Month: August 2012

Two New Consultant Positions: Project Manager and Community Engagement Manager

Smart Chicago

Update: Friday, August 24, 2012 at 5PM is our deadline for these slots.

Smart Chicago is looking to engage two consultants for Civic Innovation, a two-year project funded by the Knight Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust. The successful candidate will have a part-time contract with The Chicago Community Trust, a funder and sponsor of Smart Chicago, to perform this work over the course of the project. Here’s some background:

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a civic organization devoted to using technology to make lives better in Chicago. Created by its founding partners (the City of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust), Smart Chicago works as a center of gravity for municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.

Smart Chicago is looking to engage a consultant for a long-term, part-time project. The successful candidate will work under a contract with The Chicago Community Trust, a funder and sponsor of Smart Chicago’s Civic Innovation project, to perform this work over the course of two years.

And details on the positions:

Project Manager

The Project Manager will have primary day-to-day responsibility for managing this project. The successful candidate will have experience in one or more of our core areas of focus (government, technology, community) and will have experience in and passion for bridging gaps among communities. See full job description.

Community Engagement Manager

The Community Engagement Manager will work directly with nonprofits, churches, and community members to ensure that the information needs of Chicagoans understood and served by developers. The successful candidate will have experience in both technology and community development, and be able to help translate between technical and non-technical people. Useful software that serves communities is the ultimate goals of the Community Engagement Manager. The successful candidate will engage non-profit organizations on efforts to find community solutions that are based on public data and data collected by their own organizations. See full job description.

If you are interested, please send an email indicating your relevant background & skills and why you’re interested in filling one of these roles to Daniel X. O’Neil, [email protected].

Update: We have selected a consultant for the Project Manager position and we are actively planning how to approach community engagement in this project. Stay tuned to our project page for more.  –DXO, 11/13/2012

Agenda for OpenGovChicago Meeting, August 2, 2012

Smart Chicago

ANNOUNCEMENTS

  1. Tom Feltner: Woodstock is moving the last 15 years of data to its portal by the end of the year. Licensing restrictions limit what source data can be made public. What aggregate data would be useful and what would be derivative?
  2. Barbara Iverson: Submit stories about Open Gov work in Chicago to Chicago Talks to help connect regular people on the street, “citizens” with civic projects and Open Gov work. Tell your story, and we’ll help you spread the word.
  3. Tom Tresser: Working to establish Civic Lab – Apps for Activists, Activist Speed Dating Night & The TIF Report projects.
  4. George Aye: Announcing the launch of a new crowd-designed transit app for the CTA.
  5. Francesca Rodriquez: Update on the City’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program
  6. Sharon Burns: The Field Museum, through a generous multi-year grant from the Grainger Foundation is developing new apps, ebooks and other outreach projects to enhance the revenues stream of the Museum. Are open scientific data sets interesting? Ideas welcome!
  7. Tom Kompare: I’d like see if anyone is interested exploring crime and place relationships. An investigation in the 49th Ward shows what may be significant relationships of crime with L stops and package liquor license locations. I need help to explore further.
  8. Derek Eder: Open City would like to announce our latest civic app: Crime in Chicago
  9. John Tolva: Update on the City’s Open 311 project
  10. Simeon Schnapper: Pilots in CPS today centering around youtopia.com

We’ve got a full boat of announcements– hopefully people will get a chance to review some of this material, which will help us get to the evening’s demos. Also: don’t forget that tonight is Urban Geeks at Villains (thanks, Justin Massa!)– there’s plenty of chit-chat to be had there, if you can make it.

DEMOS

  • Jesse Bounds, one of the Code for America Chicago fellows, will bring us up to speed on what the team is working on now— aDaily Brief app and a national 311 labs website to facilitate collaboration around 311 apps— and what they have planned next— beta testing the city’s new open311 api, and releasing their 311 dashboard and service request tracker apps
  • Jay Van Patten, Director of Web Services for the Chicago Public Schools, will demo their new school locator website and chat about why and how it was built. They’re building it all in-house using Google Maps, Google Fusion Tables, and open-source code written by members Chicago’s open gov community.

EFFLUVIA

  • Bring ID and come early– the security is tight in this building
  • If you’ve been to a meetup at the Chicago Community Trust before, keep in mind that we have moved to another building in the same Illinois Center complex– 225 N. Michigan, 22nd Floor
  • Sammiches will be served. Come hungry