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HIFIS Community

Welcome to the HIFIS Community! Here you can meet other HIFIS-users from across Canada and share your knowledge.

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Fri, Nov 22 · 10am EST
HIFIS Community Call
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Fri, Dec 6 · 10am EST
HIFIS Community Call
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Fri, Dec 20 · 10am EST
HIFIS Community Call

Community Call Summary

Quiet group today, I think we were all feeling a little subdued about this week's news from down south. Still, we had some good discussion:

  • PIT Count - people are using HIFIS Lite but it's really challenging because it's a shared database. So data analysts can't directly access their data via SQL queries, and there are some limitations with the data export feature.

  • Multiple meetings - there was some discussion about how there might be too many community meetings out there - community of practi…

Takeaways from #CAEH24

So long, Ottawa! Here are my highlights for the year:

  1. @Geoffrey Messier, as always, had a really accessible presentation about why you shouldn't spend lots of money on a fancy AI model, when humans are awesome, and it's not that hard to do the same thing in an Excel spreadsheet. You can actually watch a recording of his presentation, and he recorded a tutorial about building a spreadsheet that would predict who will become chronically homeless, too.

  2. Blue Door, a homeless-serving organization i…


KL

Thank you for writing this! Helps the HIFIS Nerds like myself deal with the FOMO- haha!

I'm a wizard!

About to present about data wizardry in Room 315, come join me! #CAEH24

New Look-up Table Values

I noticed when looking through Look-up Tables in my recent version of HIFIS (I'm on 60.4) that there's a whole bunch of new Look-up Table Values that previously did not exist in HIFIS, and when they were added (perhaps in 60?), they did not automatically get subscribed to any service providers. They might be interesting to check out.

There's new values in the following tables:

  • Activities (Services) (for example, Hoarding Assistance, Rent Subsidy)

  • At Risk Status (for example, Hidden Homelessnes…

Community Call Summary

Big group today! It was great to welcome some new members like @Alysia Woelbern. Today we talked about:

  • Housing Placements, in particular what to do when clients need to be re-housed as a continuation of the same service. Technically you're supposed to start a new Housing Placement, but then there's some confusion about whether that would count as multiple move-ins or not (since HIFIS would count it as a new, distinct service).

  • Data wrangling, in which you can arrange your data to be more usef…

Community Call Summary

Today, we talked about the following:

  • Update frequency. Do people prefer multiple small updates throughout the year that are minor in scope, or a smaller number of big updates that have lots of stuff in them? The general consensus was that it didn’t matter, so long as the latest version didn’t have any new bugs in it.

  • Hamilton has just re-launched after 6 months of downtime. Woo woo! 🎉

  • Some discussion about reporting after updating to 4.0.60

  • Some discussion about upcoming PIT counts