This is the landing page for working with Open Referral Human Services Data Specification (HSDS), and its API at a hackathon in San Francisco, this Wednesday, August 9th, from 2:45 pm – 8:30 pm at Optimizely, 631 Howard St #100, San Francisco, CA 94105 (Phone: (800) 252-9480).
THis repository has been created by Open Referral to help encourage hacking on our human services data specification and API.
First, what is Open Referral: Open Referral develops data standards and open platforms that make it easy to share and find information about community resources.
Next, what is Human Services Data Specification: The Human Services Data Specification (HSDS) is a schema for defining information about community resources, and the Human Services Data API (HSDA) is an API definition for deploying an API that provides access to information about community resources.
Where is the OpenAPI for the project: Right Here!
Suggested Project Website: https://link-sf.com/ Github: https://github.com/zendesk/linksf
Open Referral needs help designing, developing, deploying and operating HSDA compliant API implementations, in a variety of languages, and on various cloud platforms.
Here are some current Human Services Data API implementations:
- Ohana Implementation - An existing Ruby implementation of HSDA compliant API and admin.
- HSDA PHP Demo - A working prototype that drives the HSDA specification.
- Miami Open 211 - A developer area for the Miami Open211 API.
We encourage you to deploy and API using any language or platform you choose, some example platforms to consider:
Other platform in mind? There are many ways to deploy an API, we encourage you in helping pioneer an approach that cities, counties, and other human services providers can put to work helping people in their community in an affordable and sustainable way.
In addition to deploying Human Services Data APIs, we encourage the development and evolution of open source web, mobile, spreadsheet, voice, embeddable, and other conversational interfaces that can deliver human services.
Here are a couple examples of human service applications that put Human Services Data APIs to work:
If you need another example of a useful human services application in action, you can check out the Link-SF application developed by the Tenderloin Technology Lab and Zendesk, Inc., which you can find on Github. The project is currently being overhauled to be HSDS compliant, but if you wanted to beat them to it, that would be great.
Beyond developing an API, or an application on top of an Human Services Data API (HSDA) you can just work to help make HSDS compliant data sets from existing open data sources. Sometimes useful human services data is locked up in PDFs, spreadsheets, and other formats. While it would be much more usable if it was available in a machine readable, standard Human Services Data Specification (HSDS).
Here are a couple of existing datasets that could use some HSDS liberation:
- Mental Health Treament Facilities 2016
- Drug Alcohol Abuse Treament Facilities 2016
- DataSF Health & Human Services Open Data
Know of another data set that could be made available in the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS) format, or as an Human Services Data API (HSDA)? Feel free to convert and publish to Github as CSV, JSON, or YAML. There are many ways to contribute to developing APIs, applications, and data that helps make human services more accessible and interoperable.
Github Issues - You can leave a comment via Github issues for this repository. Google Group - Participate in the discussion already occuring on the Google Group Slack Team - Email info@openreferral.org to request an invite.