About OpenHMIS‎ > ‎

Company

A Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) collects data about homeless clients to shed light on the extent, characteristics, and causes of homelessness.  Homeless service providers such as emergency shelters, transitional housing, and supportive housing programs, collect information about their clients so that it can be collected with information from other providers to get a more accurate picture of who these homeless clients are and the services they need. 

OpenHMIS is a Collaborative Effort between Developers, Providers, Funders and other Stakeholders to provide a Simple, Open-Source, HUD Compliant software that will allow users to share information openly.  The idea is to provide a Community of Practice that will allow anyone interested in ending homelessness, a means to learn, innovate, contribute and communicate the best practices, ideas, innovations and solutions.

Using a Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) shouldn't be a chore. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) put together a straight forward set of Data Standards for collecting and storing information about persons who access homeless services and the programs that assist the homeless. These Standards specify what data elements should be collected in order to provide HUD required reports.

Our goal is to build and maintain a Core HMIS that will adhere to these HUD standards, provide an easier means to collect and share the data and provide the reports required by HUD. In order to accomplish this goal we need:
  • a deep level of user engagement: if you don't have users then there is no point having a project.
  • transparency: being open in what the community is undertaking and the way decisions are made.
  • collaboration: a means of working within a diverse group of people, 
  • agility: once work begins and there is a serious engagement with users, ideas and plans may need to change.
  • sustainability: having the capacity to keep developing an application solution over the necessary period of time.
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code site: https://code.google.com/p/open-community-information-sharing-system
example server site: https://openciss.appspot.com