Reportback from DC Open211 conversation

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - 

Thanks to all who participated in last week's meeting about the DC community resource directory project. 

We have thorough notes here.

Key points to recap: 

• Community anchors who currently produce this data (BFC, Public Defender Service, Lutheran Social Services, others...) are ready to explore cooperative solutions.
• The government is committed to a) making city service data available, b) corralling existing government-produced directories into the system, c) requiring city-contracted services to provide their data, and d) exploring partnership with the community groups above to ensure access to data about all services not provided or funded by the city.
• The Open Referral initiative (hi!) will help provide standards and a testing environment (the Ohana platform) to enable short-term experimentation in the midst of that long-term alignment.
• There are a lot of questions to guide our conversations going forward. We've listed them in those notes.

I'm also pleased to report that over the weekend, during the hackathon, we deployed the Ohana API and made a lot of progress on setting up our own DC version of http://smc-connect.org ~ note this will just be a demo system, to convey the idea that one database can serve any external application. I don't yet have a site to show you (hopefully next week) but I do have a nifty lil logo that we already threw together.

Next steps: 

- DC government reports on a timeline for getting city services and city directories into 2-1-1. 

- Open Referral reports to the United Way of the National Capital Area.

- We draw up stakeholder profiles of each of our community partners (here's a sample one for PDF)

- We should form a steering committee of these community anchors. I heard a few people offer to participate in something like this, and will follow up. Welcome your suggestions as to participants and process here.

For this to really move forward, I strongly suggest that we'll need to raise an initial amount of money to hire an organizer to drive it -- in the next month or two. I've got ideas for where to raise the money, who to hire, and where they should sit -- but this is still tenuous and critical, so if YOU have ideas, I want to talk with you about it.

I'll be in town for at least one more week. Would be happy to find time to meet with anyone who is interested in moving the conversation forward.

Onwards,

Greg

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• gjb •

202.643.3648