We have a demo Open211 site!

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - 

Check it out: http://dcopen211website.herokuapp.com/

This is just a demonstration -- we don't want to encourage anyone to use it yet to actually seek referrals -- as the data in there is unclean and unverified, and it's probably buggy and generally not really fine-tuned for DC.

But as an example of how this project can work, it's exciting. Here's the key thing: that site doesn't contain any of the data that it's displaying. It's retrieving that data from our 'API' (see here http://dcopen211api.herokuapp.com/) which could also serve the same data to any number of other applications, which might be designed in totally different ways. 

Now that we have this on hand, it may be easier to have conversations about what else we want to build -- AND, of course, the real challenge: what the right ways will be to keep the data up-to-date. 

Thanks to the leadership of our partners at Bread for the City, DC's DHS / DMHHS, and Code for DC. 

Our next steps including: bringing on an organizer to drive things forward, developing a more formal leadership structure, scoping out other potential use cases, and starting to figure out how to answer these questions that you all have identified.

A long road! But we've made great progress in the last month. Thanks especially to the leadership of our partners at Bread for the City, DC's DHS / DMHHS, and Code for DC. 

~greg

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• gjb •

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