2000115-Strengthening-Communities-with-Neighborhood-Data

Progress in Data and Technology 129
software developers. Code sharing is the essence of open source software
development, which has proved to be an excellent catalyst for the creation
of affordable software tools.
Encouraging code sharing and collaboration through local incubators
(as Boston and other cities have recently done) is an effective path
toward developing a strong community of local software technicians.
Improve Identity Management
Social service providers, like health care and financial service providers, are
burdened by a critical need for stringent protection of private information.
But social service providers typically do not command the technological
resources available to hospitals and banks, and therefore may be less able
to create and maintain secure web systems. Many social service agencies
gather detailed data about their constituents’ problems—legal, financial,
medical, and other issues. The potential for creating integrated systems to
improve human service delivery has been articulated by thoughtful practitioners
[see, for example, Allegheny County’s “Building an Interoperable
Human Services System” (Smith 2008)]. But truly integrated data
systems with multiple distinct partners are difficult to lock down. As
impressive as Allegheny County’s achievement has been, that success
would have been far more complex if it had linked multiple private providers
rather than divisions of local government. The more independent
nodes a network contains, the more difficult data protection becomes.
This integration problem is really an authentication problem. Authentication
is the verification that data requesters are truly who they say they
are, and that they have permissions to access the requested data. A secure
system must fulfill 100 percent of valid requests by authorized users, and
must deny 100 percent of requests by unauthorized users. So identity management
services, which accept each user’s identity claims and respond with
a decision on the access request, are the linchpin of secure systems. Some
promising standards for identity management have emerged in recent years.
Public key infrastructure offers a powerful identity management
model, but it is currently more feasible in the context of corporate and
government employee authorization management than widespread
public use. oAuth is an ingenious solution used by web developers when
providing personalized services to their end users, but it is not yet widely
accepted for protecting truly confidential personal data. Investing in the
further development of these models might improve our ability to serve
diverse community audiences.