About the Project

This is a starter page from Jean that I we can customize for SF-in-progress use. See Jeans original at https://github.com/sfbrigade/sf-openreferral/wiki/About-the-Project/_edit
##About the Project

SF Open Referral is a branch of the Open Referral Project based in Washington, D.C. Open Referral is driving a movement to take data about social services, including where they are and what they offer to whom, and transform it into an open source standard that can be shared broadly through any tool that supports the emerging Open Referral spec. Our team is using the Ohana API to build a platform in partnership with a local government agency to provide a real-world testing environment for the spec. The agency benefits by receiving a customized, modernized, and user-friendly database that puts no strain on their existing IT resources.

Open Referral and Ohana are both projects of Code for America, a non-profit, largely volunteer-run organization. As such, we are a group of civic hackers donating our time and diverse skill sets towards a cause we strongly believe in.

##The Problem

Public service organizations create and maintain many different community resource directories. Each organization applies similar resources and effort against a shared issue, but there is no shared knowledge. Although they share similar goals and challenges, these efforts work in isolation of each other.

Individuals seeking help are left to navigate confusing lists of resources that may or may not lead them to what they need, and may or may not be current. Social workers and other intermediaries must master multiple lists of competing information, making it difficult to connect their clients to the relevant help. Community development initiatives, both government and non-profit, are left paying for new research to inventory and understand the state of their community resources.

This is a tremendously inefficient and wasteful system. The act of seeking help becomes a burden on the help-seeker, who is often seeking public services because of an urgent need. Instead of helping it’s most needful citizens, government is burdening them with unnecessary hardship. The current system also creates an unnecessary burden on public service workers in government, who must spend large amounts of time on unsatisfying paperwork and phone campaigns to obtain and verify information, instead of serving their help-seeking clients.

##Data: Many Locations and Formats

So where does the data live right now?

• internal PDFs, word documents, and spreadsheets
• printed resource guides
• filing cabinets
• a single employee's computer, or scattered across multiple employee's computers
• internal contract management systems
• administration databases
• the minds of individual employees

(no standardization all of these are opaque and out of reach of the public)

##Opportunity: Data should be free!

We see an opportunity to free this data so it can be:

• Current
• Consistent
• easily accessible
• easy to update
• published in a standardized format
• used to set the precedent for modern referral systems

Deliver consistent, high quality social services to those in need.