gethelpky
A substance abuse treament facility locator for Kentucky
Why?
Seekers of substance abuse treatment in Kentucky have a difficult time finding services in their time of need. The existing locators are incomplete, inaccurate, or include language geared towards treatment professionals rather than treatment seekers.
University of Kentucky researchers have created a database of ~70 treatment facilities with a good deal of information about their services. They have partnered with the City of Lexington and Open Lexington, a volunteer civic technology group, to create a website to make it easier to locate relevant treatment.
User Research and Usability Testing
The primary goal of the project is to make a website that meets the needs of treatment seekers and their supporters. In order to do so, stakeholders engage in user research to understand what those needs are. We then create rapid prototypes, put them in front of treatment seekers, and see what meets their needs and what does not.
User research documents:
Key challenges in longevity of a social services directory
In taking on this project, Open Lexington has reached out to many other civic groups tackling similar resource directory problems. The consensus is that it's hard to maintain good data over the long term because of the sustained effort required. Many business and non-profit models are being explored but there's no clear winner yet.
In order to encourge more frequent data updates, we are using a simple Google Sheet as a backend to our June 2015 prototype (h/t @allaface). A client-side javascript application hosted on GitHub can pull from the Google Sheet eliminating hosting cost and complexity.
But the js application does sacrifice some search engine optimization so we may end up tackling this problem at some point.
Development
Setup
TBD
How to run
TBD
Data Update
TBD
Deployment
TBD
Support
TBD
Users
TBD
Contributing
Pull requests welcome! Please see our contribution guide.