An introduction to Open Referral and the Human Services Data Specification
The Human Services Data Specification is a data format that allows multiple organizations that maintain resources directories to write and publish their data to a common network. And this is a piece of the puzzle that emerged through the Code for America network (via cfa.slack.com). Greg Bloom at Open Referral, developed HSDS through a project that early on received support from Code for America: https://openreferral.org/about/history/
Reading his chapter of a Code for America publication, you'll realize the work we're doing for White Bird Clinic is a shared challenge for social service providers, and people have been working on this for a long time: Towards a Community Data Commons.
The openreferral.org site is a great resource for learning about other sites like Little Help Book. Here are two short video introductions, the first is also found on the Open Referral homepage, an explainer video, and the second is one of Greg Bloom introducing the challenge and proposed solution:
And Greg Bloom has a YouTube channel with meetings where contributors discuss issues, it's another way to familiarize yourself with this way of writing and publishing data to a shared network—if you're more an audio person, you can turn these on and listen in the background or intently.
Human Services Data Specification and the Little Help Book
In learning about HSDS, you'll see its basic schema: organizations, services, location. Organizations provide services that are delivered in a location, an organization can provide more than one service, and the location can be a physical location or virtual (online or phone). And that's similar to how we've structured our site, we've called organizations "providers" and all the services in our schema have "categories" and "subcategories," here's the work in progress site: https://little-help-book.netlify.app/table-of-contents-style-homepage/index.html
I made a copy of our "Little Help Book" Airtable and created a new table called "Human Services Data Specification" to test how we might transfer our data to begin writing and publishing data with HSDS. Fortunately the columns can be copied and pasted, so a sample was pretty straightforward to set up, here's a link to the Airtable with the HSDS table: https://airtable.com/tbl05nkwjqKO5igGY
Those other tables you see on the "Lane County Social Services" Airtable, some of those are necessary for our site to create our table-of-contents-style homepage, for example the CatSubcat table.
My understanding of HSDS has been that it's flexible, for example on the "Human Services Data Specification" table at the end of the row I added two columns that aren't on the template: "wheelchair access" and "language help." Those are a couple columns that our site would use to determine whether or not to place a wheelchair and/or globe icon on a provider's page. That's only one example of how our base for the Little Help Book website might be different from the HSDS Airtable template, and I'm wondering how flexible HSDS is and what's possible.
So, why do we care?
Interoperability. One of the requests from White Bird, and our goal: a universal data source, so that providers in a multi-system network can update their information in one place and it's updated everywhere. This would be amazing! And it's not about having a single database. It's about writing and publishing the data in a format, a "machine language," that allows organizations within a data commons to directly share their public information about available social services.
An introduction to Open Referral and the Human Services Data Specification
The Human Services Data Specification is a data format that allows multiple organizations that maintain resources directories to write and publish their data to a common network. And this is a piece of the puzzle that emerged through the Code for America network (via cfa.slack.com). Greg Bloom at Open Referral, developed HSDS through a project that early on received support from Code for America: https://openreferral.org/about/history/
Reading his chapter of a Code for America publication, you'll realize the work we're doing for White Bird Clinic is a shared challenge for social service providers, and people have been working on this for a long time: Towards a Community Data Commons.
The openreferral.org site is a great resource for learning about other sites like Little Help Book. Here are two short video introductions, the first is also found on the Open Referral homepage, an explainer video, and the second is one of Greg Bloom introducing the challenge and proposed solution:
Building a Safety Net for the 21st Century
And Greg Bloom has a YouTube channel with meetings where contributors discuss issues, it's another way to familiarize yourself with this way of writing and publishing data to a shared network—if you're more an audio person, you can turn these on and listen in the background or intently.
Human Services Data Specification and the Little Help Book
In learning about HSDS, you'll see its basic schema: organizations, services, location. Organizations provide services that are delivered in a location, an organization can provide more than one service, and the location can be a physical location or virtual (online or phone). And that's similar to how we've structured our site, we've called organizations "providers" and all the services in our schema have "categories" and "subcategories," here's the work in progress site: https://little-help-book.netlify.app/table-of-contents-style-homepage/index.html
I made a copy of our "Little Help Book" Airtable and created a new table called "Human Services Data Specification" to test how we might transfer our data to begin writing and publishing data with HSDS. Fortunately the columns can be copied and pasted, so a sample was pretty straightforward to set up, here's a link to the Airtable with the HSDS table: https://airtable.com/tbl05nkwjqKO5igGY
Those other tables you see on the "Lane County Social Services" Airtable, some of those are necessary for our site to create our table-of-contents-style homepage, for example the CatSubcat table.
My understanding of HSDS has been that it's flexible, for example on the "Human Services Data Specification" table at the end of the row I added two columns that aren't on the template: "wheelchair access" and "language help." Those are a couple columns that our site would use to determine whether or not to place a wheelchair and/or globe icon on a provider's page. That's only one example of how our base for the Little Help Book website might be different from the HSDS Airtable template, and I'm wondering how flexible HSDS is and what's possible.
So, why do we care?
Interoperability. One of the requests from White Bird, and our goal: a universal data source, so that providers in a multi-system network can update their information in one place and it's updated everywhere. This would be amazing! And it's not about having a single database. It's about writing and publishing the data in a format, a "machine language," that allows organizations within a data commons to directly share their public information about available social services.
We need people on our team who deeply understand this data format, so we can help social services to adapt it: http://docs.openreferral.org/en/latest/
What you learn in studying these docs has value beyond our project, the Alliance of Information and Referral Systems has endorse HSDS as a primary method for establishing interoperability among resource databases and associated technologies.