Fwd: San Francisco resource platform project update

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - 

Just wanted to share this update from our sibling pilot project, over in San Francisco. 

Jason here is a staffer in the Mayor's Office of Civic Innovation there. They are really taking a lead on pushing for the consolidation of SF's resource directories, encouraging vendors to join up through the new Open Referral standard project, using the Ohana API as a testing environment, etc. 

It's exciting, and there are a lot of similarities between the way that the city gov there is thinking about their role and that which we've talked about DC gov playing here. 

So take a quick look just to get a sense of things...not a big deal for us per se, but exciting nonetheless.

~greg

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Jason Lally <jason...@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Mar 27, 2014 at 7:25 PM
Subject: San Francisco Hacktivation for the Homeless and SF City efforts
To: open-referr...@googlegroups.com

All,

Last night at our Brigade meeting we had a great time doing a broad search across San Francisco to find resource guides provided by the City and community based organizations. The outcome of this is an initial spreadsheet tracking where all these resources live (we need to do another pass for some cleanup, but a good broad overview). You can see the spreadsheet here: http://c4a.me/socialservices

I stated on another thread that we are interested in using the hacktivation to move the work forward around deploying Ohana in San Francisco. Of course, ideally it's a Bay Area resource. You've all done great work already and I think we ultimately should collaborate and build out a group in this Brigade to connect the work and bring more resources to the effort (not that I should speak yet on behalf of all of San Francisco, but I'll go out on a limb and say we don't want to duplicate).

A little background on what we've been investigating at the City, and this is all very much in the draft investigation phase, so nothing is set in stone:

The City of SF contracts with about 25% of the non-profits present in the City (based on a recent estimate done by the Examiner).  We spend $500 million on non-profit contracts, primarily (although not exclusively) to deliver programs like workforce development, housing assistance, food assistance, and so on. We want to be able to leverage our ongoing contracts with non-profit organizations to painlessly collect and verify data on a consistent schedule. We believe this could be one of many mechanisms to make sure that data about services is maintained and up to date. There are many organizational, technical and political aspects to implementing these kinds of policies, but we've seen demonstrated interest in streamlining data collection as the benefits are quantifiable and by basic estimates large. 

But to do this right, we want to make sure we have the right infrastructure in place before we go about changing any of these policies. The worst thing we could do is to create a new data collection and verification requirement and not make that as painless as possible. And the best thing we could do is create new workflows that actually provide value to multiple stakeholders including the non-profits, City agencies and other providers. 

So at this stage we want to do small tests of these assumptions by having some basic technical infrastructure in place like the Ohana API and piloting with an agency or two some data collection and verification workflows on existing contracts. If we can demonstrate value in small ways it will be easier to build a case for doing something more robust across our City.

So at a basic level, what we're thinking of doing this weekend:

1. Deploying Ohana API and loading it with some real data from our City (from the Department of Children, Youth and Families) OR expanding on the work you've already done and loading that same data on your existing instance

2. Cleaning up data and porting it to the Open Referral spec (DCYF is a strong partner on this so focusing on that data for the weekend would be great and then expanding as time allows to Department of Public Health)

3. Deploying a frontend to consume/add/edit the data from Ohana API. Could be Link-SF (http://www.link-sf.com), SMC-Connect or something else (sidenote: in the short run I'm primarily interested in simple verification and editing workflows that can make it easy for either staff or a non-profit to keep data up to date)

If we come out of this weekend with DCYF's set of resources ported into the API with a basic editing interface on top, we will be 1 step closer to showing immediate value within the City.

In the long term I see the Oakland and SF brigades doing some incredible cross-bay collaboration to really scale this thing up fast, so let's do this! Thoughts, feedback, and help appreciated.

Best,

Jason

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• gjb •

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