Thanks, Val, and thanks for the encouragement to host this. This is somewhat last minute, but it's a great opportunity for me to practice what I'll be delivering next week at the Ostrom workshop at Indiana University. So this is the first time I've shown off some of these materials, but many people in this community have heard me give talks about this topic in various times. So I'm gonna try to go fast through an introduction to this topic, but we will make sure to include in the notes a link to the video of my previous, webinar a couple years ago, where I think we took some more time to explore the implications. So I shared a link to the I I do have slides. I'm normally sort of hostile to PowerPoint, but this is very visual. Am I able to okay. Co hosting. Here we go. Okay. So slides. There we go. Okay. Let me see if I can go into presenter mode. Y'all see that? Yes. Okay. Great. So open referral, actually, we are technically an unincorporated community practice. We are fiscally sponsored by Aspiration. I founded this initiative. I really think of it almost as a campaign, and I'm I'm still the facilitator of it. I also have now taken a position at the industry association for this field that eventually, approved what we've done as standards, and I'm now the director of strategy and partnerships at Inform USA, which is the industry association for information and referral providers, and I'll talk a little bit about that just shortly. So we develop standards and open source tools and strategies to share, find, and use information about the resources available to people in need, which you might call human service directory information. There's different terms of art for it. We did not develop a single software solution. We developed standards and cooperation protocols to try to help shape what is currently a a sort of failing market into what could be, an effective ecosystem, where this information about the resources available to people in need is, like, infrastructure, available to many different tools that many different people use for many different purposes. So, again, really quickly, the scope of what we're talking about here is information about organizations that provide services to to people in need, presumably lower no cost services, organizations that are presumably government or nonprofit organizations, not necessarily. Sometimes they're contracted by government or so on. And the the the domain of data is not information about people or information about the act of providing a referral. It's information about what you know, it's public information, what organizations exist, how do you access them. This is actually a deceptively difficult problem, and I'll give you a very quick summary of why it's so difficult. You'll have to trust me during this time, but we have documentation of all this. So on the right, you see our basic representation of of social service providers. The root of the problem is that, for the most part, social service providers, people who organizations that provide services to people who don't pay them for those services or who don't pay much for those services, they don't have strong incentives to be found by more people. They're usually not paid by their funders on a per person basis or in the rare case that they are paid by their funders on a per person basis or maybe paid by Medicaid in The US for social services. They're usually not paid enough to cover the costs of the service. So that means that organizations are not trying to get more people in their door. They're open. They have too much demand and too little capacity. And so they're it's not like a functioning marketplace like Yelp, which has problems, right, or Google Places. But, like, they're not nobody is hired at any of these organizations to spend time going to anybody's directory, to update your information about, you know, our intake hours and our eligibility rules and all that stuff. Right? And I know that because I worked at one of these organizations, and I did that. You know, when people ask me for this information, I would spend hours collecting information about our dozens of services across multiple facilities. And, eventually, my own boss is like, you don't have to do that. Nobody does that. So if you want good information about the resources available to people in need, you probably have to make phone calls. You have to do that over and over again. You have to know what questions to ask. Probably need to be trained and managed. And what ends up happening sort of naturally is what you could call an anti commons where many different organizations do some effort to try to gather as much information as they can to deliver through their own channel to their community, their constituency. And so you have more and more sources of less and less reliable or sustainable information because all these different organizations are sort of, by default, competing with each other. Sometimes even as a business model, they are competing with each other, to collect information about the resources available to people in need. And this is sort of a simplified version of what that looks like. Many different silos trying to chase the same information, and you have more and more supply, and the demand is not met. Open referral did not solve this problem, but we developed the necessary precondition to solving this solving this problem, which is a standard. We didn't call it a standard until the industry association approved it as a standard. We called it a specification to enable interoperability so that this data could be exchanged among different systems more or less frictionlessly. Right? So there's a common format for, publishing data so that any different number any number of different information systems could consume it without requiring complex custom jobs, forever. And, the standard is now it's now sort of like an industry protocol. The vendors in the space that serve these organizations in the center, the referral providers, they're all expected to use the standard, and most of them are using it to one degree or another, although compliance and so on is obviously an issue. But open referral developed these standards not because they solved the problem again, but because they expand the range of possible answers to the question of who should be responsible for maintaining all this information, which is sick is a significant cost, and it's really a public good. Right? Everybody ought to have benefit ought to benefit from it. Nobody's really inclined to pay for it, so how can it be sustainably maintained? This is our under specified high level vision of what, you know, this current state would look like if it was better. Right? We have infrastructure. Infrastructure where information about the providers of services for people in need is managed by some means, and it's made available to many different channels. So it's not necessarily one website or even one database that everybody uses to do everything so much as shared means of aggregating information and publishing it, to many different databases, many different websites, etcetera. So this is the vision of the healthy information ecosystem. And, what what I I'll come back to this. But when I presented last time, we were articulating different patterns, archetypal patterns of who would steward this infrastructure and how it could be sustainable. So I'll touch on that a little bit, but but we'll come back to that, but you can review the the previous webinar for more detail on it because I'm gonna go quick quickly through it. So before I jump back into the weeds, what we've done now is take these diagrams, which are, at this point, very old. Right? I've been doing this work for ten years, and we developed this vocabulary sort of iteratively through time. And what I've wanted to do sort of from the beginning is get to the point where we can have a workbook where people could, you know, sort of cut and paste and annotate and draw their own version in community in collaboration with other stakeholders. Right? The re the referral providers, the social service providers, even the help seekers in community, we wanna get to the point where this infrastructure that you see in the central column can be specified in ways that reflect a community's priorities and landscapes, which can can really only happen by, you know, stakeholders in that community being like, here's how this ought to work for us. And it is difficult for people to wrap their heads around these complex concepts, and so visualizing them, I think, is one way to try to level the playing field among people who really are peers but have very different levels of technical sophistication and understanding. And so trying to get to a point where we can have simple visuals that people can use to convey complex infrastructural concepts has been my interest, and and we now have this prototype to sort of share, and and play with. Let me see. Any questions about everything I just shared with you before I start walking you through, you know, what what we are now working with? Okay. Cool. Like I said, crash course. Everybody can see the documentation or the last, webinar for more, but we'll we'll I'm gonna jump through pretty quickly because what I'd like to do is see if we can can get to the point where we can actually play around with the approach that we're developing and get your feedback. So, really quickly and and I'll just say, I got my inspiration from this comes from a specific, precedent, which is the Open Technology Institute's, workbook for building community wireless networks called Every Network Tells a Story. It's from, I think, 2012. And so these were community wireless mesh networking who developed a a workbook that conveyed the key concepts of, like, different kinds of wireless routers, what their properties are, and then, like, led a community through the process of being like, let's build your own network on your own map of your community and was able to convey really complex technical concepts visually in ways that then helped communities figure out, like, how do we want like, where should this router go? Should it go on the church? Should it go on the school? How would we bounce it into into the neighborhoods, etcetera, etcetera. So with that in mind, I will quick I won't read every every one of these, but we have offered this simple dial iconography. I think most of this comes from the Noun project, which I find really valuable for iconography. So help seekers, service providers, referral providers who provide information about services to people seeking help. And so on the left, you have a human. On the right, you have various, tools that humans might use to connect people to information and service records like data itself. And we've toyed with various ways of conveying the concept of data. This is a theme that you can then build on with database. I actually have a better version of API. We are we are working on it. I have a version of API that's basically a robot, and you have a the the the robot's you know, the chest has this data sort of icon. But we haven't used the API icon in our material so far, and you'll see you'll see why. And it's an open question of whether we wanna do it. Data steward. This is really the key concept that everything is building to. But, ultimately, the question that I'm trying to help communities ask is who should be responsible as a human or a set of humans for assuring the quality of of this data. And because that often gets lost in these communities to the detriment of communities in ways that leave them even more dependent on their technology vendors who sort of, like, wave the magic technology one and the question of who are the human responsibilities for assuring quality information usually gets left behind. And so this whole all of this work is building to this question of who will be this set of responsibilities and how will their responsibilities be sustained. We have other concepts like funder and data utility, which I'll briefly talk about, but this is this is the core of the the introduction to the workbook. I will very quickly show you all how this has come together in sort of formal generic designs to answer the big question of if this information ought to be publicly available, but it takes human labor to maintain, and then how can it be sustained? Right? How can maintenance of this information be sustained? This is the big question we wanna answer. What we have offered to dig to the field to date is these three patterns that are not either or. These are great tastes that taste great together. I've conveyed them here. I will briefly introduce each one of them because and I'm able to do it briefly because somebody gave us the great recommendation to make sure that in addition to a narrative text and a visual, we should have a haiku to describe these complex concepts. So, number one is the service registry. The haiku is self updated list required by authority monitored for trust. Number two is the data utility. One steward maintains open access database pay for premiums. And number three is the data collaborative, a federation, shared responsibility, mutual benefit. So that's a very quick summary of these three models that are not mutually exclusive. The right answer is probably some combination of them, which will bring us back to the purpose at hand, but I will very quickly walk you through, like, the examples of how we have used these this iconography to date to convey these complex concepts of a service register in which service providers on the right would be required by their funder on the bottom to update information in an open access database that every referral system could use to provide information to people in need. Right? And so we've outlined that pattern in which some sort of authority institution simply says, if you're gonna get money or accreditation from us, you have to be listed in this register. And the key point is for a register to be official, it has to be assured. You need a custodian who is responsible for ensuring compliance. Right? The requirement is not sufficient. There is a human who is going to check and monitor the accuracy of that information. And so we've sort of conveyed this as one answer to the question of who would be responsible and how would that responsibility be maintained. And again, moving very quickly here, another pattern example, is a utility where there's one organization that's like the information in for media intermediary. They collect all the information, assure its quality, publish it as open data, and some of those consumers, those institutional consumers of that data pay for premium services that add value to data that everybody else has access to for free. Right? And the question of what should those premium services be, how should they be rated and monitored? That's a governance question. We will get there. So very quickly moving on, the data collaborative, and this is my ultimate interest. Like, we we won't really have solved the problem until we are able to build this kind of infrastructure. I've only seen it happen a couple of times. We're trying to make it easier to for these infrastructures to emerge where there's many different organizations that are responsible for maintaining information as part of a cooperative network, and the different stewards might divide up responsibilities and share data outputs. And so this is a a many to many model that really includes, presumably, both of the other two. Right? A federation presumably will be more sustainable if you have developed effective registers and a utility with, you know, stewardship responsibilities and so on and so forth. So, again, not either or models. What we wanted to do, though, having put the models out there, it's helpful. It gives us a language. I have a reference point to walk communities through these different concepts that's visual. But what we really wanna do is use those as sort of archetypal examples that help communities then figure out how should this infrastructure work in our community. And that's not a that's not a process of selecting one of those three models. Again, those those are archetypal patterns. It's really the question of, like, how do we have the right combination of these different responsibilities and data flows that's going to reflect our community? This is a photo from a workshop where I tested some of this vocabulary, this visual vocabulary, and this methodology. This was in rural Washington state with organization. This is, like, five or six different organizations that all maintain redundant directories in this one rural community, and we'd spent months with them being like, do you all wanna cooperate with each other rather than continuing to roll your own? And they're like, okay. Yes. And so then we got together and started drawing. What would it look like? And, you know, anecdotally, I can share that, like, this was an effective workshop, but it was partially effective because I was there to make it work. If people had just been handed these iconographies, you know, I'm not sure that they would have had a constructive, conversation on their own. And I think that's personally my my goal is to develop a workbook so that people wouldn't need me in the room to be able to have the pattern recognition. The workbook could actually be, you know, somebody who's capable of holding space and facilitating conversation could pick it up without having, all of all of the experience that that I that I that I've had the privilege to bring to the process. So we've tested it. We're hoping to continue improving this workbook. And this is where we get to the, you know, the the prototype process. What we have the circular motif on the right, which is we did we did land on this independently, but only after the fact, I found that the Open Data Institute, for example, has a, you know, draw your data ecosystem, a model that has the same circular motif that I think allows you to convey complex systems where you might have, like, essentially a supply chain where you have different information systems operating in relation to each other. Right? But we're trying to help people step out of the mental model that hasn't really worked, but is it endures. The mental model of, like, a piece of technology will solve this problem. So we need one centralized system that everybody uses to do everything. And what we're trying to help organizations understand is actually, like, infrastructure might be many different systems that work together to achieve a common purpose, which is an important distinction, and we wanna give people the tools to be able to draw that. Right? So we have all the, human icons and some of the information system icons, and some examples of, like, maybe institutional models that people could pick and choose, to work through their process of articulating, like, how should our ecosystem look. And, so wait. I'm gonna pause here. There's I wanna walk through, the next thing that we're developing for this visual vocabulary. And then if we have time, maybe I can show you a board where we can play around with it, and I'd love to see what you all do if we had twenty minutes. I don't know if we'll have it, to try experimenting with drawing your own, you know, infrastructure. But let me see if I'll pause here and see what questions have come up. Any any questions or observations?

I think that's a great question. And I think it's, I think the practice is probably iterative. Like, in that workshop, we started by drawing what is. First, we just map the ecosystem. You know, who is using what tools to aggregate which information for for which users. And we map the ecosystem as part of our sort of landscape analysis, part of getting everybody on the same page about what currently exists. And, you know, predictably, everybody's like, wow. There are a lot of different organizations collecting the same information and spending a lot, you know, a lot of our collective resources redundantly and even in competition with each other. And it just, like so mapping that ecosystem does is a a helpful first step. Val, I think to your question, I I think as a facilitator, mapping what currently exists, mapping what our ideal future epic scenario, blue sky thinking about, like, I you know, like, what what would exist if we were totally successful in the long Right? That can sometimes be helpful and distinct from what is the next thing that we are going to do to move us in the direction of that complex vision. Right? So there so so I think, yes, mapping what currently exists and then mapping what you want to see exist is probably the right answer. And you can even get more granular by mapping, like, what is our five year vision or ten year vision, and then, like, what's the thing we are going to do together in the next six months or a year. Right? Other questions? Okay. So I'll walk you all through what I what we are now prototyping in terms of just the visual vocabulary. And then if we have some time, we can take a look at the the board. And let me get the URL for the board that I can share in the chat. Let me see. Okay. And So

Okay. But now we're getting to the governance part, which is, I assume, what we're all here for. So what I shared with you all there was, like, the question of how do we design infrastructure that takes data that's currently sort of managed uncooperatively and align different interests so that there's some means that are shared of publishing data that many different organizations use through different channels. Right? But then if if if any community was successful at designing any of those, patterns in a way that would work, you would immediately start getting questions about, like, who decides, you know, how those feedback loops, how those flows, you know, either, you know, are incentivized or, you know, who decides what's effective or what's not, and how do we resolve conflicts. And so in our first round, we didn't try to design that governance model, and now we are trying to develop another layer, whether it's, like, literally just an overlay or a parallel sort of arena that has bearing on on those institutional designs. We're trying to develop a, visual vocabulary for, like, designated representative, a charter, what in Ostrom terms you might call constitutional rules, an advisory group. Right? This is still very early on as you can see from the lore of Ipsums. But the the idea being, we wanna get to the point where we would have a layer of this of of of these diagrams that can show where your decision making process happens, who participates in it, how the rules for these different flows, can be made and changed. And so with that, we can jump to the Miro board that I just shared in the chat. And this is literally, I'm tinkering with it, like, week to week with with a designer. But what you see here is just, like, generic version of a governance model that has, like, a charter, a committee. The committee has representatives that represent different stakeholder groups and an advisory group that provides advisory input that maybe represents, you know, other, you know, you know, organizations or or VVIPs or experts or what have you. And what you see here is my very crude initial attempt to show how the decisions of this committee there are rules about how the committee is formed. Right? Those are contained by the charter, and then the committee creates policy changes that set operational rules that extend over here to this diagram of infrastructure and responsibilities. So this is very basic. I would welcome your input. It looks like spaghetti. I can't say that right now. It's, like, actually you know, most people, when they see this so far, like, the materials, everybody's like, wow. Complex. Right? The the the effect is really conveying the complexity of the challenge, but we have not yet developed these materials to the point where, it's actually helping somebody really mentally navigate through that complexity, and so that's gonna have to come through refinement. But you can see how we're trying to bring it all together, so that communities can not only say, like, here's how our data should flow, but also participate in designing, the decision making over that process, you know, in a in a standing way. There are blank versions here. And so I'll I'll just say if anybody wants to you know, I I ran a a session or facilitated a session with Val at at a event last year where, like, let's draw our governance models. And in fifteen minutes, maybe you could take some of these icons or create some of your own and actually try to use this, this, circular motif to design your own governance model, and I'd be very interested to see what everybody might come up with. If you would like to take one of these and just start tinkering with it, let me know. And if there's more than two or three people, I will quickly create, new new, panes so that everybody can have one to to play around with. But this should be an open board. You should be able to move stuff around. So let's see. If anybody can indicate in the chat, I'd love to get you know, if you're gonna get in there and and choose one, just let me know in the chat. And, otherwise, I would welcome your questions or observations and feedback about what we've got so far. Yeah. Bumble fudge.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I'll give you a few examples, and there's layers, right, which you should expect in any complex system. Some examples like, we have standards for data exchange. Right? But those are standards for machines. Right? Those are instructions for how the machine should format and publish and consume data. The data, you know, is content. And outside of mechanical context, you could describe, a service with a paragraph or a simple sentence or even a simple word or a set of bullets. Right? Like, there's various styles with which you could, you know, develop a description, and different audiences might have different needs. And the question of how information would be shared across different organizations that have different audiences with different needs presents some questions about, like, okay. What are the things that we are all agreeing to in terms of our style beyond just the data standards for exchange, and how might we cope with some divergence from that agreement, you know, at the edges? And another example of that like, in this in this domain, a great example of that is the taxonomy problem. Right? The question of categories. And this is a huge challenge in this space because effectively categorizing services means something different to different kinds of users. Right? A person who is just seeking help needs to use very simple language that is very you know, they they expect, like, you know, fifth grade reading level kinda language. Whereas a policymaker or a researcher or a funder wants to get very specific or a service coordinator wants to get very specific and pretty technical about the language they use to categorize services. So, for example, rehab is a good, solid, understandable category for somebody seeking help for behavioral health. But is is is this rehab behavioral health inpatient counseling, or is this behavioral health outpatient group work? You know, like, there's various technical ways that the same that could be, you know, further granular, and the question of how do we manage a shared taxonomy among different organizations that have different audiences, how much of this are we agreeing to as a collective, and how would we manage divergent from that agreement is a great example of a content level governance question. But then there's other questions that you can anticipate here such as, like, if information is going to be managed by a steward who's gonna be responsible for making phone calls and assuring the or assuring the quality of that information, how much does that steward get paid? Can can that steward sell services on top of, you know, the basic access? You know, who decides what is a fair price for those services? Right? There's all kinds of then incentive rules that might need to be made and maybe even conflicts that need to be resolved. And if you just imagine the sort of, like, idealized and simplified version and then go and build a database and deploy an API, but you don't have a method in place to make decisions about how all this stuff will work, you're probably gonna set yourself up for failure. And I can give more more examples, but, of course, I could talk about this stuff forever. So feel free to engage in the in the chat. Let's see. So, Daniel. Yeah.

Yeah. Sort of relatedly, I'm I'm curious. In terms of the maintaining of the database and standardizing and harmonizing, how much of that do you envision as being kind of novel creative work that requires someone who's trained, well compensated, and given a lot of leeway versus the kind of, like, a regenerative labor kinda repetitive that you can just kinda divvy up and say it's your turn to clean up the database. We're doing this as part of, like, a collective. You know, is this the kind of work that can be that

kind of maintenance labor, or does it require a level of agency and creativity that requires more of, like, a skilled trade person?

Yeah. I mean, I think that's a good question, and I think there's there's there's gonna be a diversity of perspectives in a community about that. Right? Like, the the organizations that are responsible for aggregating this information as official referral providers. Right? It's their business to connect people to information about other services. That's the service they provide. And they're gonna say this needs to be trained. This needs to be, you know, someone who, who is accredited to provide all this information, and I see their point. And I also know, you know, at least some organizations that aren't trained, aren't accredited, and do a pretty good job of managing this information. You know? Usually, somebody does need to get paid and and and has has the capacity to do this over time, not as a volunteer. But, you know, I've seen at least some examples where communities do patch together some volunteer labor to make a pretty good effort at maintaining this information. And and so I think it it sort of and some are experimenting with large language models to provide, you know, quality feedback, but it's certainly true that, like, the the all the AI tools is just like like, it it's for the most part, like, these are not fit for purpose. Right? Like because the AI tools don't tell you what is true. They can't tell you what is true. All they can do is is, like, give you patterns, that have, you know, some only sort of, like, secondary or tertiary relationships in each truth. So so you do ultimately need humans to determine what is true, but I think my sense is that the balance of that is, like, setting the style guide, managing the categories, the taxonomy. That's work that requires a certain amount of expertise evaluating the quality of data with or without mechanical assistance from an LLM. That requires some measure of expertise, and there's a certain amount of of labor that could be done by a distributed set of volunteers, by people, you know, who are getting their first job, you know, doing data entry as part of a workforce development program. I think there is a lot of opportunity there. But, of course, the the more diffuse your responsibilities are, the more distributed your responsibilities are, I actually think the more important it is to be able to say, here's how we make decisions and monitor out outputs and sort of and and assure quality across this distributed network. One of the running themes that I think I would call out for this specific audience is, at this point, I've been around the block enough to to be like, we're not gonna solve these governance problems with technology. Technology might be a part of some sort of solution, but we need to we we we actually might need to step all the way back and be like, so much of the work is figuring out how we do the human work and organizational design work of governing ourselves in a world with technology rather than assuming that technology can solve these problems for us because I just haven't seen it happen. Any other questions? Questions. Yeah. No. Go ahead. Sorry about that. No.

Yeah. How yeah. So this picture here, y'all can see that. I switched. So you see the picture from so okay. We have, yeah, we have a funder in the room. They convened it. They paid me. We have four or five different organizations that are very local and maintain, like, Word documents, or they have, like, a WordPress site, and they maintain a text list. Right? But people in their community have said, we trust this source of information more than any other. Right? Because somebody is maintaining it, and we know that person, and that person knows us. Right? And funding and funding from some of the funders to maintain a hotline. And the locals have historically been like, well, we can't find what we need or there's information that's out of date, so we don't trust 211. But and I think there are ways in which that that organization could improve, not picking on it specifically. Right? Every organization, you know, there's a gap between what it could do and what it actually does. But, usually, there's just, like, no context in which they can talk to each other. Right? And if you have eight complaints from a set of community members about, you know, the regional cert data service, right, the regional information referral hotline, at least half of them are either reflections of just the nature of the challenge. Right? This information is really difficult. Right? There's no design solution for some of this. It's like the way we allocate resources to meet people's needs in this country kinda sucks, and it's kinda anti human. And there's not not really, like, anything that somebody can do to improve that if you're just relaying you know, you're just the messenger of of bad information, ultimately. And then some of it is, you know, probably, you know, people don't know how to search the website, and maybe the website could be improved, but they don't have a channel to discuss. So so much of this work is creating space at a specific point in time for us to all get in the room and also, like, institutional space that persists over time where more effective dialogue among different layers of this ecosystem from the sort of intermediaries to the service providers to the service users. So much of this work is about creating that space and letting the specifications for the information infrastructures and information systems follow from those conversations rather than being like, what is the solution? Let's build it. Now let's talk about how to govern it. Right? So

Yeah. Go ahead, Ben.

talking about the schema. The schema.org, maybe? The the so so schema.org is a cons yeah.

Yeah. So so I'm not sure which which w three c link you're referencing, but I I I I I have I might have an idea. And, yeah, this is a good example. So, like, schema.org is a consortium of search engines that's, like, sort of unofficially led by Google, but it includes, like, Microsoft and and some of the other big platforms, Meta and and, yeah, schema.org developed this schema that then the w three c approved, and this is for microformats for publishing this data on a website. Right? So it's, like, basically, little, like, codes that say, this is an address. This is an organization. This is the service the organization provides so that web engines can index the data more effectively. Right? By rather than just doing, like, search for the words on a website, you can actually be like, I am looking for this kind of service, and the website won't like, the web engine won't need to, like, match the text to the text, but can actually know this is a kind of service in this context and presumably deliver better results. This is not either or. Right? We, that was actually the impetus for me to be able that was the reason I end the to be able to start a standards initiative was I was like, oh, Google is developing this specification. Y'all don't wanna be left behind by Google. Right? And, also, you know, the people in this field knew that, like, you can develop a form a a format for publishing data on the web, and it doesn't solve the supply chain problem. And Google, as soon as it got a whiff of, like, among us, as soon as they realized that, like, organizations are not going to start marking their websites up and publishing great data at scale just, like, because they can, they were just like, okay. Well, you know, we tried. But because the standard was up there, we're able to say, you know, I was bluffing. I was like, nobody's using like, it you know, privately, I'm like, nobody's using this. Google doesn't have a plan. But publicly, I'm like, this is coming. Do you want to get onboard and set the terms for how it will work? Because we still have a lot of open questions about the supply of that information and how it becomes reliably published on the web. And that was enough to get people in the door. Eventually, we came back and did a translation between our data exchange format and the status specification. Again, we're, like, in very technical terms, but, like, we did the work of being like, if you publish this data in this format, can you translate it it to this web format? And then if you do that, does it improve Google results? And the answer is yes. Right? We did that with Legal Aid, and we demonstrated that, you know, when this data is published in a structured standardized way with with the schema.org w three c tags, you know, it will improve the quality of of search results across various metrics. It doesn't answer the question, though, of how will you produce the information. And for that, we wanted to create a context in which those the technical standards could happen with participation of community organizations who would normally not really want to or be able to really practically participate in web standards bodies. Right? And we wanted to be more agile and also aligned. Right? Like so we didn't view it as you know I had to be able to answer the question of, like, how do you avoid this x k c d cartoon's logic about the universal standards. I assume everybody here may might have seen the x k c d cartoon. If not, you can search x k c d x k c d universal standards, and it's basically this logic that usually technical men bring out to tell me why what we're trying to do is not possible. Because it's like, oh, you know, there's too many standards, so you're gonna create another standard to solve that problem. And That is what we did, but what we did was we created another standard in a context in which we could talk to the people who developed those other standards and facilitate the cooperative value propositions rather than being like, we're gonna beat you all. And that's how we succeeded. It's often difficult for technical people to really imagine a context in which people get together to talk as being a positive context that's constructive. But ultimately, I think that lack of imagination is partially why the gap between promise and reality across, you know, generations of technology development, is so stark.

That's right. Yep. Well, Val, I would love someday to come back and actually play with these, arrangements. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to talk through this stuff. I really would welcome y'all's feedback. I'm gonna have to jump, like, almost immediately. But I'll give you a great example of a question that we have, which is, like, most people's instinct is to put this the user at the center of this target and then design around that. And I don't wanna tell them that they're wrong, but, like, also, it makes more sense to me to put, like, the technology infrastructure at the center even though that's breaking with, like, human centered design. Right? And, like and maybe there isn't a right answer to that. We just need to develop protocols for, like, different ways that you can design your governance model and your institutional arrangement. That's the kind of feedback that we would love to get from a community like this. Really substantive feedback about how we go from this vocabulary to a methodology that supports people basically finding their own path through this complexity. And I really appreciate your time. Would be happy to keep talking if y'all wanna reach out.

Bye, everybody. Thank you. Good day.