Adur and Worthing Councils are moving into the beta phase with their work on the development of an Open Community for data standards and community based services.
The councils, which share a management team, have begun to search for support in a project to run until the end of March next year, saying they want to further develop the Open Referral UK standard for data on human services and support local exemplar projects.
The project is one of those supported by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s Local Digital Fund, and is aimed at providing better co-ordination and quality assurance on data standards in the sector, along with supporting automated data harvesting and publishing through APIs.
It has already gone through discovery and alpha phases.
The contract notice says the discovery phase found that national bodies such as the NHS and Department for Work and Pension, along with local authorities and community organisations, require accurate and trusted data on community services. This has created the need for an Open Community ecosystem to support the connection of services through a well managed Open Referral data standard.
It adds that the standard is needed to support referrals and signposting to services such as mental health support, employment support, housing and financial advice and digital inclusion.
Adur and Worthing’s partners in the project are Buckinghamshire and Devon County Councils.
Image by justgrimes, CC BY-SA 2.0 through flickr
