some more Frequently Asked Questions about Open Referral

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - 

We have an FAQ document on the site, and it's about time to expand upon it. 

I've taken a number of questions that I've received in the past few weeks, and have written them all up here as a draft. I think most of them should probably go on the site in some form, but I will take some more time to receive feedback to make sure everything is clear and apt.

We can talk about any of this during the Assembly hangout at 11am PST today - which still has a few spots if you're interested in joining.

~greg

[Greg Bloom]

Folks - 

I spent a lot of today updating our FAQ and adding a number of questions that we've been fielding yesterday. You can see the draft here. 

I'll be revising and clustering and moving this content onto the website over the next week or so. 

In the meantime, please take a look -- comment away, especially if you see sections that can be made clearer -- and let me know if there are burning questions that aren't mentioned in there. 

Enjoy the weekend :)

greg

[Greg Bloom]

Thanks, Virginia. And yes, we've had some good conversations here about this issue. 

The name 'Open Referral' does take a logical twist, in that our objective is to make common information accessible for an open set of referral methods (plus other uses like research). 

As such, I think the most immediate and urgent objective is to make it easier for various kinds of 'service providers' (by which we describe anyone who is in a position to help someone find a service) to make effective referrals. Yet we also recognize that an increasingly common 'use case' is an individual searching the web themselves. Surely we want more of those self-performed searches to be effective, even while we know that it's the points of human contact between a help seeker and service provider that are often the most crucial. 

And of course, even given success on both of those counts, we still assume there would remain a need for trained referral specialists (especially for complex situations, edge cases, etc). 

By addressing the problems of information through open data standards, we would make it a lot easier for people to actually use that information in many different kinds of ways.

I'd welcome suggestions for how our materials can improve in communicating this complexity. 

Thanks again for digging in,

~greg

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 6:15 PM, Virginia Carlson <carlson....@gmail.com> wrote:

I generally like the frame. The one comment I have comes in the definition of "referral".  I know that this has been discussed before, and I come down on the "Information" side of "Information and Referral" when it comes to Open Referral. It really addresses the need for standards in sharing  databases of service providers.In your explanation, potential clients make their own referrals. This is in contract to standard 211 centers, where there is an actual person who makes a referral for a person who calls in. I think we have to recognize that it is qualitatively different to online searches or electronic matching services. It is human contact.

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[Greg Bloom]

Cool. For now, I rewrote that text and added it to the section on 'Who Are Our Users?'. I'll do another round of revisions before updating all this in our documentation, so more feedback is quite welcome.

On Tue, Nov 25, 2014 at 10:58 AM, Virginia Carlson <carlson....@gmail.com> wrote:

I think just by using/inserting the language you have in your reply above would work. The three paragraphs starting with "As such" ....

Thanks for your quick thoughts on this.

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Virginia Carlson
414.708.4398