

Open Referral is led by local pilot projects in which stakeholders take action towards establishing accessible, interoperable and reliable community resource directory data.

Pilot projects usually start with a champion — someone who is motivated to rally other stakeholders in a community around an effort to solve this problem.

This is an open source initiative. There are lots of ways that you might be able to get involved:

• Programmers: Check out our Github repo or join our forum.
• Information-and-referral providers: Read through our data specification and make suggestions.
• Service workers: Help us identify, scope, and implement a ‘use case.’
• Citizens: Read through our documentation, ask questions, and learn about how information about services gets collected in your community.

If you have a technical question, there is another FAQ section on our technical documentation site.

Otherwise, reach out via our Community Forum or email [email protected].