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Texas Bar State Registry #86

Closed mscarey closed 7 years ago

mscarey commented 7 years ago

What problem are we trying to solve?

Putting the Texas State Bar's legal aid referral listings online in a more accessible and current form than the current PDF.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

People who need legal help, but aren't able to get access to a print copy of the referral directory and have trouble finding what they need in the PDF.

Links to any research/data available/articles

The existing directory (PDF). The Open Referral data standard.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

The State Bar hasn't approved the release of the data yet. Most progress is blocked because of that.

What help is needed at this time?

Design, planning, database, web development. Also we're interested in setting up a chatbot for searching through the referral listings.

mateoclarke commented 7 years ago

Hey @mscarey, @hlupico, have we heard back on how the internal meeting went yet?

hlupico commented 7 years ago

@mateoclarke - Katherine is still working with the IT department to get them on board with making the data public. Last week they agreed that they could routinely release a .csv file with the data needed to feed a digital referral directory until the IT department has the time to dedicate to making the data public. Katherine has another meeting set up this week to continue this conversation.

I would be open to starting a project that could consume the .csv files but I'd like to chat face-to-face about that. My general thought being that we could start with a white label solution, where the data comes from is an implementation detail.

Would love to hear thoughts from you or anyone who wants to chime in.

mateoclarke commented 7 years ago

@hlupico, thanks for the update!

I like that idea. Making it something that could apply to other State Bars service/referral directories would be great. And I could see a solution serving completely different needs.

There was a past Open Austin project that was basically a registry of non profit service providers in the Digital Inclusion space: https://github.com/DigitalInclusion/digitalatx

And there is another open project idea from the City's Public Information Office. They are looking to redo the Community Registry. #78

If we designed a "white-label solution" that could accommodate those three use cases, we'd have a pretty robust platform that could be applied to any kind of community/non-profit registry.

werdnanoslen commented 7 years ago

@hlupico any updates from your work on this last hack night?

hlupico commented 7 years ago

@werdnanoslen posting an update here as a test for the update reminder

werdnanoslen commented 7 years ago

Hi y'all, how's this project going? Anything I can help with?

mscarey commented 7 years ago

I think the State Bar decided not to release the dataset for the directory, which caused us to abandon the project before it really got started.

On Sep 23, 2017 2:07 PM, "Andrew Nelson" notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi y'all, how's this project going? Anything I can help with?

— You are receiving this because you were assigned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/86#issuecomment-331663517, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACGX3IFIbiTp2HtJHnV98_V8g-2it5nmks5slVbvgaJpZM4LhSVy .

werdnanoslen commented 7 years ago

Oh dang. Can we pivot this project to maybe a liberation or data-gathering project, or is it totally lost?

mscarey commented 7 years ago

I think without an organization's buy-in, it makes a lot less sense to gather and release the dataset. There's no obvious way to make our data more timely than what the bar association has, and most likely it would be less timely and less authoritative. Maybe we could just refer anyone interested in this project to #78 "Building a True Community Registry for Austin."

On Thu, Sep 28, 2017 at 9:46 AM, Andrew Nelson notifications@github.com wrote:

Oh dang. Can we pivot this project to maybe a liberation or data-gathering project, or is it totally lost?

— You are receiving this because you were assigned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/86#issuecomment-332859796, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ACGX3G6r7ZY2uSG_a7lfw1GH24zYLPzSks5sm7FMgaJpZM4LhSVy .

werdnanoslen commented 7 years ago

Sounds good, I'll close this one then. #78 currently doesn't have anyone driving it afaik, so it's marked as abandoned. Do you want to take the lead on that?