youthinsight.net is the product web site for a family of SaaS applications which are used by state and county government to aggregate data for children over which the government has stewardship (e.g. foster youth, at-risk youth, etc).
the work
Youth Insight has three components: the public web site about the product, the private-access SaaS web application product, and the proprietary backend data aggregation engine which prepares data for access through the SaaS application. Ultimately, the purpose of the SaaS applications are to help social workers and educators provide suitable care and education. By having current and historical information available together, care providers spend far less time gathering information, and are able to make more timely and suitable decisions on behalf of the kids.
my role
I have worked for Terben for many years now serving as the primary technical developer for the products. This project has been in action since 2003, and we continue to improve it with smarter technology and more effective tools for users.
data aggregation
This is where the bulk of the magic is. Youth Insight collects data from a number of agencies, school districts, and other sources within a client county. We have to heuristically match many of these sources to each other, and perform numerous field transformations to normalize the data. Developing a system to make that process very efficient when adding new data sources, and having it adapt to change in data source details is a key element to the overall system design.
security and privacy
You can imagine the sensitivity and scrutiny that security and privacy issues would raise for an application like this. These are areas I have paid close attention to for about 10 years now. From writing in a defensive programming style for security to granular user permission controls for privacy, a lot of care and refinement have gone into these areas.
