Open211

A directory of social services and programs that anyone can contribute to. The problem that we want to solve is a scenario where someone needs to visit a ton of social programs to get their ducks in a row but has a hard time navigating the social program offerings in their city. Examples include families looking for food stamps, healthcare or childcare, parolees looking for re-entry programs to help them get back on their feet or homeless populations looking for food, shelter and other amenities. Traditionally 211 is a hotline funded by the federal government. This means that the allocation of hotline resources is done through government bureaucracy at the state or regional level, and is inconsistently implemented throughout the country. There is a huge opportunity to introduce a more valuable community driven open platform. Similar to open data initiatives led by transit agencies such as the MBTA in Boston or TriMet in Portland, OR we hope to aggregate information and seed an ecosystem of third party developers. We believe that by giving incentives to social programs to provide us with accurate data about the who, what, when, where and why of their service that we can make the social program ecosystem dramatically more efficient. By spending a few minutes giving us accurate information they will automatically receive free findability through a variety of applications that we develop (or that will be developed by 3rd party developers in the future through our open data APIs). In the long run we hope this will reduce the amount of time that social programs have to spend marketing themselves and answering phone calls. To accomplish these goals we think the best approach is to find individuals already doing this work in various communities across the country and empower them with the tools that we have developed. The majority of any funding received will go directly to the roll-out of volunteer coordinators and trainers who will integrate our work into as many communities as possible. Currently there are many separate one-off projects that lack APIs, text message integration, data submission forms/automated community contributions and other important features. We want to find these existing efforts and help them set up Open211 so that we can all share the tools to solve these common problems. This project began shortly before Code for Oakland (http://codeforoakland.org), a one day team building/brainstorming session that took place in early June.