Creating Public Value by Democratizing the Ecosystem of Human Service Providers

Human service providers play a critical role in improving well–being in the United States. However, little is know about (i) how service seekers find the services they are looking for by navigating among available service providers, and (ii) how such organizations collaborate to meet human needs. In this paper, we report the first outcomes of our ongoing project. Specifically, we first describe a data acquisition engine, designed around the particular challenges of capturing, maintaining, and updating data pertaining to human service organizations from semistructured Web sources. We then proceed to illustrate the potential of the resulting comprehensive repository of human service providers through a case study showcasing a mobile app prototype designed to provide a one–stop shop for human service seekers.

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