Introductions thread [welcome to Open Referral!]

[Greg Bloom]

Hi folks - 

As our work together gradually gets started, I want us all to take some time to introduce ourselves. Declan and Devin have already done so, and I hope to see everyone on this list eventually follow suit. (I know some of y’all may just be trying to lurk… be prepared to get noodged!)

We all want to know: 
A bit about who you are.
Your experience with referral information systems, and what brought you to join this group.
A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work can make possible.

AND please share at least one or two of the following: 
What are some resources you can bring to the table? 
What needs do you have, with which others might be able to help? 
What questions do you want us to try to answer?

Okay, I’ll go first! 

#

So. I’m originally from Miami, Florida, and have been working in the health/human/social service sector in the District of Columbia (as in, the city itself — not the seat of the Federal Government) for about seven years. My professional experience is a mix of community organizing, fundraising, and communications of various other kinds. 

I like to try to make systems work better for the people who are impacted by them. The ways that I go about that usually involve creating space for people to share, learn, and work together to make such improvements (or to imagine new systems, then build them) themselves. 

Most of y’all have heard my story about how I came to this particular field, and what my vision is; for anyone new and/or interested in more details, you can read my essay published in Beyond Transparency last year.

A lot has happened since that essay was published. Right in the midst of my research, Google.org proposed their Civic Services schema to the W3C. This immediately seemed like it could be a game-changing development. Around the time my essay was published, I convened a conversation among Google.org, AIRS, Code for America, Aunt Bertha, and a number of ‘subject matter experts’ who had informed my research. That conversation led to the forming of this group; the development of this proposal that I’ve put before us; and finally, co-sponsorship of my work by Code for America and the Ohana project. 

That brings us more or less up to date. So, for some thoughts on my role here moving forward: 

My title here is Chief Organizing Officer of the Open Referral initiative, though I picked it with my tongue planted firmly in cheek. My power is essentially facilitative: I’m going to be synthesizing information, helping set agendas, seeking clarification, cheering greatness, intervening in anything that seems unconstructive, and of course, accounting for decisions along the way. 

Also important to clarify: I’m not an employee of Code for America. They have contracted me specifically to provide services for the development of the Open Referral community (such as this email right here). As such, CfA is 'co-sponsoring’ the launch of this initiative — but it is very much ‘owned’ by all of us in this group. I’m looking to you all for leadership and vision (and help with graphic modeling!) and believe we can do things in a way that includes and supports a broad range of interests and perspectives. I’m always inclined to seek rough consensus, but my prerogative is always to solicit and defer to the expressed interests of actual stakeholders — in other words, the people who work in and/or seek help from health, human, and social services.

A final note, on principles. In the near term, I think it will benefit this community to articulate a set of our own principles. There are a number of existing sets of ‘open data' principles that we might consider. However, shared principles can only truly emerge from shared experiences. 

That said, I can be clear on what my principles are, so that you know where I’m coming from right from the start. So here goes:

In my work, I have learned a tremendous amount from the Allied Media Projects [https://alliedmedia.org/amp-network-principles], as well as the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition [http://detroitdjc.org/principles/] — I aspire to follow the precedents they’ve set in grounding work for social change in the experiences and prerogatives of marginalized people. I’ve also recently been trained as a ‘cooperative developer,’ and I find the Rochdale cooperative principles to be somewhat relevant (if only by analogy) to this context. I also admire the methodologies of Lean and Agile, yet these too will require some re-imagination to effectively be applied here. Finally, I’ve been studying the work of Elinor Ostrom and her principles of common pool resource management -- which I believe are directly applicable to our mission here.

That’s all for now! Thanks to those of you who have read this far. I’ll be nudging everyone to share their own introductions (which I assume will be shorter than mine, unless you got a stemwinder of a story yourself, in which case, let it loose :)

~greg 

202.643.3648

[neil]

Hi all,

I'm the Director of Services for iCarol, which is a hosted platform built specifically for non-profit help lines (as we call them). In this context folks might call it an Information and Referral software system. We have hundreds of agencies in the US, Canada and internationally who use our system, some of whom have shown an interest in OpenReferral. My team has conversed with Greg and reviewed the documentation so far. We have a great deal of experience integrating with third-party data (both as publishers and consumers) and are happy to contribute to this initiative too.

Neil McKechnie

[Moncef Belyamani]

Hi everyone,

I'm one of the co-creators of the Ohana project. My professional background is in Software Quality Assurance and Software Development (Ruby on Rails primarily). You can read more about my background here: http://about.me/moncef

During the Code for America Fellowship last year, I wrote the code for the Ohana API and the Ohana API Admin interface. This year, we are focusing on streamlining and improving the code to make it more robust and easier for other communities to deploy. What we built last year was a prototype for San Mateo County in California, so there's a lot of hardcoded stuff that's specific to San Mateo County. We want to extract those out into settings that can be customized based on a community's needs and preferences.

One of the major changes we had planned was to change the database that holds the data from MongoDB to Postgres. This work should be done by early next week. Along with the recent improvements to the documentation and scripts for installing and deploying the code, this means that communities can feel confident in using Ohana to import their data and start making updates using the admin interface. The subsequent improvements we make to the code can then be pulled in as needed without affecting the data or having to re-import it.

I'm not by any means an expert in human and social services, so we're looking to those of you who are to provide feedback via GitHub. Feedback examples include pointing out missing or unclear documentation, features you would like to have, fields/columns or tables that should be added to the database. Here are all 4 repositories where you can provide feedback by opening an "Issue" (make sure to read through the current issues first):

https://github.com/codeforamerica/openreferral

https://github.com/codeforamerica/ohana-api 

https://github.com/codeforamerica/ohana-api-admin

https://github.com/codeforamerica/ohana-web-search

Cheers,

Moncef

[Eric Jahn]

Hello, Eric Jahn signing in.  

I'm a health and human services interoperability consultant, freelancing as "Alexandria Consulting" out of Saint Petersburg, Florida. 

I'm interested in how OpenReferral will harmonize with existing models/standards such as NIEM UML, the Open Data Protocol, AIRS, etc..   

Looking forward to collaborating with you all!  -Eric

[Sophia Parafina]

Hi,

I'm Sophia Parafina one of the Ohana project team members. I've a done a bunch of stuff, it's mostly on the net, if you're interested. Relevant experience is that I funded and helped developed standards for geospatial data and interfaces in a past life. Some of the standards became ISO standards. My primary role is facilitating development and publishing the OpenReferral standard. So if you want to provide input, need help with posting issues, need help with using GitHub, scheduling meetings, let me know.

I'm laconic and parsimonious in speech and writing, which means I'm listening.

sophia

[Fitch, Dale K.]

Hi Group,

Dale Fitch, here, an academic in social work. I cut my teeth as a social worker 30 years ago on the United Way's "Bluebook," the forerunner for all community resource directories. I moved to academia 15 years ago and do research on human services and technology <http://ssw.missouri.edu/faculty_fitch.html>. I cut my I&R 'digital' teeth on the 2-1-1 implementation in Michigan in the early aughts. That experience and my other research has really guided me to the conceptual side of information system design, ala, soft systems methodologies, etc., focusing on the 'requirements analysis' process. I shudder whenever I hear a project team member utter 'scope creep' because that means requirements were not properly done in the first place. I have found my work in that area makes my eventual database design work flow a lot more smoothly. In principle I am very attracted to the idea of Open Referral; however, I believe at this time we are talking more about directory standards as opposed to actually doing referrals. That's fine as long as we remember the difference between the two.

Regards,

Dale

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[Anselm Bradford]

Hi All, I'm on the Ohana team, where I'm focused on design and interaction related areas. My background is in visual communication, web and interactive design. I'm working primarily on building the search front-end to the API (github.com/codeforamerica/ohana-web-search), which is the evolution of http://smc-connect.org. As Moncef outlined, feedback is always good!

Ans

--

Anselm Bradford

Co-creator, Front-end dev Ohana API - ohanapi.org

2013 Code for America San Mateo County Team

@anselmbradford

linkedin.com/in/anselmbradford

[Hailey Pate]

Hi all!

I live in Sacramento, where I work for the State of California as a data program analyst by day and serve as a CfA Brigade captain by night. 

Over the past several years, I have worked with lots of different public-sector stakeholders to adopt, implement, and revise data standards. I'm particularly interested in how we document and communicate data standards to both technical and non-technical folks. Standards I've worked with in the past are healthcare related and include Los Angeles County Trauma and Emergency Medical Services Information System Data Standards (TEMIS), California EMS Information System Standards, National Trauma Data Standard, and the National EMS Information System.

I've seen a lot of successes with data standards, but I've also seen many fails. If my experience and lessons learned might be helpful at the initiative level, I'm always glad to share!

Otherwise, I'm hoping to support local information and referral organizations here in the Sacramento area by 1) connecting them with our local brigade and 2) sharing the news about the awesome resources available by Code for America (i.e. Ohana!)

Proud to be connected with you all,  

Hailey

[Scott Schwaitzberg]

Hi everyone,

 I live in SF and work for the Google Social Impact team. 

Last year, my colleagues and I developed the civic services schema for schema.org 

Excited to see what this group pulls together! 

best,

Scott

--

[Clive Jones]

OK ... my name is Clive Jones and I am Helper Without Portfolio for the grandly named Alliance of Information and Referral Systems (www.airs.org) which in reality is a small nonprofit (2.5 program staff) membership association of about 1,100 organizations in the US and Canada who are engaged in the art and science of this niche within the human services system know as 'Information and Referral'.

If you would like to learn more about what that involves, I will gladly spend the 9 hours needed ... about 35% of our members operate comprehensive I&R programs under the 2-1-1 banner, about 40% operate Area Agencies on Aging (AAAs) or Aging and Disability Resource Centers (ADRCs), while the remainder are a mixture of comprehensive and specialized I&R programs. Most members are nonprofits, some are programs within governments.

AIRS has national standards (www.airs.org/standards), we run an accreditation program for organizations and a certification program for individuals (one certification program for the social service folks who work with clients and one for the resource specialists who gather and maintain human services information). AIRS developed an XSD so most of the I&R softwares can "sort of" exchange data with each other.

AIRS does not own or have any financial interest in the AIRS/211 LA County Taxonomy of Human Services but believes it is one of the most amazing fruits of a 30+ year long collaboration of the hundreds of organizations that use it and contribute to its ongoing development. The Taxonomy needs more folksonomy approaches to augment its searchability but I have found that most criticisms of it are based on some false premises, so I will be happy to politely admit any faults that actually exist while also correcting any misunderstandings that might be out there!

All I&R databases are free and online (so folks are not trying to 'sell' or 'restrict' 'their'data), but nearly all I&Rs/211s have been the 'victim/survivors' of data scraping without the use of the word 'please', so there is sensitivity there that this project is aiming to do that ... However, many of our members are open to opportunities to get our data into more places to help more people in more ways - as this has always been our mission and we are VERY passionate about it !!

We are happy to get involved with bright, smart people who can potentially take us to the next level of being able to help people. Last year, our folks answered around 25 million calls and had webvisits well in excess of that number, but we need to expand the use and usability of our data, and also be able to enhance our capacity in mobile, chat and text.

We have a handful of projects that various members and our existing software providers/partners are engaged in that involve APIs and so on and so forth, so we are also happy to get involved in this project in order to learn more about it (and we would like to think you would like to learn more about us) ... we think this is the right destination to head towards. (Although "we" does not mean "everyone" but is more than just "me")

Most data/application projects I have been involved with had business requirements being confirmed followed by coding -- not sure if that boat has sailed and we will be looking at coding followed by "yeah, this won't work because it does not take into account of  ..." or "wow, I am astonished you managed to figure that out. Not many people do!".    And by the way if you direct me to a data schema and say "look, there it is, you are free to comment on it", I am probably not going to understand it ...but would like to do so ...

And if you have read this far down - thanks for your patient indulgence (it is a good sign!)

Clive Jones

AIRS

 

--
Clive Jones
AIRS
www.airs.org
www.twitter.com/AIRSplace

[Joey Schulte]

Hello,

My name is Joey Schulte and I come from a comprehensive 211 called HandsOn Central Ohio. I've been here almost 2 years as a Resource Specialist (database manager, indexer and researcher of services). I come from a library background and hold a MLIS which I think help contributes to my excitement about such a project. I am a firm believer in free and open information to everyone.

A use case I would be interested in seeing is being able to look at referral/resource data from like sized cities to compare similar and distinct problems between them. I would hope to be able to glean gaps of coverage and look to other cities as a model of what programs have been successful for them addressing the needs of clients. I also see this as a great means of collaboration that is often spoken of and lauded in the nonprofit world but rarely seems to be put into practice.

I would say what I bring to the table is someone who knows the "problems" with making all of our data open outside of the organization. Many 211s are apprehensive because being the gatekeeper of that information gives them value. If you make it free to the public, would city/county/state government still see the value of the information enough to pay us for what we do, even though they can access it now for free. I am of firm belief that the data would be valuable enough that it wouldn't be an issue, but I understand people's concerns, especially those from smaller municipalities that may not have a lot of funds to throw around for a service that may seem antiquated in a lot of ways.

My MLIS specialty was cataloging so I also have a thorough understanding of classification schema, indexing practices and relevance of metadata. I, however, am not a programmer, and I do not enjoy what little coding I actually know how to do.

Please feel free to contact me with any questions.

Joey Schulte

[David Erlandson]

Dajia hao!

Like Joey I've got an MLIS and am a resource specialist with United Way 211 in the metro area of Minnesota (http://211unitedway.org/).  I'm fairly new to this position, starting just last November, but I'm pretty excited about the possibilities of this project.  I will say that it is going to be a tough sell for some of the management in my organization:  as Clive mentioned many 211s have had information effectively stolen, which happened to our organization and lead to the formation of our greatest competitor.  I personally think open data is the way most information fields should be going which led to me joining this group.  

I'd like to see referral data in the hands of people who can analyze it and make recommendations regarding the development of our database is what I'm mostly interested in as a use case.  This is something that I could do if I had a few more hours in the day, but updating the database entries we have tends to be more important for my particular job.  I also think it would be great if nonprofits had this data to better coordinate services among themselves.  I personally feel that there's a lot of untapped potential in the data we have.    

My organization is a private/public partnership, so I'd like to help guide standards and policies to a place where I can convince the leaders of the organization that opening up our data would be a good move.  Also similar to Joey there's the classification/metadata/211 taxonomy experience I can contribute as well.

[Jarred Wilson]

Hi Everyone,

I have a similar experience as David and Joey, having come from a library/archives background. But before I decided to go to grad school, I was working in human and social services and in non-profit management. I'm now at Switchboard of Miami (the 2-1-1 provider for Miami-Dade, Monroe, and Collier counties), where I've been maintaining our database for about 6 months. I joined the group because I (as well as my company) have a strong interest in seeing more cooperation between human/social services providers in our community. We see ourselves as the ones who can really bring organizations together and help them maximize their reach while being mindful of limited resources. And a huge part to doing that is having the ability to share information easily. We're certainly guarded about the work we've put into collecting and maintaining (I would use the word curate if it wouldn't tick off my museum friends) the information we have, but we realize that it's no good if it's sitting in our database and not shared. So I guess my use case is broad, but I'd like to see open data in I&R work to make the provision of services more streamlined and efficient within specific communities.

I think what I can bring to the table is an ability to share and synthesize multiple perspectives. I have a fairly strong understanding of the technology behind open data initiatives, having worked with various archives & library projects, as well as some GIS applications. And I have a real understanding of what it's like to be in a small, struggling non-profit who is trying to help people but who finds itself spending half its time chasing down information for its clients only to find out that a site has closed or a service is no longer offered (I'm speaking of my previous work experience, not to mention the difficulties of working within I&R and having to track down all of this information).

A question I would want us to try to answer is how do we make this project palatable to people within I&R who do not have a technical background or understanding of the current reality open data. I have the impression (I could be dead wrong, though) that a lot of people who work in I&R come to it from a human and social services background, with a strong desire to help people, but without a strong technical background. Those of us in I&R and in other human and social service fields certainly make sure that we're providing the best technical platforms for our work that we know how, often having to rely on IT managers or IT vendors to do so. But, I don't think we always have a day-to-day hand in the technical world like a lot of other-CfA-project people might. I just think it's important to keep that in mind and make sure we figure out how to present whatever we're doing in a way that will be easily digested by those with less tech savvy than us.

I'm looking forward to this project and hope to be a meaningful part of it!

Best,
Jarred Wilson


Jarred Wilson, MSIS
Data Resource Specialist

Switchboard Of Miami
190 NE 3rd Street
Miami FL 33132
Tel: (305) 358-1640 x1148 Fax: (305) 377-2269
24-Hour HELPline: (305) 358-4357 or 211
TTY: (305) 644-9449 or 211, opt 4

http://www.switchboardmiami.org

-----Original Message-----
From: OpenRe...@googlegroups.com on behalf of Greg Bloom
Sent: Mon 4/7/2014 4:29 PM
To: openre...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [openreferral] Introductions thread [welcome to Open Referral!]

Hi folks -

As our work together gradually gets started, I want us all to take some
time to introduce ourselves.

Declan<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openreferral/W64vfZ7w7qo>and
Devin <https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/openreferral/2cH9Ylke5zE>have

already done so, and I hope to see everyone on this list eventually

follow suit. (I know some of y'all may just be trying to lurk... be prepared
to get noodged!)

*We all want to know: *

A bit about who you are.
Your experience with referral information systems, and what brought you to
join this group.
A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work
can make possible.

*AND please share at least one or two of the following: *

What are some resources you can bring to the table?
What needs do you have, with which others might be able to help?
What questions do you want us to try to answer?

Okay, I'll go first!

#

So. I'm originally from Miami, Florida, and have been working in the
health/human/social service sector in the District of Columbia (as in, the

city itself -- not the seat of the Federal Government) for about seven

years. My professional experience is a mix of community organizing,
fundraising, and communications of various other kinds.

I like to try to make systems work better for the people who are impacted
by them. The ways that I go about that usually involve creating space for
people to share, learn, and work together to make such improvements (or to
imagine new systems, then build them) themselves.

Most of y'all have heard my story about how I came to this particular
field, and what my vision is; for anyone new and/or interested in more

details, you can read my essay published in *Beyond Transparency* last
year<http://beyondtransparency.org/chapters/part-5/towards-a-community-data-commons/>
.

A lot has happened since that essay was published. Right in the midst of my
research, Google.org proposed their Civic Services schema to the

W3C<http://blog.schema.org/2013/08/vocabulary-for-describing-civic-services.html>.

This immediately seemed like it could be a game-changing development.
Around the time my essay was published, I convened a conversation among
Google.org, AIRS, Code for America, Aunt Bertha, and a number of 'subject
matter experts' who had informed my research. That conversation led to the
forming of this group; the development of this proposal that I've put

before us<https://docs.google.com/document/d/17cJxF_1P6fafcsFJQERFQifKKc_kPbAKmAXwe2LWDcI/edit#heading=h.bcx6pkqe4xyv>;

and finally, co-sponsorship of my work by Code for America and the Ohana
project.

That brings us more or less up to date. So, for some thoughts on my role
here moving forward:

My title here is Chief Organizing Officer of the Open Referral initiative,
though I picked it with my tongue planted firmly in cheek. My power is
essentially facilitative: I'm going to be synthesizing information, helping
set agendas, seeking clarification, cheering greatness, intervening in
anything that seems unconstructive, and of course, accounting for decisions
along the way.

Also important to clarify: I'm not an employee of Code for America. They
have contracted me specifically to provide services for the development of
the Open Referral community (such as this email right here). As such, CfA

is 'co-sponsoring' the launch of this initiative -- but it is very much

'owned' by all of us in this group. I'm looking to you all for leadership
and vision (and help with graphic

modeling<https://docs.google.com/drawings/d/1WRpa15fzCSfJwdj0mWlXmjG3MP3Bll_OJYq7MvL40jY/edit>!)

and believe we can do things in a way that includes and supports a broad
range of interests and perspectives. I'm always inclined to seek rough
consensus, but my prerogative is always to solicit and defer to the

expressed interests of actual stakeholders -- in other words, the people who

work in and/or seek help from health, human, and social services.

A final note, on principles. In the near term, I think it will benefit this
community to articulate a set of our own principles. There are a
number of existing

sets <http://globalopendatainitiative.org/declaration/> of 'open data'
principles<http://www.civilrights.org/press/2014/civil-rights-principles-big-data.html>that

we might consider.
However, shared principles can only truly emerge from shared experiences.

That said, I can be clear on what *my *principles are, so that you know

where I'm coming from right from the start. So here goes:

In my work, I have learned a tremendous amount from the Allied Media

Projects [*https://alliedmedia.org/amp-network-principles
<https://alliedmedia.org/amp-network-principles>*], as well as the Detroit
Digital Justice Coalition [*http://detroitdjc.org/principles/
<http://detroitdjc.org/principles/>*] -- I aspire to follow the precedents

they've set in grounding work for social change in the experiences and
prerogatives of marginalized people. I've also recently been trained as a
'cooperative developer,' and I find the Rochdale cooperative

principles<http://usa2012.coop/about-co-ops/7-cooperative-principles>

to
be somewhat relevant (if only by analogy) to this context. I also admire

the methodologies of Lean <http://theleanstartup.com/principles> and
Agile<http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html>,

yet these too will require some re-imagination to effectively be applied
here. Finally, I've been studying the work of Elinor Ostrom and her
principles of common pool resource

management<http://onthecommons.org/magazine/elinor-ostroms-8-principles-managing-commmons>

--
which I believe are directly applicable to our mission here.

That's all for now! Thanks to those of you who have read this far. I'll be
nudging everyone to share their own introductions (which I assume will be
shorter than mine, unless you got a stemwinder of a story yourself, in
which case, let it loose :)

~greg
202.643.3648

[Fitch, Dale K.]

Dear Group,

A couple of observations based on today's introductions. But first, just to clarify, while I sometimes speak fondly of 2-1-1, I have never worked for, nor ever received any funding from, any 2-1-1 entity or AIRS in any way, shape or form. Two, my interest in I&R extends back to the early 90s when the federal government had a grant program entitled TOP (Technology Opportunities Program). By the late 90s many communities across the U.S. had "community resource directories" funded by this program. Unfortunately, I know of known that still exist. As such, when 2-1-1 came along, and offered to provide web based information and 'information kiosks' in the mall, it seemed like a new day was dawning. In retrospect, the technologies were very primitive, but they were going in the right direction as their intent was always to make the information publicly available.

 

From my perspective the technology has rarely been the problem. The 2-1-1 folks (at the national level) knew it would evolve and from my perspective they were fine with that.  How that was implemented at the local level I'm sure was a different matter. Instead, I believe the primary problem lies with the accuracy of the data. My information systems research echoes exactly what Jarred said (I know Jarred made the following comment referencing a prior position), "only to find out that a site has closed or a service is no longer offered..." Keeping the underlying data accurate and current is not easy. David's posting highlights the other brutal reality in that someone has to pay to keep that data accurate. Then having that data "stolen" just does not work over the long term as it will always detrimentally impact community relationships.

 

I understand the beauty of APIs and how they can be a tremendous labor saving device, but if they are scraping data for which other people have had to pay to produce, then I think that goes by another word - theft. I fully appreciate the Creative Commons license (and have used it with some of my own products) and the API Commons <http://apicommons.org/>, but I believe those relationships, motives and behaviors must be very explicit and they must be honored.

 

Ideally, if we can derive a schema (e.g., schema.org) based upon a robust taxonomy (e.g., AIRS) and if we can get agencies to use this schema on their websites, and if they update that information when changes occurs, then we may go a LONG WAYS toward having a fully automated data update system. Then the API spiders can crawl all they want!

 

Best,

Dale

--

[Greg Bloom]

Folks - thanks for the introductions we've had so far. I'm personally excited by the breadth of experience -- and to see us joined by a number of experienced I&R hands who share our vision.  

Dale - thanks for your thoughts, I'm going to respond to something you've said in another thread. Meanwhile, I encourage everyone to keep this thread just for introductions. This way new people can quickly scroll through to see who's in here. (Note that I've pinned this thread to the top of the group.) Feel welcome to respond to and/or about someone who has introduced themselves here, for the purpose of sharing even more information about the people in the group. But for topical or procedural discussion, if someone says something to which you wish to respond, please start a new thread. 

Everyone else - I'm asking all of the members of this group to chime in here! If you haven't introduced yourself, I'm eventually gonna bug you to do so. ;)

~greg

--

• gjb •

202.643.3648

[Derek Coursen]

Hi, my name is Derek Coursen. A long time ago, while doing an MLS, I worked on a community referral directory for immigrant services at Queens Library. Later I studied information systems, particularly data architecture and software development methodology. Finally I studied public administration, with a focus on how best to strategically organize information in the service of multiple diverse stakeholder groups.

 

My macro interest is in how the human services can evolve more effective and sector-specific information methodologies. I teach that as an adjunct at NYU Wagner, and blog about it at humanserviceinformatics.wordpress.com

 

I'm excited by this group's potential to develop new approaches that might break through the longstanding dilemmas of I&R. I think the key will be to develop something that will be a cost-effective choice for as many stakeholders as possible in this underfunded field. Good long-term solutions, in my view, need to be based on a mindset that is pragmatic and eclectically informed and that avoids narrow ideological commitments.

 

Dale, I was very glad that you wrote:

I understand the beauty of APIs and how they can be a tremendous labor saving device, but if they are scraping data for which other people have had to pay to produce, then I think that goes by another word - theft. I fully appreciate the Creative Commons license (and have used it with some of my own products) and the API Commons <http://apicommons.org/>, but I believe those relationships, motives and behaviors must be very explicit and they must be honored.

Agree 100%.

 

Derek

 

 

[Steve Eastwood]

Hello all,

I'm the Resources Manager for 2-1-1 Arizona in Phoenix. I've been with the agency that runs that program, Community Information and Referral Services, for almost 17 years and I take care of the referral database, website, social media, and electronic newsletter.

Hoping to find out what this project is all about and what it's primary purpose is and how my agency and others like it across the U.S. and Canada fit into the picture. 

[Keith Lavery-Barclay]

Hi

My name is Keith, I'm an Information & Referral Database Specialist with an Area Agency on Aging, Aging and Disability Resource Center.

I came into the Health and Human Service Industry by back roads, my qualifications are in Engineering, data, digital, micro processing control, software and hardware design. The reason for saying all that is I am also an immigrant and arriving here I couldn't find work in my field because no-one understood my qualifications, mine are mostly vocational, here they were looking for academic, they had the data, but not the information to make an informed decision about my abilities, and that is the difference we in the Information and Referral business are worried about, you can scream all you want about openness, but information is to data as chocolate is to ice-cream, unless what we are giving is the information the person is looking for, it is a usless collection of data. I&R have been providing this service for a long time, on a local basis, I'm all in favor of combining, we've advocated for it at AIRS for a l ong time, but to get this information costs, and someone has to pay the bill, sure we'll share our information, will you share the cost?

[David Henderson]

Hey all,

My name is David Henderson, for a number of years I ran a company called Idealisitcs that built web-based referral systems for large nonprofit and government agencies. I've had the opportunity to meet with Greg several times and am glad to see this initiative gaining momentum.

David Henderson

david.he...@gmail.com

fullcontactphilanthropy.com

[Stephanie Sanchez, CIRS]

My name is Stephanie Sanchez, I am the Statewide Director for 2-1-1 Colorado.

I work for Mile High United Way.

I have been with the 2-1-1 program for 9 years.

 

I’ve been stockpiling all the emails and just finished reading one month’s worth of conversations HaHa

Interesting read, and it seems we are still drilling down on terminology, common needs & objectives and debating over perceptions and reality.

 

I agree with the challenges, not sure yet where I land on my choice of solution, so at present, I am a “lurker”.

 

I will close with one “perception vs reality”. Roads and libraries are not free. We all pay for them with our tax dollars. And I guess in many ways, that’s the heart of this project/topic, sustainability for the work we each do.

 

Stephanie Sanchez, CIRS
2-1-1 Statewide Director, Colorado
Mile High United Way
stephani...@unitedwaydenver.org

Check out the NEW Mile High United Way website at:
http://www.unitedwaydenver.org

From: OpenRe...@googlegroups.com [mailto:OpenRe...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Greg Bloom

Sent: Monday, April 07, 2014 2:29 PM
To: openre...@googlegroups.com

--

[Burt Lum]

Aloha everyone,

I am out here in Honolulu, Hawaii and am the Executive Director of Hawaii Open Data, a startup non-profit working to advance open data principles in the Aloha State. I also lead the Code for Hawaii Brigade.

Since we already have Ohana at the core of this work I thought it might be good to have a token Hawaii person on the team. Note: I didn't say Hawaiian because that often gets confused with Native Hawaiian ancestry. 

In the open data work we are doing here, we found strong interest in creating an open data/referral system to support the social service sector. I am working with agencies here like the Institute for Human Services and the Interagency Council for the Homeless. 

We would help this effort in a number of different ways. There is a strong community of developers here interested in civic and social projects. We also have organizations willing to adopt whatever data standards come out of this working group. Personally I am interested in helping in any way I can to develop the open 211 data standard.

Thanks Greg for spearheading this effort and I am honored to meet all of you.

Mahalo!

Burt

http://hawaiiopendata.org

[Jim Christie]

Hi Everyone,

I’ve been the Information and Referral Coordinator at 2-1-1 Big Bend in Tallahassee, FL for about three and a half years.  I oversee two Resource Specialists who help maintain our program data.  We use IRis 4.0.  I also maintain our Intranet and Internet websites and am involved in a number of different community collaborations on behalf of the agency.   My degrees are in communications and information technology.   Prior to joining 2-1-1 I worked for a consulting firm mainly in the education data field (Reading First, No Child Left Behind, student assessment data, etc.).  Before that I was a website/database manager for state government.  I’m mainly interested in finding out more about the project, offering the perspective of a data manager for a small to mid-sized 2-1-1, and learning what I can to improve the field.

Thanks for allowing me to participate and I look forward to engaging in a robust discussion with all of you.

Jim

 

Jim Christie, MS, CRS
Information and Referral Coordinator
2-1-1 Big Bend, Inc.
P.O. Box 10950
Tallahassee, FL 32302
Direct: 850.617.6318
Fax: 850.617.6359
E-mail: jchr...@211BigBend.org
Website: www.211BigBend.org

[Nate Falkner]

Hi all,

I am VP for Strategy and Head of West Coast Ops for Single Stop, a national organization spun out of the Robin Hood Foundation in New York City.

 

We work with partners across the country to provide coordinated access to benefits and services (both traditional state and federal benefits and community-based resources like food pantries, legal services, etc).

 

Since 07 we’ve developed partnerships in about a dozen states and touched almost a million students and families across the country connecting them with resources in excess of $2.5 billion….with more than 42 million American’s living at or below FPL and more than 50% of community college students dropping out b/c they can’t afford to stay we think the opportunity is significantly greater.

 

Very glad to be looped in and look forward to being part of the conversation!

 

Best,

 

 

Nate Falkner

Vice President of Strategy and Interim Regional Director, West Coast

Single Stop USA

369 Pine Street, Suite 503

San Francisco, CA 94104

www.singlestopusa.org

 

P: 415.391.7170

C: 646.919.6064

nfal...@singlestopusa.org

 

Notice-

This email including attachments is intended only for the use of the person or entity named above and may contain information that is confidential or legally privileged.  This email and its attachments constitutes non-public information intended to be conveyed only to the designated recipient(s) named above.  If you are not an intended recipient or a person responsible for delivering messages or communications to an intended recipient, you are hereby notified that the unauthorized use, distribution, or copying of this communication or any of the information contained in it is strictly prohibited. If you have received this communication in error, please notify us immediately by telephone at (212) 480-2870 and then destroy or delete this communication, or return it to us by mail if requested by us.

 

From: OpenRe...@googlegroups.com [mailto:OpenRe...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Jim Christie

Sent: Wednesday, April 16, 2014 10:13 AM
To: OpenRe...@googlegroups.com
Cc: openre...@googlegroups.com; bl...@codeforamerica.org

--

[Benjamin Y Clark]

Here goes for my introduction:

I'm an assistant professor of public administration and public health at Cleveland State University, as well as an adjunct informatics researcher at the MetroHealth Medical System (also in Cleveland). I am a former local government budget analyst, so I've got a real nuts and bolts/practical understand of local government management and operational constraints.

I have been conducting research on 311 systems and associated internet and smartphone applications for the last three years. The first stage of that research was trying get to better understand how these system distribute resources within the communities that use them (http://bit.ly/coproduction_par). From there I've moved more toward trying to understand how the data can inform government management (budget allocations and allocation of personnel across a city) and the extent to which they are or are not accurate. We have only just begun to scratch the surface of what is possible in explore the data being generate via 311--and I can see the same thing happening with 211 as well. 

Both 311 and 211 systems clearly help to streamline the process by which residents of communities can be connected with resources--which also means they can offer social science researchers great opportunities to test the effectiveness of outreach efforts. I am in the very very early stages of connecting with the 211 system in Cleveland to figure out how to do some of these evaluations, but I don't see myself as being limited to just Cleveland as the data for other systems are likely just as open and available and may offer similar opportunities. 

I'm very open to collaborating with people from across the country who have analytic or program evaluation needs. I'd be particularly interested in seeing collaboration across 311 and 211 platforms. Cleveland has a non-functioning 311 system so that integration is likely very very very very far off here.

I'm not a coder in the sense that many of you are (though I do write copious lines of code to run my stats programs). I have extensive experience in econometric modeling and have numerous spatial econometric modelers working with my at the university should a need for that of thing come up.

-Ben Clark

e: b.y.clark [at] csuohio.edu

On Monday, April 7, 2014 4:29:10 PM UTC-4, Greg Bloom wrote:

[aa...@geauxpoint.com]

Hi guys,

I’m very excited to be participating in the Open Referral project. As some of you may know, I have been promoting integration in I&R for quite some time. From my long experience in the software industry, it is has always been clear to me that the technology is critical in I&R.

I have been involved with most of the integration work in I&R thus far. However, the industry still has a long way to go. AIRS has been driving the process, and I have supported the organization as much I have been able. I started a consulting practice in 2008 and have strived to deliver strong solutions to clients across the I&R space and beyond. 

So far, progress has been intermittent and there is no definite path to completion. I have always believed that in order for timely progress to be made with integration, the initiative would need a large “dose” of leadership.

With the introduction of the Open Referral initiative entrance in I&R, the reality of integration has become tangible. I think that some of the work I have completed toward the initiative can be put to use for this group's purposes. For example, I custom-built a Saleforce.com information-management system for Help Me Grow that generated considerable buzz in the network. I was invited to demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in front of several Help Me Grow executives, and the platform was well received. I believe this kind of success can be re-created for all of I&R.

My observations regarding the I&R environment are shaped from years experience performing integration in the software industry. I worked at NetSuite for more than three years managing their SaaS integration strategy. Additionally, I have completed 200 enterprise-level and non-profit Salesforce implementations.

In light of this experience, I have given considerable thought to how integration in I&R might play out and what the path to success would be. I believe that the first steps would be to identify use-cases for integration within I&R, and have already begun work to identify these. Afterward, there are numerous paths to success worth discussing.  

Now that integration in I&R has become imminent rather than eventual, I wish to support the initiative as much as possible. Look forward to collaborating with you all! 

Regards,

Aaron

Aaron G. Blackledge

Lead Strategist

GeauxPoint

225-802-1805 

aa...@geauxpoint.com 

[Kathy Kelly]

 Kathy Kelly Hi all. I'm director of information Resources and Technology at Findhelp Information Services or 211 Central Ontario. I'm originally from Detroit but have lived happily in Toronto Canada for many years. After years in the private sector working in Information Technology, I joined Findhelp in 2003 because I wanted my IT work to matter. We have a very supportive and collaborative I&R sector in Ontario and have done lots of great things together. personally, I am driven to use technology to remove barriers to service and to finding creative ways to do the impossible. 

[stev...@west.cmu.edu]

Hello, my name is Steve Ray. Unlike most of you, I have no experience in the referrals area. I first heard about this group when Greg posted an inquiry on the Ontolog Forum mailing list, which is a list full of "ontologists" who use semantic modeling of varying degrees of rigor for various domains. Some use very formal languages such as Common Logic and other variants of first order logic, while others (like me) use less formal languages such as OWL (Web Ontology Language) that drives the so-called Semantic Web and much of the Linked Open Data world. I have some experience in creating OWL models, and in mapping between OWL models for the purpose of interoperability. I work with standards committees in various industry sectors such as the smart grid, manufacturing, and the "internet of things", and sometimes reverse engineer standards from other representations such as XML Schema or UML.

This project looks interesting as another domain that needs to interoperate among many data sources, and a neutral ontology to guide that interoperation could be a very good approach. Greg has mentioned that schema.org might be a useful integrating ontology, and I agree with him on that. The kinds of tools I use are OWL modeling tools such as TopBraid Composer (mostly) and sometimes Protege. These allow modeling as well as reasoning over the models. Given the need and the time, I could try some of these tools on this project's data.

My background is 27 years at NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) working on - you guessed it - standards; then 5 years free-lancing and working part time at Carnegie Mellon University way out here in California (yep, we have a campus at Moffett Field, where NASA Ames is located). Have also dabbled in disaster management data interoperability, although the first responder community is very far away from considering ontologies in their operational work.

I'm looking forward to learning more about what has already been done here, and what is planned for the future.

 - Steve

[Cat Dwyer]

I'm a self employed management consultant and trainer based in NYC.  I have 20+ years experience in the Information and Referral industry, primarily in resource work. 

-- 
Cathleen Dwyer, CRS, CIRS

c...@cdkconsulting.com
www.CDKConsulting.com
Unlock your potential...
914-629-4972

[Aaron Pikcilingis]

I am a software developer who has been working on a tool called HelpSteps for the past 8-plus years (this may be misleading: I spend the majority of my time on other clinical projects, but my true interest is HelpSteps). In short, HelpSteps is screening and referral tool for health and human service needs. It employs a database of about 1700 agencies in the Boston area for generating referrals. We maintain that database in partnership with a team at the Boston Public Health Commission. Recently I've begun the process of redesigning the way the database system--including the admin system--works to improve our processes for adding and updating information and to set it up to run with a web API that other organizations, developers, etc could use for their own projects.

My research into open standards as part of the design process led me to the Ohana project and this group, both of which are very exciting to me. I am very interested in setting up a local group for Boston and will begin talking to people at the hospital and other organizations around town to get their thoughts on the process and organization for local teams outlined in the public documentation.

Our current database contains over 1700 agencies in Boston and the surrounding towns, plus some agencies in other parts of the state and a cluster in the Little Rock, Arkansas area added and used by partners based there. We maintain the information by calling the agencies, with a goal of contacting them each once a year. This is very labor-intensive and I am eager to find ways to lower the bar for others--representatives from agencies listed, people using our search tools, etc.--to contribute to the system with minimal intervention required from our staff. I have read with great interest some of the processes described in the discussions in this group.

[Chris Mattmann]

Hello,

My name is Chris Mattmann, and here are the answers to the questions below:

We all want to know: 
A bit about who you are.

A good bio is here: 

http://www.amazon.com/Chris-Mattmann/e/B006V44GIG

In particular, I currently wear another hat this is directly related to this effort, which is that I am the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at 2-1-1 LA County, working with the executive team there to help define strategy and bring to bear a robust, scalable, IT infrastructure for information and referral. I started out working on bringing the efforts that I helped to lead at Apache in search - I was one of the original members of the Apache Nutch PMC, which eventually spun off Hadoop and a number of other projects in Big Data; I was the progenitor of the Apache Tika toolkit, http://tika.apache.org/ and http://manning.com/mattmann/) - to 2-1-1 as a consultant and helping them to bring search innovation to the agency. I then moved onto requirements analysis, and helped with the complete redesign of their customer call center system called 2-1-1 LinQ. I have since helped document and describe the architecture at the agency and helped to staff a world class team with strong connections to the I&R community; the CS community; the open source community and the Big Data and research communities. I currently sit on the board of the Apache Software Foundation, in addition to my other roles above.

Your experience with referral information systems, and what brought you to join this group.

I've worked at 2-1-1 LA County since 2008 helping them to completely redesign and rework their customer call center system; their resource database, and to contribute to IT at the agency.

A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work can make possible.

I'm interested in finding out more about this group and what it can make possible.

AND please share at least one or two of the following: 
What are some resources you can bring to the table? 

Right now I have joined this list and so has our IT project manager, Mark Perryman.

What needs do you have, with which others might be able to help? 

TBD.

What questions do you want us to try to answer?

TBD.

Looking forward to collaborating.

Cheers,

Chris Mattmann

[Mark Perryman]

Hi There -

My name is Mark Perryman, I am 211 LA County's IT Project Manager. I work with Chris Mattmann, my team of developers, our executive team, community service providers, and policy makers to ensure that the largest 211 in the Country (211 LA County) is able to serve the public's needs.

From running over a dozen successful political campaigns (in LA County and Ventura County) to developing network infrastructure and policy at the local, state and federal level, I have a broad skillset focused on making government more efficient and accessible to the general public.

At 211 LA County, my development team and I are working to develop APIs to connect resources from/to our 211LinQ software to ensure that we are providing accurate information to the public, disaster personnel and policy makers.  In addition, my team is charged with redeveloping the look and feel of the 211 LA County website, the 211/AIRS Taxonomy website and corresponding tools including the consideration of open-sourcing the Taxonomy.

I'm interested in understanding through this forum what the specific "Problem" is that these efforts are trying to address in addition to providing a clear analysis of any gaps that may or may not exist.

I believe this should answer many of your questions, but if you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to ask.

Best,

Mark

mper...@211la.org

(626) 350-1841 x 2164

[Jennifer Miller]

I am the Resource Center Manager for 2-1-1 at United Way of Greater Kansas City. I am just interested in getting to know as much as I can about the concept of Open Referral and what Code for America and related projects are proposing. I have been doing I&R resource work for over 10 years now, and am constantly striving to integrate any technology I can to make the process easier for users, be it staff or the public. We are currently sharing our data with a local government for their case managers' use, but in primitive form, through spreadsheets which they in turn upload to their system, and I would love to see a quicker and easier way to do that. I have zero programming knowledge and zero budget for testing solutions, so I am interested to see what others are accomplishing, where they are getting their support and what is possible through technology. 

-Jennifer Miller

[Chris Mattmann]

Dear Jennifer,

Very nice to meet you!

Cheers,
Chris

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
211 Los Angeles County
Email: cmat...@211la.org
WWW: http://www.211la.org/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer Miller <mfc...@gmail.com>
Date: Saturday, April 26, 2014 10:51 AM
To: <OpenRe...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: <openre...@googlegroups.com>, <bl...@codeforamerica.org>
Subject: [openreferral] Re: Introductions thread [welcome to Open
Referral!]

[Jessie Posilkin]

Hi all,

I'm a new addition to this group - I'm one of the advisors to the Open Referral Project in Washington, DC. Like Greg, my (paid) work until recently was focused in local DC, though I've made the professional jump to working nationally at the federal funder for Civil Legal services.

I come from a social services background, but am also an organizer, technologist, facilitator, and a not-yet-developer (hey lesson 3 of Python!)

 

A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work can make possible:

I'm excited to see what can be mapped of how individuals get routed between organizations, and to see it be used to improve organizational efficiencies. (I see already that a few folks may find that interest off topic, as it's an applied use of the system and not building the system itself, but...here we are).

What are some resources you can bring to the table?

- Personally, I enjoy translating between tech and non-tech folks.

- Knowledge of local DC agencies

I'm looking forward to supporting the local DC project and learning from you all.

Jessie

[Chris Mattmann]

Nice to meet you Jessie!

Cheers,
Chris

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
211 Los Angeles County
Email: cmat...@211la.org
WWW: http://www.211la.org/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++






-----Original Message-----
From: Jessie Posilkin <jessie....@gmail.com>
Date: Sunday, April 27, 2014 5:54 PM
To: <OpenRe...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: <openre...@googlegroups.com>, <bl...@codeforamerica.org>
Subject: [openreferral] Re: Introductions thread [welcome to Open
Referral!]

[John Plonski]

Hello All,

By way of introduction I am John Plonski.  I have been in the field of crisis intervention and I&R for quite a while.  When I started in the field it had been established that the Sun did not orbit the Earth but we did use phones that had things you had to rotate to make a call and the resource database was a contained in several shoeboxes of 5 x 8 index cards.  Following that initial experience I worked at a national crisis hotline and at the end of my tenure there I was responsible for their resource database that was populated by almost 40,000 agencies.  For the last 5 years I have been self-employed as a training consultant focusing on crisis and suicide intervention.  I also provide supervisory oversight to a web-based crisis intervention service.  Over the years I have worked with local, state, national, and international agencies.  I am a board member of AIRS.  I also co-chaired the NYS 2-1-1 Collaborative and worked with a group of non-profits who worked with New York City 311 to bring 2-1-1 into the City’s 311.  I also been involved with the AIRS/UW Disaster Response team organized to assist I&R call centers in times of disaster.  

I am looking forward to be part of a process that has so many knowledgeable individuals participating.  However, to be frank, I come to this group with high hopes and low expectations.  At various levels of input I have been involved with many endeavors promoting open access to resource data.  All these efforts were well intentioned and technologically elegant.  However, actual implementation fell short of the intended goals.  In each case the coding was spot on.  Alas once things are coded then we enter the realm of the user.  Everyone wants to put their imprimatur on the process and elegance turns to quicksand.  Yes, you are right, I am the rain on the parade.

As I understand it our goal is to develop a standardized data structure that will permit cross platform interoperability allowing users to access resource data in a manner that is both user friendly and consistent.  I have looked at the schema put forward and they seem practical and doable.  However experience has taught me that which is elegant, practical and doable is not always easy to implement.

What brings me to this group is a desire to see this project through to a successful implementation.  I foresee several barriers, which it seems the group is trying to address through this collaborative process.  

First there is the issue of standards.  With so many entities involved adherence to a specific set of standards is important.  I will admit I would hope the group would choose to embrace the AIRS Standards For Professional Information & Referral (The Standards).  These standards have served the I&R system well over the years as it moved from shoebox resource databases to this point.  Much effort has been expended to keep them current and relevant.  Adopting The Standards as the foundation of the end product of this exercise will give us all a common point that we can reference.  Also The Standards as well as The AIRS XSD Data Interoperability Standards are open and accessible to any and all through the AIRS.org website.

Second is the issue of indexing the data.  The AIRS/2-1-1 Taxonomy has been a “work in progress” for about 30 years and has served the I&R community well.  The Taxonomy would serve the mission of this group well as it provides a common “language” for resources.  While the perception that The Taxonomy is not user friendly to those outside of the I&R field the perception is flawed as evidenced by the number of I&R services who post their resource databases online and are readily accessed by those in need.  I see that the phrase “Folksonomy” has been mentioned as a way to “humanize” The Taxonomy it would be best to start that process with something that has served the industry and its consumers well.  Granted the entire Taxonomy is not truly “open” but the minimal cost to subscribe supports the constant updating of the taxonomy as needs and services evolve although the Disaster Services, Volunteer Opportunities taxonomies are freely available on the 211Taxonomy.org website.

The third issue, with apologies to Tip O’Neill, is that “All I&R is local.”  We should keep in mind that I&R is not just 2-1-1.  I&R is a system of many providers serving many catchments.  They are large agencies as well as small “shops”.  The reality is the whole system does not work without all the players represented.  It is my hope (goal) this process leads to something that will improve the entire I&R system.

Another issue would be how is the end product would be maintained and checked for accuracy.  Most technology based resource data systems resort to email messaging to effect updates.  Experience has shown this is not a very practical means of guaranteeing accurate records.  Either the requests to update are ignored or the information provided is not accurate.  

There is also the issue of legacy databases.  There are many services (frequently government services) whose backbones date back to the days of massive servers written in arcane languages.  Interoperability with such systems can be problematic.

And finally perhaps my biggest concern.  In my experience there are many, many times where the individual is contacting the I&R for a specific service to help them.  Upon engaging that person in the I&R Process it is discovered that which the individual wants is not what would be most helpful for them.  While this issue is not the focus of this initiative it is my hope that we do not lose sight of the fact that what we code may not be the optimum solution for the person in need.  I am not, by any means, embracing the Luddite Fallacy.  Rather I am merely observing that the “system”, or in this case the “solution”, needs to recognize the value of the human in the helping process.

Sorry for being overly long.  I promise to be more succinct in the future.  Anyway it is nice meeting all of you.

John P

On Monday, April 7, 2014 4:29:10 PM UTC-4, Greg Bloom wrote:

Hi folks - 

As our work together gradually gets started, I want us all to take some time to introduce ourselves. Declan and Devin have already done so, and I hope to see everyone on this list eventually follow suit. (I know some of y’all may just be trying to lurk… be prepared to get noodged!)

We all want to know: 
A bit about who you are.
Your experience with referral information systems, and what brought you to join this group.

A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work can make possible.

AND please share at least one or two of the following: 

What are some resources you can bring to the table? 

What needs do you have, with which others might be able to help? 
What questions do you want us to try to answer?

Okay, I’ll go first! 

[Judith Mayer]

Hi All

I am the Project Director for BRIDGE San Francisco.

BRIDGE is working to develop icon based kiosks, full of relevant information and aggregated data for San Francisco's homeless population so that people in need can more easily connect with local government and non profit providers. A website companion affords providers a more robust interface.  Our goal is to facilitate and improve the social service ecosystem through open data collection and reporting.  

BRIDGE is now  fully staffed by a cross functional team of  Google volunteers who are involved with all aspects of the project: UI/UX, resource and utilization mapping, backend development, among other areas.

We are user/consumer centric and our stakeholders will be providing imput through every iteration.

We are:

Barry Roeder, Founder, Executive Director:  Co-Founder, HandUp (mobile donation platform); Fellow, SF Office of Innovation; Adjunct Professor, USF School of Management; 20+ year product experience

Judith Mayer, Project Director:  Founder, Tender Roots; Former Dir, National Alliance of Mental Illness / San Francisco Chapter, 20 years project experience (Apple, HP, Oracle, Wells Fargo, AT&T, United Nations)

[Jennifer Stowe]

Hi all!

Jenn here- the Lead Organizer for the Open Referral project in DC. 

I'm originally from Atlanta, but I've been in DC for 10 years. I have a background in non-profit fundraising, relationship management, and communications, but more recently I've been focusing on improving digital communications at local DC health/human/social services non-profits. I'm also currently in school obtaining a BFA in Graphic Design. 

I'm coming into this role right after a nine month turn working in communications at a poverty relief organization here in DC. I don't have much direct experience using a referral info system, but because I've been gearing up to take the lead in this project for a short while, I have an understanding (although somewhat broad-brush) of the types of referral systems and their related challenges. 

I bring to the table knowledge of DC organizations, visual, digital, and strategic communications, and relationship building. I can code HTML and CSS and a tiny bit of Python, but I may ask you all for help in breaking down the complicated technical concepts. 

Excited to work with you all!

Best,

Jenn

 

[Sunny Juneja]

Hi Everyone,

I'm a volunteer for Open Oakland and civic hacker. I was most recently employed as a software engineer but I have a breadth of experience. I heard about 211 when Greg came to a meeting and talked about the importance of 211. I worked with Ohana to get their applications running for the Alameda County. I like hacking in Java, Ruby and Javascript.

Sunny Juneja

[Sameer Siruguri]

Hi, everyone -

I apologize for jumping in rather late - I seem to have run into technical problems and hadn't been signed into the forum until just yesterday.

I'm really excited to be part of the Open Referral team. I signed up as the California Regional Lead, working on the ground with Greg and CfA (Jack) to pull together local stakeholders, and facilitate the process of translating their user stories into technical roadmaps and requirements.

I run an online strategy consultancy called Digital Strategies, and provide technical product strategy and coaching services, as well as web development support. I have worked in both the corporate and non-profit sectors for over a decade as a product manager, most recently at Techsoup in SF and Bing (Microsoft) in Seattle.

Regards,
Sameer.

[Jack Madans]

Hello everyone,

I'm Jack Madans. Officially, I manage government partnerships at Code for America. But - like many of you - I wear a few hats around CfA, including overall responsibility for our participation in Open Referral.

Before I jump in, I want to say how heartened I have been by the posts to this thread. I'm humbled by the  I&R veterans, librarians, standards experts, technologists, entrepreneurs, information architects, organizers, and academics tuning into this work. Even more exciting is that most you work at the intersection of two or more of these worlds.

Apart from the end user help seekers themselves, CfA is doing this work for people like Jennifer M and Carol Wood: dedicated public servants whose institutions are strained for the time and budget for trying new approaches.

I caught the Code for America bug early on when we launched our first Fellowship class in 2011 - through our Fellowships, we embed programmers, designers, and data folk in local government and support them in working on civic challenges identified by those governments. Since 2011, fellowship teams have deployed to nearly 35 municipalities, we've organized a 2000-person strong Brigade of volunteers, created an accelerator program to bring more tech entrepreneurs to gov tech, and started a professional development and peer network for government staff. It's our goal to bring these resources - and this community  - to bear to help make it easier to help people in need find critical services.

As the Open Referral backstory explains, last year a group of Code for America Fellows had a breakthrough in creating Ohana, an open API for San Mateo County Human Service Agency’s previously closed database of social services. We see Open Referral as an opportunity to build on that momentum, working with a network that spans the I&R ecosystem to develop a new standard that can help all kinds of efforts to make this data easier to collect, share, and re-use.

I think our broad network of civic hackers and local government innovators is in a way an ideal environment in which to grapple with this work. One important note to make here is that Code for America is the hub of a broad network of active idealists who often chart their own path forward; there are many things that happen in a Code for America context which our actual organization may not bear any direct responsibility for. That said, we model behavioural from HQ. So with that in mind, I think it’s important to outline the principles that I enumerated to our staff, to the Ohana team, and to Greg directly, as we agreed to co-sponsor this effort. Here are those principles:

1. We need a common way of describing health, human, and social services.

2. We have a prerogative to work with the already-existing technical and human infrastructure in our cities and counties and states — including 2-1-1s and other longstanding I&R services.

3. We must experiment with a variety of approaches to the challenge of keeping community resource directory data up-to-date and reliable.

4. We must constantly develop our understanding of the particular needs of each type of user in the client/service provider/referral system interaction.

If you've gotten this far, I appreciate it :)

I look forward to demonstrating that Code for America and our network can be a strong, supportive ally in this effort, as this initiative already demonstrates some of our best characteristics — a bias towards action, with steadfast support to those who take risks in the name of improving our civic infrastructure.

[Judith Mayer]

As Team BRIDGE, we would like to thank everyone who attended yesterday's meeting for the
Open Referral Bay Area Group. It was insightful, inspiring and we look for forward to working together again.

Team BRIDGE
Barry Roeder
Judith Mayer

[Sacha Steinberger]

Hi all -

I am an attorney in San Francisco. I am working with a local foundation to pilot a project that seeks to equip the foundation's grantees (social service providers) to better identify their clients' legal issues and link them to the services they need. The Open Referral work may be very relevant to our work and I am interested and excited to track the progress of this important effort. 

Sacha Steinberger

Project Legal Link

415-321-9199

[Chris Mattmann]

Nice to meet you, Sacha!

Cheers,
Chris

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Chris Mattmann, Ph.D.
Chief Technology Officer (CTO)
211 Los Angeles County
Email: cmat...@211la.org
WWW: http://www.211la.org/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++






-----Original Message-----
From: Sacha Steinberger <sa...@projectlegallink.org>
Date: Tuesday, May 13, 2014 5:21 PM
To: <OpenRe...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: <openre...@googlegroups.com>, <bl...@codeforamerica.org>
Subject: [openreferral] Re: Introductions thread [welcome to Open
Referral!]

[J. Albert Bowden]

hello open referral,

code for hampton roads brigadeer here.
heard about open referral via open knowledge cast
http://okcast.org/2014/05/episode-10-open-referrals-with-greg-bloom/

[Jeff Piestrak]

Hi all! My name is Jeff Piestrak and I’m delighted to learn about this initiative and the work each of you are doing. While I’m definitely still getting up to speed on the world of “I&R” (please feel free to share useful info/resources for newbies like me), it does seem to parallel and increasingly intersect much of my own work.

As an Outreach & Engagement Specialist at Cornell University’s Mann Library, I support the research, education and outreach needs of our University, particularly in regards to agriculture and food systems. GIS is a specialty of mine. I provide consultation and instruction support in that area, while helping maintain a state data repository (CUGIR). I’m passionate about finding ways our library can help fulfill and “reimagine” our Land Grant mission in a networked age, breaking down silos to better support the health and well-being of our state’s citizens and communities.

I’m also very involved with several civil society groups working toward a more just, equitable and sustainable world, at the local, state and regional levels. One project I help lead, the Northeast Food Knowledge Ecosystem (NEFKE), is focused on helping those engaged in agriculture and food systems across the Northeast US work (and learn) together for mutual benefit and “Collective Impact”. As many of you likely know, there is increasing interest in Collective Impact by United Way and many others as a strategy for aligning community efforts/services to address the root causes of societal ills, rather than simply treating the symptoms.

I see networked information and communications systems, via open standards, protocols, etc., playing an increasingly critical and necessary role in all of the above, linking public, private and civic knowledge assets (tacit and explicit), and providing valuable tools and platforms for communication, learning and collective sense-making. The Urban Institute/NCCS Community Platform is one tool I’m looking to employ in communities I work with. In fact Tom Pollak from NCCS was the one who introduced me to Greg and Open Referral.

The CUGIR data repository I help maintain will soon be migrating to Open Geoportal, and I'll be looking for ways to feed geospatial web services provided by that to community based efforts. I'd also like to apply/extend groundbreaking semantic web work our own library has done in regards to creating and linking open data with VIVO and AgriVIVO, including the creation of local and state registries of people, orgs, and projects. See our CALS Impact site for what a Drupal front end linked to Cornell VIVO data looks like. Our NEFKE project is looking to adopt or adapt several existing controlled vocabularies/taxonomies, including Geonames and Foundation Center Philanthropy Classification System (feedback on PCS currently being solicited).

In terms of a potential 'use case' I hope Open Referral work can make possible -I see several, but one that immediately comes to mind (and for which funding proposals are being developed): I’d like to use the Community Platform and other tools to support Community Food Policy Councils and Action Groups across New York State. Having well-structured, easily accessible and repurposable Open Data to draw upon (via API and otherwise), indicating who is doing what, where and when, and what resources/expertise they have to share, will be a huge help in supporting informed, coordinated food policy and action. That might include a range of things/programs like childhood nutrition, farm to school, community gardening projects, food security/hunger, farmland preservation, or food related entrepreneurship programs. We'd love to have CfA involved in this effort somehow.

Last year I had the pleasure of participating in a Nonprofit Technology Network (NTEN) organized year-long “Community of Impact” peer learning group, where we looked at the challenges and opportunities of org-to-org data sharing. What I realized through that and my experiences elsewhere (and documented in our report, “Collected Voices: Data-Informed Nonprofits”), is that relationships based on mutual understanding and trust are key in moving past and many of the barriers expressed by others here. That is likely what will be needed most for this very worthy project to move forward in an inclusive and widely adopted way. I look forward to learning from you all, and contributing to the process when and where I can!

Cheers, Jeff Piestrak


~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jeff Piestrak
Outreach & Engagement Specialist
Albert R. Mann Library
Cornell University
Ithaca, N.Y. 14853
jm...@cornell.edu

http://mannlib.cornell.edu/outreach
http://cugir.mannlib.cornell.edu
http://guides.library.cornell.edu/local_food

[patty.m...@multco.us]

Hi everyone,

My apologies for being so tardy with my introduction. My name is Patty McGovern. I have been working in the I&R field for about 9 years. I'm currently a program specialist with an Aging & Disability Resource Center (ADRC) in Portland, OR. In this role, I develop many of our policies & procedures for resource data management and I&R service delivery. I also provide training & technical support to our statewide network on technology and reporting.

Prior to coming to Oregon, I worked in various roles for an AIRS accredited 211 system in Asheville, NC. First as an I&R Specialist, then as a Resource Manager & Data Analyst. 

Like other I&R systems, we struggle with growing needs in the community and shrinking budgets  - stretching staff hours to continue delivering services and maintain quality data. It's my hope, between all the super bright minds in this group,  we can develop a tool which allows us to better serve our communities. Most of the data sharing projects I've been involved in (or witness to) have turned out less than ideal. 

I'm a subscriber to the AIRS taxonomy, standards & best practices. I would hate to see these left out of the vision. So far though, that's not really what I am reading. I did attend the Open Referral Workshop at the AIRS Conference in Atlanta and thoroughly enjoyed Greg's presentation. We were pretty hard on him and he took it like a champ.

I only see good things coming out of everyone's participation here. Wherever possibly, I will do my best to chime in when I have something of value to add. I admit I've not been able to spend sufficient time to get caught-up on the discussion though.

Cheers,

Patty McGovern, CRS, CIRS-A

ADRC Program Specialist

Portland, OR

[James Sullivan]

Hi all, I am a 311 Call Center advocate. I assist cities in all aspects of developing a 311, from initially making the business case to desigming the ayatem and busineas processes to managing the implementation project. My 311 clients include the cities of Atlanta, Philadelphia, Newark, and Detroit to me a few.

I am very interested in the interaction between 311 and 211. I have had to help define "disambiguation" business process for many of my clients where their human services offerings intersect with the local 211/Help Line I&R services.

I can offer the group the various perspectives and hot button issues for 311 industry.

I look forward to bring an active participant.

James.

[Perla Ni]

Hi,

I'm Perla Ni, CEO of GreatNonprofits.org.  I'm based in the SF Bay Area.

GreatNonprofits is the largest providers of tools to collect feedback about nonprofits and social programs.  We have crowd-sourced feedback, including those from clients served, for over 20,000 nonprofits in the US.  The reviews are publicly available on our website or via our API.  Our API reaches an audience of over 15M per year.  This year, we just launched a Bi-Lateral API, which allows other websites to collect feedback about nonprofits and push them to us and then have it shared out to other API partners.  

We're interested in this effort because the voices and insights of low-income clients served can be easily integrated into 211 systems.  Referrals can be made to organizations that better meets the expectations of clients.  I co-wrote an article about the benefits of collecting and sharing client feedback  (http://greatnonprofits.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Summer-2012_Get-Feedback-1.pdf).  

We've seen improvements in organizations as a result of client feedback and resulting greater client satisfaction.  And I think equally importantly, there's a moral imperative for us to include the insights and voices of marginalized people in the information that we disseminate.  

What we offer and hope to get out of this group?  We offer a variety of tools to enable 211 websites to collect feedback from clients on the nonprofits they've received services from.  We have a set of tools ranging from our APIs to super simple javascript widgets (and soon, SMS feedback)  that can be added to your website that would allow you to display/collect feedback about specific agencies or nonprofits.

Happy to have conversations.  Drop me a line.  

Best,

Perla Ni

CEO, GreatNonprofits

per...@greatnonprofits.org

[Daniel Lucero]

Hi all

I'm Daniel Lucero, Resource Manager at 2-1-1 Santa Clara County. 

I manage the 500+ agencies in our database (always updating/adding), continually running reports for cities/counties/agencies, call center improvements etc. Previously with another nonprofit as a resource specialist giving out referrals so I've been on both sides which has only helped me learn about the needs (and unmet needs) in the community. Here to learn more about this exciting project and offer any insight I've picked up through the years of doing information and referral.  

Daniel Lucero, CIRS-A

United Way Silicon Valley

[Mike Ubell]

I am a retired software developer.  I have spent close to 40 years developing database and transaction management systems.  I am currently active in the OpenOakland brigade, working on OpenDisclosure.  My other volunteer activities are focused mostly around gun violence prevention in Oakland.  I am on the Board of S.A.V.E.-Oakland a community group that calls attention to the problem of violence in the community.  We are looking to add services that would help address the root causes of the violence and have picked Social Service Referral as a place to start. While a few members of our board and community are professionals or have experience with Referral I am just getting started.

In short: I am looking to trade my software skills and product delivery experience for an education in Referral.  I hope that people felt that we did an even swap during the last two days at the workshop, I certainly learned a lot. 

[Caroline Caselli]

Hi everyone!
I'm Caroline Caselli, Support Services Manager at Tenderloin Housing Clinic (THC). I've worked as a case manager at a homeless shelter prior to my work at THC, and have been interesting in improving client outcomes with data for the last 3 years. I've also started a company to streamline affordable housing applications called Haven Connect. I'm able to bring a knowledge of clients and particular use cases (ie social workers and clients) to this project, and am interested in collaborating with Open Referral to make sure my businesses' data adheres to the Open Referral standard.

I enjoyed meeting so many of you at the conference last week - I wrote up an article about it here, so feel free to read it and let me know what you think!
Caroline

[Volkan Unsal]

Hello everyone,

I am a New York-based developer, affiliated with the NYC chapter of Code for America brigade.

I have been building an app to make high school choice easier to New York City students for the past 6 months. It started with a challenge from NYC department of education. Not being a domain expert and an only developer, I was overwhelmed at first by the data. I spent months cleaning and modeling my way through it.

Just a couple of weeks ago, through Ariel Kennan, I was introduced to OpenReferral (and Ohana API) and I've now now completely ported my project to Ohana, and also redid my data model using OpenReferral. I want to express my gratitude to both the Ohana and the OpenReferral teams for solving this problem and building these great tools.

My project is called Edori. You can check it out at edori.org. (http://www.edori.org)

It allows students and parents find pre-k, high school and after school programs. The high school choice in New York City may seem like an unlikely usecase for OpenReferral, but if you think about the diversity of public and charter school offerings in the system, and the variety of providers, you start to see how this is necessary. The NYC middle school students need to make a choice of top 12 high schools at the end of the 8th grade, and they largely conduct that research on their own. The datasets for that are a bit messy and the best apps out there spend way too much time on data maintenance.

If this standard is adopted by the NYC DOE, in an extended format that covers some of the special cases that apply to educational resources, it would be so much easier to keep apps like mine current.

What can I offer? I can offer you guys feedback from an implementer's point of view. I conduct user research every week, and update my data model often in response to the research. I'd love to be part of the conversation around extending the model to include educational services, such as pre-k and after school programs.

Volkan

[Wen Dombrowski]

Hi everyone!

Thanks to Greg for inviting me to join this group.

I'm a New York City based geriatrics physician-technologist-entrepreneur that has a long-standing passion for connecting Resources to Needs. I am especially concerned about the health and safety of older adults, people with disabilities, and other vulnerable populations. The formal healthcare system does not address many of their needs, so I've spent much of my career looking at what are non-medical services & tech-tools that can help those in need.

An example of something I created is a Senior Services Map right after Hurricane Sandy in 2012: 

http://slideshare.net/mobile/wendombrowski/hd-palooza-google-crisis-mapsenior-serviceswen-20130604no-notes-v2b 

Much was learned from creating that mapped directory and many subsequent discussions with stakeholders from data entrepreneurs, government, corporations, social service agencies, emergency management professionals ,caregivers, et al.

Some of those lessons are outlined in the slideshare link above 

& in various tweets compiled here https://bitly.com/bundles/foodfan/9

Some key lessons about senior services & a broader social services directory...

(not an exhaustive list, just what comes to mind at this moment)

CONSUMER DEMAND / NEED / PAIN POINT:

* People with needs &/or their caregivers need an easy to use UI to search for resources they've never heard about but are relevant to them.

* Need search tools that include Filters by metatag Categories of services provided & Geographic Catchment area of the service provided (address of an agency headquarter doesn't show which towns they serve; and searcher is not necessarily in same location as service user)

* Often times adult children of elderly live in different cities, so a daughter in California needs a way to find resources in NYC or Idaho, and not just find what's in the the Cali phone book.

* The directory/database/site needs to be Free & Easy To Find (not on an obscure site that no one has heard of).

* The directory/database should be sufficiently comprehensive so that it's easy for searchers to one-stop-shop. Empower them for self-service & self-care.

BUSINESS CASE & ROI:

* Economic benefit to communities -- people who are healthier and able to get around will spend more money, shopping, etc. Also people have more $ to spend if they're paying less taxes (which supports Medicare & Medicaid).

* Benefit to employers -- employees who are caregivers would be more productive, miss less days of work, & less depressed/heart disease if they are less stressed with caregiving.

* Decreases "Total Cost of Care" & cost of Long Term Care if can support people in the community (such as Meals on Wheels) to prevent costly hospitalization (~$10k-$15k per admission) & annual cost of nursing home stay (~$80k per person)

DATA SOURCES:

* Lots of local ad hoc directories exist, but these are not easily accessible, not well known, often not updated.

* One of the biggest barriers to creating a mega-directory is lack of Political Cooperation of leaders of orgs to share their directories of resources. These are often publicly funded government agencies and nonprofit charities that claim to want to help as many people as possible -- despite this, there are often organizational insecurities and outdated notions of Turf that are counterproductive for the public good.

* Some gov and nonprofit leaders need to be educated about how sharing their information resources will be a direct benefit to them (number of people they were able to impact) and have positive economic benefits to their locales as noted above. 

* There are many ways to use Crowdsourcing to keep directories up to date, reliable, etc.

These are just some thoughts that come to mind. I will be on vacation for a few weeks, but I look forward to continuing this conversation with anyone who's interested after I return. I am based in NYC but my interests are national & international.

Wen

Wen Dombrowski, MD, MBA

W...@Resonate-Health.com

www.Twitter.com/HealthcareWen

www.LinkedIn.com/in/WenDombrowski

Connect ~ Collaborate ~ Create

[Manik Bhat]

Hi Everyone!

Hope all is well. I'm CEO and one of the cofounders of a health startup called Healthify. We are a small team (seven) that helps healthcare organizations better manage, track, and engage with their population's social needs. We got our start doing community health work in Baltimore for a few years (along with working with a group called Health Leads) and quickly realized that a majority of the patient's we worked with had unmet social and behavioral health needs that not only impacted their health but also their associated healthcare spending. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here, but we had no tools to figure out which patients had certain issues or figure out which services might be able to help. It was a mess. 

Luckily, we were a relatively tech savvy bunch and decided to build a platform that could help with some of the pain points we encountered. We quickly realized that there is no perfect solution for many of these problems but I've always believed that perfect shouldn't be the enemy of good. Our platform does a few healthcare specific things (screening, risk identification, texting engagement) but a lot of our platform also relies on solid services data. 

We have spent quite a bit of time looking at how to organize, clean, and structure data to be searched (about to roll out some neat semantic searching) easily from the perspective of a healthcare provider and are now getting some great data from some of our clients (NY,FL,MD). We have experimented with calls, programmatic outreach, and crowd-sourcing users (and patients!) to edit information. Being a healthcare specific platform comes with a host of challenges like behavioral health referrals, language level, cultural competency, HIPAA, relative expertise of individual using the tool, claims issues etc.... Looking forward to contributing some of our learnings to the group and to help build consensus on how to interpret and share this crucial data. Feel free to reach out with any questions. Exciting times! 

Take care,

Manik Bhat

937.903.8545

[Zach Goldstein]

Hi Everyone! I’m Zach Goldstein, the Director of Systems & Technology at Health Leads. I know many of the folks on this list and am excited to join the discussion. 

About HL: Health Leads envisions a healthcare system in which all patients’ basic resource needs are addressed as a standard part of quality care. In the clinics where we operate, physicians and other providers can prescribe food, heat, and other basic resources their patients need to be healthy, alongside prescriptions for medication. Patients then take those prescriptions to a Health Leads Desk in the clinic waiting room, where our college student Advocates work side-by-side with the patients to access community resources and public benefits.

About Me: I’ve spent the last 15 years working with high-potential health and education social enterprises, helping them go from proof of concept to scale. I’ve seen a ton of community resource databases come and go over that time, and I’m excited about the many new startups entering this space. I think we all have a huge opportunity right now to catalyze the healthcare marketplace and change the way care is delivered in this country. I hope I can share some of the lessons I’ve learned from seeing other resource databases in the past – particularly around how quantity of information alone is not enough to successfully connect families to resources. 

Looking forward to continuing the conversation!

Zach

[ke...@frontlinesms.com]

Hi everyone,

I'm Keith Porcaro. In past lives, I was a lawyer and a developer, and now I run the Legal Project at Social Impact Lab/FrontlineSMS. Much of my work centers around how to make legal systems more accessible, mostly with (but not limited to) inclusive technologies. The referral-related challenges I'm keenly interested in revolve around how to build unified networks between disparate legal (and social) organizations, so that a client doesn't have to navigate multiple rejections before getting to someone who can help, and an organization doesn't have to waste time and resources turning as many people away. 

We're spinning up some prototypes around this and other challenges, and looking forward to contributing what we can to the group!

k

[Paul Mackay]

Hi all,

I'm based in London, UK and have a couple of interests here:

I'm currently working as a technologist/Fellow in Code for Europe at Nesta (UK's innovation foundation) and working with others on a very early stages project called Localo to try to build data and API specs for local government services. One part of that would include just knowing more about locally available services themselves, which relates to Open Referral. I'm collating a few reference notes here https://github.com/LocalGovDigital/localo/wiki/Services.

Also I have a business called Folk Labs with a mission to produce better tools for local communities. One longer term project we're working on is building software for local community websites that would include directory listings of groups and services, so I'm interested in how to make that data machine readable and accessible in a standard way and encouraging others to do the same. I was involved in a team also with others from Lambeth Council (a London borough) to pitch a LinkedIn for Communities project earlier this year. I'm also closely involved with Transition Towns where community needs are and related services are often important.

Paul Mackay

[ckopp...@polarisproject.org]

Hi everyone,

I'm Charles Koppelman-Milstein, a software developer at Polaris, a US anti-human trafficking organization.  I have a long history of working with technology and building APIs for social good, and a much shorter history of social service referrals in particular.  I get very excited by data structures.  One of my pet projects here at Polaris is cleaning up our Service Provider model, and another is developing an API to communicate data with global and domestic allies, so this project fits the perfect intersection of those two.  Suffice to say, I'm very excited about this initiative.

I'm particularly interested in how to develop a distributed system where service providers can choose to share some information and to not share other information, or to only share information in a limited circle since in our field, flying under the radar (except within a trusted network) is often very important. 

Regards,

--

Charles S. Koppelman-Milstein | Developer

Polaris − Freedom Happens Now
PO Box 65323 | Washington, DC 20035
Tel: 202-745-1001x156

ckopp...@polarisproject.org | www.polarisproject.org

[Stéphane Guidoin]

Hello,

Stéphane Guidoin, working for Open north, a non-profit active in the domain of civic engagement and open data. We are developing open511, a cousin of open referral and we certainly have common challenges/ideas that i could share. Also we have a strong interest in standardization in the open data field, more precisely we recently take on the lead of  "open data standard" steam of the Open Governement Partnership in order to provide more input about standards. So how standards like open referral unfold, gain adoption and so an are of interest for us.

Steph

[Benjamin Kamm]

Hi Everyone! 

I’m Benj Kamm, Information Systems Manager at Health Leads. I work closely with Zach Goldstein, also a member of this group, and am excited to join this conversation in this venue.

About HL: Health Leads envisions a healthcare system in which all patients’ basic resource needs are addressed as a standard part of quality care. In the clinics where we operate, physicians and other providers can prescribe food, heat, and other basic resources their patients need to be healthy, alongside prescriptions for medication. Patients then take those prescriptions to a Health Leads Desk in the clinic waiting room, where our college student Advocates work side-by-side with the patients to access community resources and public benefits.

Broadly speaking, I'm interested in how people can align their interests, priorities, and capabilities to make large-scale change possible.  As such, I'm excited to see so much movement around tools to simplify and standardize how we manage resource information.

All the best,

Benj

[Katherine Carey]

Hi everyone,

My name is Katherine Carey and I work at Polaris (a national anti-trafficking NGO) with Charles Koppelman-Milstein.  However, unlike Charles, I have no tech background.  I work with our various programs, including the national hotline and the global team, and so I hope to bring a programmatic awareness to project, including relevant usage cases and scenarios.  Before coming to Polaris, I worked with an small domestic violence and human trafficking shelter in Sacramento, CA, where one of my roles was answering the 24-hour crisis line and giving referrals, so I plan to bring that expertise as well.

I'm excited about the prospect of having accurate information that is regularly updated be easily accessible to the organizations that need and use it, while still safeguarding the privacy and security of organizations like those that address human trafficking and domestic violence.  I look forward to working with all of you on this!

Best regards,

   Katherine

[Joel Natividad]

Hi all!

I'm Joel Natividad - co-founder of Ontodia.  We're an Open Data Solutions startup born out of Open Data (2-time winner of NYCBigApps).

Our aim is to take open data beyond portals, PDFs, spreadsheets and databases into an open knowledge commons that will allow everyone to gain insight.  I previously headed the Knowledge Engineering practice of a small consultancy creating knowledge systems primarily in lifescience and finance industry, primarily using open source and open standards.

I'm a Semantic Web practitioner (of the "practical, scruffy" school, not the "neat, academic" school), and I strongly believe that Linked Open Knowledge is the killer-app of Open Data and vice-versa, and there's no better place to start than health, human and social services.

We're currently working on a geotemporal data virtualization platform that will allow users to gain insight from data, taking care of the data-wrangling (ETL, geocoding, normalization, linking, archiving, etc), and allowing even non-tech users to create hyperlocal indicators they care about.

We're keen in pushing the openreferral standard here in NYC, as a lot of the puzzle pieces are already in place (Open Data Law, Largest City in the US, a progressive administration, etc.).

Looking forward to advancing the standard!

Joel

[Heather Leson]

HI folks, Greg thanks for the introduction to your community.

We all want to know: 

I am a community builder and idea hacker. Some of the communities I participate include Ushahidi, Crisismappers, Random Hacks of Kindness, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Mozilla and more. You can read about this at textontechs.com.
My experience with referral systems is limited.

AND please share at least one or two of the following:

I'd like to see how this project might support open community collaboration.

Looking forward to meeting and learning with you

Heather

[Virginia Carlson]

Hi all. Greg accepted my invitation over a month ago and I'm just getting around to introducing myself. I'm Virginia Carlson.

I began my work in the "data for community development" field in 1983 when I was undertaking up a Master's Degree at the University of Illinois Chicago. Data were on hard copy or mag tape. I was honored to be among the first researchers to work with HMDA in its extant form at the Woodstock Institute in Chicago. We used dial up modems to submit batch jobs.

What data we use to understand the needs of local community has been a passion of mine. Within that, I've been particularly interested in data archaeology - understanding the processes by which data are collected is essential to knowing what the data really say and can be used for.  In other words, reporting a pothole is not just a pothole report; it's an indicator of civic engagement.

I worked at the Brookings Institution in 2004 working to wedge out better data from the fed statistical system by which we could understand urban areas (so much easier to measure homogeneity than diversity). I ran the Metro Chicago Information Center for a few years until it closed its doors in Feb 2012 - doing technical assistance around data and information for social sector organizations. We ran the Apps for Metro Chicago competition in summer 2011. (We were saddled with a $650,000 pension liability and a Board who could not get their head around new ways of doing business with new technology, among other things.)

I now work at IMPACT Planning Council in Milwaukee, and we affiliated with the local 2-1-1 center. 

I've watched as civic coders have attempted to address some of the same problems I have had over the past thirty years. I'm watching in some cases as the same lessons I learned 30 years ago have to be re-learned (e.g., "what do communities need?" e.g., "why don't the feds release data in a way we can use?"). I wish civic coders and those who have done data-driven community organizing could talk to each other in service of what we might call "intentional disruption."

[Nivedita Chopra]

Hi everyone,

I'm a student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and I'm in my final year of undergraduate studies in computer science. The manner in which I got involved in OpenReferral is perhaps a bit different from most others in this community. Earlier this year, I took a class at CMU called "Software Development for Social Good" where we aimed to use our skills to give back to the community. As part of this class, we explored various initiatives, and then formed small groups to contribute to the initiatives that we found most interesting. This is how a few classmates and I got involved with Ohana, and first met Moncef, Anselm, and Sophia.

Ans told us about OpenReferral, and the idea of making a validator for the specification really resonated with me. I worked with Sophia to come up with an initial version of the validation tool, which can be seen here (Github repo). This is based on the state of the specification in May (here is a sample made by Sophia back then). I'm looking forward to taking this to the next level when we finalize version 1.0 in January, as well as to making other contributions in this space.

I'd also like to thank everyone here for being really supportive – this is my first venture into open-source development and civic engagement. A special shout-out to Sophia, Greg, Ans, Moncef and Hailey for the help and encouragement :)

Regards,

Nivedita

[Jared Vorkavich]

Hello. I'm a user experience director at a healthcare advertising agency in Columbus, Ohio. I just completed my master's degree in information architecture and knowledge management at Kent State University, and as part of my thesis work, I conducted a week of usability research with Help Seekers in the Bay Area (separate post to come on that topic). I first came to be aware of referral systems and this group because a friend was working on the Ohana API project. When I first learned about Ohana and Open Referral, I was immediately drawn to the idea of helping people in need by building better systems to support their needs. I hope that I can use my experience with information architecture, interaction design, and user research to contribute to these types of efforts.

[Mark Hebert]

Good day, this is Mark Hebert. Part of the local MeetUp Code America and Map Time Miami groups. I work as an IT Analyst and GIS coordinator for the City of Coral Gables. At the City I am involved and manage Business Analysis and Project Management duties for the enterprise and department development, I'm also the supervisor of the Customer Support Division of IT. We are currently working to implement as many GIS web maps and apps as we can to support City operations and public information access.

This past weekend I attended the Code Across 2015 workshop at the Miami Ad School where I joined this group. With an aged and aging demographic in CG, we are interested to advance the 211 capability; and, to work with surrounding agencies to build a robust information nexus to serve communities near and far.

I've got a lot of experience in mind mapping and project planning and management. As well, obviously, as GIS. Done some little bit of programming in Python, C++, etc. But, not full development.

Plan to stay close with the local Hack community and educational institutions. Thanks, and look forward to doing good.

Mark

[Kisha Semenuk]

We all want to know: 

A bit about who you are.

 I am a Labor and Delivery RN and maternal mental health nurse advocate. I recently moved from frontline nursing to my first 9-5 gig as a Program Manager for the Alliance for Innovation on Maternal Health at the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in DC. I live in Germantown, MD. 

Your experience with referral information systems, and what brought you to join this group.

Last year I performed a community needs assessment at the hospital level regarding resource linkage to community-based maternal mental health resources. As a result of identifying the lack of resource linkage for this pressing public health issue, I developed an open access online directory of maternal mental health programs, providers, and supports groups in the DC metro area.  In my new role as AIM Program Manager, we are tackling severe maternal morbidity and maternal morbidity by empowering hospitals and states to use data for rapid cycle quality improvements.

I found out about the Open Referral Initiative from a colleague. 

A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work can make possible.

As part of my community needs assessment, I searched for state-based online maternal mental health resource directories. There were only a handful and many were simply PDF files embedded within websites.  My vision is to formalize a national maternal mental health network similar to the www.mentalhealth.gov directory

AND please share at least one or two of the following: 
What are some resources you can bring to the table? 

The DMV PMH Resource Guide: www.dmvpmhresourceguide.com  

What needs do you have, with which others might be able to help? 

Capacity-building, Networking, Resource Linkage 

[Noah Teshu]

Hi Everyone,

I've just started working at Boston Children's Hospital as a software developer. I'll be working on HelpSteps, a referral service that we operate. My main work right now is moving our information from an older system into a forked version of the Ohana API. One of our primary partners will be the Boston Public Health Commission. We're excited about working with them and making our data more open and readily available. 

I am new to information referral services, but am learning as quickly as I can. Reading through the intro thread and articles people have linked to has given me an appreciation for the immense amount of work that has been done in the field. The idea of the "community data co-op" is especially interesting. I'm looking forward to learning from everyone here. 

In general, I'm here to try and minimize redundancy. Being able to use Ohana has given us an enormous head start in opening up our data, allowing us to avoid lots of boilerplate work that had already been done. In an effort to also give back where we have taken, we plan to freely share the data and source code that comes out of the project. 

I'm excited to join the community!

-Noah

On Monday, April 7, 2014 at 4:29:10 PM UTC-4, Greg Bloom wrote:

Hi folks - 

As our work together gradually gets started, I want us all to take some time to introduce ourselves. Declan and Devin have already done so, and I hope to see everyone on this list eventually follow suit. (I know some of y’all may just be trying to lurk… be prepared to get noodged!)

We all want to know: 
A bit about who you are.

Your experience with referral information systems, and what brought you to join this group.

A potential 'use case' of community resource data that you hope this work can make possible.

AND please share at least one or two of the following: 
What are some resources you can bring to the table? 

What needs do you have, with which others might be able to help? 

What questions do you want us to try to answer?

Okay, I’ll go first! 

[Matthew Kopel]

Howdy Folks,

My name is Matthew Kopel. I work for a nonprofit in Syracuse, NY supporting libraries and library services. We've got a small band of folks thinking about ways to make something like link-sf and Ohana easier to deploy for communities that might not have the technical resources to do so on their own. The chief thought that has come from that need is to make one instance with an easy data submission process and a front end for under-served end-users everywhere. I just learned about Open Referral over the last few days, and this is definitely going to play into whatever we come up with!

Cheers,

Matthew

[Noah Teshu]

Welcome, Matt! I've been working extensively with Ohana for about five months. Please let me know if you have any questions. Good luck with your project!

[Bob Filbin]

Hi All,

My name is Bob Filbin. I'm the Chief Data Scientist at Crisis Text Line. We offer 24/7 support to people in crisis by text. Since launching in Aug 2013, we've exchanged 14 million messages with texters in crisis. We're excited about expanding the set of validated referrals we offer to texters + tracking data around what works best for our texters. Looking forward to working on this with everyone!

Bob

[Ash Roughani]

Hi All,

Joel Riphagen and I are California Health Data Ambassadors, and scoping a potential Open Referral pilot project in California. Really interested in Greg's vision of a federated publishing platform, so we're attempting to identify all of the possible datasets currently being published (or that could potentially be published) and rolled up into an Ohana-like API. We're very intrigued by some of the work by the team at Dat, and hope to integrate that into the stack. Anyways, in the next week or so, our findings will be published here:

http://humanservices.cahealthdata.org/

If you have any input you'd like us to incorporate, please drop us a line at hea...@codeforsacramento.org. Stay tuned!

+ash 

[Greg Bloom]

Welcome, Ash! 

I just wanted to chime in here to make sure folks see Ash and Joel's new blog post about their work: https://openreferral.org/california-health-data-project-creates-new-role-in-civic-tech/

I think they've articulated a couple of points better than I've managed to do so far :P

And the project that is taking shape there in California seems to be very similar (if not actually parallel) to that which we've been recently discussing with the federal government. 

Really looking forward to see where this goes. 

~greg

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202.643.3648

[Kin Lane]

Hey there...

My name is Kin Lane - I am the API evangelist. 

Helping spread the gospel of how to do APIs right, focusing on the best practices when it comes to tech, business and politics of APIs.

I am very hopeful for what the Human Services specific and Open Referral can do. 

I am eager to help understand what best practices we can borrow from the space and help apply.

You can find more about me on apievangelist.com

Kin Lane

@kinlane

[jordanlyons]

Hi! I'm Jordan Lyons. I have my Masters in Public Administration from the University of Montana, and my professional background is in nonprofits.

I work for Missoula Aging Services, an Aging & Disability Resource Center. We provide I&R/A, and currently use Iris from Bowman Systems. We are looking to upgrade our database and improve performance in several ways:

 

1.      Increasing client access to resources online

2.      Switching from our system of “keywords” to taxonomy

3.     Sharing CRM-type information between many different departments (such as Meals on Wheels, Senior Corps, and agency donors)

4.      Making it easier for community groups to keep their own information up-to-date

5.      Possibly partnering with groups such as our local 211, hospitals, and/or combining with our state’s database (http://www.montana-adrc.com/)

I look forward to learning together with all of you. Thanks!

[edouard....@gmail.com]

Hi,

I am Edouard Legoupil and I am working for UNHCR Regional Protection Services in Middle East & North Africa as a Snr Information management Officer. I am based in Amman, Jordan. I tweet about refugee, data & analysis @ https://twitter.com/edouard_lgp

In my previous assignment, for the UNHCR Jordan Country Office, I contributed to the http://advisor.unhcr.jo project where we were looking at how to support humanitarian referrals with the establishment of a master list of services.

My interest for the Open Referral initiative came from this article: https://openreferral.org/introducing-the-humanitarian-service-data-model/

What we would like to further explore is to see, beyond the establishment of master list of existing potential support/services how referrals could be initiated by any community members instead of being solely under the control of humanitarian case management worker.

Another point might be to look at the establishment of quality insurance criteria adapted to an humanitarian context and to community based organizations.

Thanks for any ideas you would have.
Edouard

[Devin Balkind]

Hi Edouard.

Any feedback/ideas you have on the data model from that post would be greatly appreciated.

Our next step is to tackle the taxonomies of #service+type (what the service does) and #service+eligibility (who the service is for) - which I think are both essential for enabling people to find their own services, make their own referrals, etc.

We need more momentum to get that work done. If you're interested in getting involved let me know.

 

[Sean Erreger]

Hello all,

I am a mental health care manager for youth and referral is a HUGE part of job. I also blog about social work, mental health, and technology at www.stuckonsocialwork.wordpress.com. I am also a huge fan of social media which is how I came across Open Referral. I was following the recent AIRS conference on twitter (#AIRS2016) and read Greg's slides.

As a care manager enthused about technology this project really interested me. I often deal with referrals between systems that don't "talk" to each other well including (but not limited to) mental health, schools, juvenile probation, and child welfare. To have an open referral exchange between these systems would be amazing. So I look forward to following the conversation and learning more.

On Monday, April 7, 2014 at 4:29:10 PM UTC-4, Greg Bloom wrote:

[Ernie Hsiung]

Hi everyone,

Ernie from Miami checking in - I'm a software engineer by day, in the evenings I run Code for Miami, the local volunteer civic brigade.

Our brigade will also be doing a partnership with the Miami Open211 project which uses OpenReferral as well. You can read about this here:

https://medium.com/code-for-miami/working-with-switchboard-of-miami-and-the-open-referral-initiative-371b5b7c967b#.h5h232832

Thanks!

- ERnie

[Noah Teshu]

Welcome, Ernie! Sounds like you have awesome work going on in Miami.

We should talk. I'm on the leadership team of Code for Boston and I also implement a social services system with Ohana at my day job. Join us in Slack!

[Derek Eder]

Hi all!

I'm Derek Eder from Chicago. I run a civic technology company called DataMade and organize Chi Hack Night, a weekly event for building, sharing and learning about civic tech.

Over the years I've built a lot of civic projects and tools, including the Searchable Map Template powered by Fusion Tables.

Recently, DataMade just launched Dedupe.io, a web interface for quickly and automatically finding similar rows in a spreadsheet or database, using machine learning methods. It's really good at finding fuzzy matches in lists and linking together different datasets based on shared fields.

Let me know if you're interested in talking about any of these tools!

Derek

[David Portnoy]

Hello group,

I’m David Portnoy.  As Entrepreneur-in-Residence* for HHS (U.S. Department of Health & Human Services), I launched a program called Demand-Driven Open Data (DDOD).

Background

DDOD can be described as “Lean Startup for open data”. It consists of a technology platform and methodology that serve as a framework for governments and nonprofits to execute on their open data initiatives.  The methodologies take into account real world resource constraints, prioritize work based on actual demand, and measure the value of the data assets delivered.  The technology platform consists of tools that catalog data assets, maintain a searchable and semantic knowledge base of use cases, support collaborative online discussions, and automatically measure value delivered and data quality.  The DDOD framework quantifies its metrics in terms of three core deliverables: knowledge base, data assets and technical capability.  You can find more details in the Introduction for Data Owners deck and the DDOD website for HHS (http://ddod.healthdata.gov).

DDOD has been operating at HHS since late 2014 and has already produced the many quantifiable accomplishments.  (Incidentally, I believe a couple of members of this group, including Purple Binder, have been able to leverage DDOD already for their needs.)  The next phase of DDOD is to scale it government-wide, beyond its HHS pilot.  To that end, a recent workshop at a Data Cabinet meeting held by the White House OSTP (Office of Science and Technology Policy) group may be of interest: The Lean Startup Approach to Open Data.

Data Standards

The reason I’ve been asked to participate in this workgroup is due to my work on DDOD related use cases leading to contributions to data standards.  The most prominent are the standards for Provider Network Directories and Drug Formularies that went into effect fall of 2015: http://ddod.healthdata.gov/wiki/Interoperability:_Provider_network_directories.  Not only did DDOD result in a convening of an industry workgroup to provide input to regulators of health insurance exchanges, but it went on to leverage the momentum of the new regulations to work with Google in launching a corresponding standard for Schema.org: HealthInsurancePlan, HealthPlanCostSharingSpecification, HealthPlanFormulary, HealthPlanNetwork.

Another area of standardization has been around how to effectively and consistently convey data dictionaries for open data for both machine and human readability.  This is an area where the current open data platforms are still at embryonic stages compared to the master data management practices of the commercial world.

Open Referral

I’m a long time fan of the vision behind Open Referral, so it’s about time I joined the group – although I confess that I have to rely on others to point me in the right direction, as I’m not very familiar with this domain.  My involvement with Open Referral so far has been to provide strategic input for getting traction and critical mass of adoption and some preliminary review in terms of data interchange best practices and technical implementation.  (See Feedback on HSDS folder.)  We were discussing the possibility of creating pilot implementations in one of HHS-related service areas:

• ACL’s Eldercare Locator

• Health facilities via ACF / CMS

• HRSA health centers API

• HIV/AIDS testing and care treatment services API

• VA services API and potentially other info about VA clinics (although technically not HHS)

There’s an entry on the DDOD knowledge base describing the concepts and benefits behind the standard: http://ddod.healthdata.gov/wiki/Interoperability:_Directories_of_health,_human_and_social_services.  Once we have a pilot identified, I may be able to assist further in implementing it as a DDOD use case.  

_____

*  The Entrepreneur-in-Residence position is a fellowship where the government brings in experts from industry to launch new initiatives.  In real life, I’m health tech CTO, big data architect and mentor for startups.

[Bill Winfrey]

Hi all,

Brand new to the group and its efforts here but was introduced earlier this week by Greg Bloom via Eric Fleegler at Boston Children's. I'm working at the Innovation Center at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS). I'm brand new to the IT world- coming from social policy and the world of working directly with folks who would benefit from referral systems like this- but trying to quickly get up to speed. Very excited about the potential of this project and many of the others mentioned in introductions throughout this thread, and while I will start as a listener, perhaps I can find a way to contribute down the road!

[rob.r...@opendataservices.coop]

Hi everyone!

My name is Rob Redpath, and I live in Nottingham, UK. I'm part of Open Data Services - http://opendataservices.coop - we've just started working with Greg and Ernie on a bundle of work around Open Referral, HSDS and Miami Open211's use of Ohana. Formal announcements will be coming soon, and some of my colleagues will be introducing themselves as well, but in the meantime hi! 

[Vicki Shumulinsky]

Hi all, 

I'm Vicki Shumulinsky, Strategy Manager for West Health, based in San Diego, CA. We're a policy and research center focused on initiatives around seniors and successful aging. We have a few projects going that require and IT Platform that electronically connects senior patients to community based services for their non-clinical, in-home needs. Greg was introduced to me by a contact at Healthify, an interesting platform that does this type of work. The Open Referral work will be an integral part of the data that populates the platform that we choose. 

Happy to be a resource for healthcare market here in San Diego or someone to share ideas with around the senior population. I'll be back with questions targeted to this group!

Vicki

[tross]

Hi, Open Referral advocates. I am Teri Ross, Program Director at Illinois Legal Aid Online. My guest post was featured on the blog yesterday. I am a lawyer by education, but do not practice. My employer - ILAO - offers online referrals to free and low-cost legal resources for people with civil legal problem in Illinois. We are using Open Referral as a data model to structure our legal aid services profiles. I am happy to talk with anyone who is interested in our implementation and to hear your ideas about how we can improve. Glad to be a part of the community -

teri

[steven...@opendataservices.coop]

Hi All

I'm Steven Flower - I work as part of the team at Open Data Services Co-operative: https://openreferral.org/meet-the-open-data-services-cooperative/ 

Information about community services is of real interest to me.  Back in 2007 I started a project called "Plings" , which was all about sharing data on "Places to Go, Things to Do" for young people (Pl+ings!) in the UK.  We worked with several cities in the UK to collect, standardise and pool this information, then making it easier for others to build services, information points and apps.  Alas, very little remains of the project, although the report for central government may make interesting reading for some: http://www.substance.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/DCSF-Information-and-Signposting-Project-Sharing-the-Learning.pdf

Best wishes

Steven  

[edafe.o...@opendataservices.coop]

Hi

I'm Edafe Onerhime. I work with Steven Flower, Tim Davies and Rob Redpath as part of Open Data Services. I'm doing a lot of the data heavy lifting for the Miami Open Referral pilot https://www.google.com/url?q=https%3A%2F%2Fopenreferral.org%2Fmeet-the-open-data-services-cooperative%2F&sa=D&sntz=1&usg=AFQjCNEgq6lMTKLQOKU3EbFh8-b7F7DlSg

I haven't had a great deal of experience with referral systems, so I'm interested in how to balance capturing the story organisations are trying to tell using Open Referral.

[Daniel Fowler]

Hello all,

My name is Dan Fowler.  I'm currently based in NYC working for Open Knowledge International.  I spend the majority of my time on our Frictionless Data (http://frictionlessdata.io/) project.  I recently learned about Open Referral from Tim Davies who, as part of the team at Open Data Services, are working on the Miami Open 211 pilot project.  The HSDS spec is of particular interest to me as it is an instance of the Tabular Data Package, a general container format for tabular data.  It's always so useful to see actual implementations like this, so I'm excited to follow along with updates as the Miami work develops!

Cheers,

Dan 

[Aaron Bean]

Hello all, 

    Aaron from Asemio here.  We are a technology consulting group that is helping communities with the evolution of data ecosystems focused on improved community outcomes.  We are excited to be joining the Open Referral community and grateful for the work that has already been done in the space.  The foundation that this group has laid has helped us immensely in Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Read more about the work we are doing to build on top of the community work already done here on the Open Referral blog: Oklahoma Open 2-1-1.  In addition to the improved services being made available in the short term we already have several large nonprofit institutions who are shifting their strategic technology roadmap based on the open data directory that is being made available.  

    Oh yeah, and about me.. my background is as a Solution Architect @ EMC (pre-Dell), and also the United States Peace Corps (Kazakhstan 2009-2011).  So that should tell you all about why I ended up working in tech consulting for the social sector. ;)

Glad to be here, 

Aaron

[Pieter Gunst]

Hi everyone! 

My name is Pieter Gunst. I am a former attorney (DLA Piper, IPT) and passionate about legal technology.

I started a company called Legal.io in 2012 that helps legal service organizations with intake, referral and outcome tracking. Open Referral is directly relevant to our main use case.

Some things I can contribute to the group:

- Expertise in terms of technical and UX aspects of making referrals. 

Things I am looking for:

- Understanding everything in relation to the referral process, across different use cases.

Pieter

[ja...@i-p3.org]

Hi All,
Jamie Kleinsorge, Project Director at Community Commons here. I've been on the Community Commons development and training team since it's launch back in 2011.

I am interested in how information hubs are being used in community and organizational settings and how common data models are being developed and implemented.

Just very interested in learning from others! Thanks for allowing me to be part of the group. I hope to have something to contribute and I become more familiar with new models.

[tiffp...@gmail.com]

My name is Tiffany and I'm the founder of T.E.I.L.S., LLC at www.teilsbiomed.com.

I became a member of this community shortly after International Data Day, the first day to the start of Data Week. I attended NYC School of Data Conference where I learned about recent initiatives and resources, and Greg Bloom's name and initiatives were referred to specifically.

My work and effort is centered on data. Whether it is my formal day job as an analyst, an open data advocate and entreprenuer, my core focus is to show and apply the benefits of data.

[Jim Harris]

Hello all - My name is Jim Harris. I'm with the Technology Division of the National Center for State Courts. Prior to joining the NCSC, I served in many private- and public-sector roles developing software and providing technology consulting for courts and other justice system agencies.

My work at The Center includes, among many other exciting projects, participation in national initiatives to develop technology standards for the justice community. One of the more recent projects tackles challenges with access to justice and the concept of "litigant portals" to provide guidance to citizens looking for assistance and resources that may be able to help them with a legal problem. A paper titled "Building a Litigant Portal: Business and Technical Requirements" describes what a litigant portal might do along with business and technical requirements for such a portal.

With this model in mind, there is an effort underway to develop technical standards for interactions between various modules described in the paper and, perhaps more importantly, with external resources that can provide assistance appropriate to the type of legal problem described in lay terms by a user of the portal. We hope to leverage work of the Open Referral Initiative to support some of these interactions. OASIS (an international nonprofit consortium supporting development of open standards) is standing up a new Technical Committee for this work. Business and technology experts interested in the topic are encouraged to participate.

In the meantime, I'm looking forward to learning more about the Open Referral Initiative.

Regards,

Jim

jha...@ncsc.org