While working on the alpha phase of the project to develop the standard, there was an opportunity to work with Buckinghamshire’s childrens services as an early adopter of the standard.
As with all good projects, the focus was on meeting user needs. In this case that was about how we use good quality information, advice and guidance to quickly get people in touch with the services they need.
The realpolitik of making change happen in government often means looking at where all parties can get enough of what they need. The service team needed to move off a legacy technology stack, I wanted to test the emerging data standard and we all wanted to deliver a better experience for users.
We will post a full case study to the Open Community website soon, but the tl;dr version is that Buckinghamshire Family Information Service directory is built with 21st century technology, uses the Open Referral UK data standard and is helping residents find the services they need.