‘Community resource directory data' comprises information about the accessibility of health, human, and social services that are available to people in need. Such services are provided by a fractured landscape of governments, nonprofit organizations, contractors, and other civic institutions. Institutions that fund services don’t tend to collect information about the accessibility of those services – and service providers often lack strong incentives to promote this information themselves. Instead, directory data tends to be aggregated by ‘infomediaries,’ for use in their proprietary channels, or for sale to third parties as a commodity. The result is a knowledge anti-commons, in which resource data is simultaneously overproduced and underutilized – a tragedy that causes systemic dysfunction across the so-called safety net. This paper outlines a set of strategic interventions pursued through the Open Referral Initiative – a community of practice that has developed data exchange standards, open source tools, and pilot projects through which multiple stakeholders experiment with new methods of sharing resource information as open data. The paper’s final section outlines a set of institutional designs that can hypothetically sustain the provision of trustworthy open resource data as a public good.

Social policy is both the academic study of the causes of social problems and social need, and the practicalities of policies and administrative arrangements undertaken by governments and other key players such as non-government organisations (NGOs) with the intention of improving citizen wellbeing, especially the wellbeing of members of a society who are experiencing disadvantage. It is much broader than the government provision of social security and personal support to protect people from life-course risks that may appear in childhood, sickness or old age. This chapter introduces ideological debates upon which contested concepts of welfare are based, key conceptual principles underpinning welfare state provision, the difference between equality and equity, and the role of that difference in relieving or exacerbating disadvantage, how government provision of resources and benefits is underpinned by political ideology and how such provision may be implemented, adjusted or indeed stopped as governments change, and the role of human services workers in implementing social policy and appreciating how this role has the potential to be either emancipatory or disempowering for the end users of services.

Social policy resists a neat, narrow definition, but broadly speaking it provides the framework for the welfare state – that is, the set of institutional arrangements established to achieve citizen wellbeing. The institutions most relevant to this discussion are generally categorised as the human services, and this draws a narrower focus than public policy, which is taken to refer to all elements of government intervention. The boundaries are blurred, however, because many aspects of public policy (such as taxation and – increasingly – climate change policies) involve distribution and redistribution of resources and generally aim for outcomes broadly compatible with those of social policy. This chapter introduces the concepts and debates circling social policy in Australia in the twenty-first century.

Human services NGOs have long played a key role in Australian social welfare, although the ways in which they have been funded or subsidised by governments have changed over time, as has the extent to which they have had autonomy and control over their own decision-making. At the start of the twenty-first century, human services delivered by NGOs were a driver of the fastest growing sector of the Australian labour force. This chapter focuses on the size, scope and importance of the human services sector in Australia, the policy and funding decisions that impact conditions for workers in human services NGOs, the ways in which a focus on NGOs operating in similar ways to for-profit organisations may change the modus operandi of NGOs and the relationships between workers in and clients of the sector, and debates about the roles and responsibilities of volunteers within the broader context of the human services.