As January 2020 comes to a close, I’m pleased to share our Year in Review report for Open Referral’s 2019.
The report is available to download here. You can also read it embedded in this blog post below.
This year, our report features voices of stakeholders across our network — including social workers and legal aid providers, Chief Information Officers managing legacy systems and young innovators breaking ground with new projects. These stories convey the wide range of ways in which Open Referral is making it easier for communities to share information about the resources available for their residents in need.
2019 was a year of both small steps and big leaps. We’ve developed some critical new tools — from a free resource directory content management system (Airtable) to a new open source front-end resource locator interface (ORServices in Laravel, by Sarapis), as well as validator and transformer modules that can help implementers facilitate the process of data standardization and publication.
On a personal note, in 2019 I also had the privilege to participate as a visiting scholar in the Ostrom Workshop on the Commons at Indiana University. Elinor Ostrom’s work in Governing the Commons (and the broader scholarship of the ‘Bloomington School’ based at IU) has been instrumental in developing Open Referral’s strategic framework. In 2020, I’m excited to synthesize the lessons learned from this scholarship into institutional design frameworks that can sustainably provision resource data as a public good. Through this alignment of theory and practice, we can best pursue Open Referral’s vision of the future — in which it’s easy to share, find, and use information about the resources that are available to people in need.
Onward!
Browse through all of our previous Year in Review reports here.
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