Open spjika opened 9 years ago
@spjika these are all solid points! Thanks for sharing.
Generally agreed with Spike's points.
1) Roles I see for the state:
2) A federated model is, I think, precisely what's needed in the long-run. The challenge is building that road. Ideally, state and local agencies and NGO aggregators can collaborate in the short term to take incremental-but-valuable steps that demonstrate the concepts, while learning and deliberating about what kinds of federation are needed to make this more and more effective.
3) I think it's worth getting specific about the 'crowd' here. I believe the most likely members of this particular crowd here are going to be service providers (librarians, social workers, healthcare practitioners, etc) and database administrators of organizations that aggregate this information. If you can develop a system that is trustworthy enough to be valuable for them (presumably one that is designed for interoperability so that they don't have to abandon their existing system to benefit from a new thing) and can receive their feedback, then the incentive will be that they can get better quality data by sharing that update alongside all the other service providers and directory aggregators than they would if they were just on their own.
4) There are probably multiple people in each county who already do this work -- alone in siloes. 2-1-1s alongside organizations that produce subdomain-specific directories (legal services, etc). What kind of system would promote stewardship that's shared among multiple institutional stakeholders?
5) I can say that the key objective of the Open Referral initiative in this next phase is the development tools and interfaces that enable distributed stakeholders to collaborate in the production of reliable data. So, it could very much help if properly scoped!
To interrogate the principles listed in your next steps a bit: while I don't think that conforming to a particular data standard should be an a priori objective of this kind of project, I also don't think that it's as simple as 'making the information available as quickly as possible.' Important information might not be getting collected or datized in the first place, and simply focusing on 'getting the data out' may miss the step of assessing what data should be out there. Likewise, if there are old directory datasets out there, containing information about services that are already being better maintained by NGOs like 2-1-1, then 'getting the data out there' could make a mess. If your goal is to work towards a world in which this data is accessible, interoperable, and trustworthy, then you may find that adopting a standard format is a necessary (though certainly not sufficient) step along the way.
Thanks @greggish! Super-helpful feedback.
Worthy idea.
more thoughts later.. this is hopefully food for thought rather than just dumb criticism. There is a case for something here!