Open Referral / HSDS
Not an app — an open data standard for 'who provides what help, where' — so a community's resource directory can be maintained once and read by every tool, church, and hotline that needs it.
Every neighborhood maintains the same list a dozen times: where the food pantry is, when the clinic's open, who has beds tonight. Open Referral, founded by Greg Bloom in 2013, attacks the duplication with a standard instead of a product: the Human Services Data Specification (HSDS) defines how to describe services, providers, and locations so any directory can be published once and consumed everywhere — by a website, a 211 line, a case worker's tool, or an AI assistant.
It's infrastructure with real adoption: piloted in Miami's county systems, adopted across UK local government as Open Referral UK, endorsed by the 211 sector's standards body. The spec and schemas are openly published on GitHub.
Neighborhood remix: publish the block's mutual-aid inventory — who has a truck, a spare room, jumper cables, a Narcan kit — as a tiny HSDS-shaped dataset (with consent), so the church down the street and the next tool anyone builds can both read it without asking anyone to retype it.
Details
- maker: Open Referral Initiative
- license: CC BY-SA 4.0 (specification)
- repo url: https://github.com/openreferral
- remix idea: The block's who-has-what inventory as a tiny, consented HSDS dataset.
- practice kind: tool
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Build prompt
Build: A Front-Porch Digest for One Block
A starter build: fork Front Porch Forum's constitution, not its code — real names, one geography, one email a day, a rotating…
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Build prompt
Build: A Living Asset Map
A starter build bridging both new shelves: an asset-based community development map where the assets are neighbors' own declared gifts,…
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Build prompt
Build: A Third-Places Map for Your Neighborhood
A starter build: a local Ushahidi — neighbors collectively map the porches, stoops, cafés, courts, and corners where the neighborhood…
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Build prompt
Build: Adopt-a-Thing for Your Block
A starter build: the Adopt-a-Hydrant pattern, remixed — a map of small civic objects (tree wells, storm drains, benches, little libraries)…
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Build prompt
Build: Participatory Budgeting for a Very Small Budget
A starter build: run real participatory budgeting on a block association's actual money — propose, develop, vote, do — sized so the whole…
Contributed by Open Referral Initiative (Greg Bloom, founder) · openreferral.org
Original source: https://openreferral.org/
See something to fix or add? Suggest an edit on GitHub — the commons lives in git too, and its history is the changelog.
local-civic-techcivic-tech-tooldata-standardmutual-aidopen-source