Month: May 2013

Using the new ClearPath API to help communities interact with the Chicago Police Department

Christopher Whitaker

On Saturday, civic web developers, designers, and data gurus came together with the Chicago Police Department at Google’s Chicago headquarters to test out and find creative ways to use the new ClearPath API.

ClearPath is the Chicago Police Department’s community information portal. First launched in 2007, ClearPath gives residents information not only about crime in their area, but also information about which police beat they’re on and when their CAPS meeting is.

CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Program) is Chicago’s community policing program. At the center of this program are the CAPS meetings that occur in each police beat. At the CAPS meetings, the police department can hear about community concerns in the neighborhood and interact with local residents.

With the new API, the Chicago Police Department wants to make it easier for residents to interact with the ClearPath website and to report community concerns. CAPS Executive Director Lucy Moy and CPD Information Services Direction Jonathan Lewin explain:

Results of the Safer Communities Hackathon

Photo Courtesy of Brian Fitzpatrick

The hackathon produced a number of creative ways to use the API to make it easier to interact with CAPS and the ClearPath system.

CAPSure by OpenCity Apps

Derek Eder and the OpenCityteam helped to test the API and got an early start on building an app using the API.

The app they launched is called CAPsure. CAPSure helps residents get information about their local CAPS meeting. You enter in your address and the app will tell you which police beat you are in, when your next CAPS meeting is, and where the meeting is located. The app can also add the meeting to your Outlook, Google, or iCal calendars.

The app uses the ClearPath API’s calendar and event data to find events. The app also uses the City of Chicago’s data sets to help find users police district and beat number.

CAPStagram – Hackathon Winner

CAPstagram

Image courtesy of Patrick Brown

The winner of the Hackathon was a team of Patrick Brown, Karl Statz, Donchaa Carroll, and Cathy Deng.

For this concept, the app attaches a picture to community concerns submitted by residents. Currently, the ClearPath API doesn’t allow you to include pictures when making a community concern report. This mobile app allows users to send their local CAPS district a picture of a concern such as an abandoned building or graffiti to help aid in the investigation.

CAPS by Text – Runner Up

The runner-up for the hackathon was the team of Alex Soble, Josh Kalov and Demond Drummer.

Their app prototype allows users to send a community concern to their local CAPS district by text so that residents without the internet could still take advantage of the new system.

CAPs Alerts – Third Place

In third place was an app prototype built by Kevin McMahon. This mobile app not only uses the ClearPath API to help report community concerns, but it will also alert users when crime is reported near them.

Other prototypes:

Other ideas for using the ClearPath API included:

MapThatTrap: An app that residents can use to report abandoned buildings to both 311 and to the ClearPath API

Green Light Program: A concept that would change the colors of Chicago’s Blue Light Cameras from blue to green as crime rates went down in the neighborhood.

Next Steps:

Safer Communities Hackathon at Google Chicago

For groups wanting to continue to work on their apps or for people not at the hackathon wanting to get involved, there are some great resources out there to make that happen.

The first is the Chicago OpenGov Hacknight that happens every Tuesday at 6:00pm at 1871. The OpenGov Hack Nights are a great place to learn about what is happening with civic innovation in Chicago and work on civic app projects.

If you’re looking for a place to host your civic app, the Smart Chicago Collaborative provides free hosting to civic applications. Smart Chicago will also provide user testing for your app for free as well.

If civic developers have questions about the API, they can contact the developers directly by emailing [email protected]

Making our communities safer is an ongoing challenge that will not be solved in a single weekend or by a single web application. To utilize the new API to the fullest extent will require partnerships between the CAPS office, civic technologists, and community groups. If you’re a CAPS group or neighborhood organization that would like to form partnerships with civic technologists, feel free to email cwhitaker @ cct.org for more information.

A big thank you goes out to the Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick for hosting the hackathon, as well as the Chicago Mayor’s Office and Department of Innovation and Technology for putting on the event. A special thanks also goes out to the Chicago Police Department for spending their Saturday with us and their continued service to the City of Chicago. 

OpenGov Hack Night: Karen Weigert and the CleanWeb Challenge

Christopher Whitaker 

Energy usage by neighborhood area, picture courtesy of Tom Schenk Jr

Karen Weigert and the CleanWeb Challenge

This week’s OpenGov Hack Night featured a presentation by the City of Chicago Chief Sustainability Officer Karen Weigert and the winners of Chicago’s Earth Day Hackathon showed off their apps.

In September, the City of Chicago released the Sustainable Chicago 2015 Plan focusing on seven areas:

  1. Economic Development and Job Creation
  2. Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy
  3. Transportation Options
  4. Water and Wastewater
  5. Parks, Open Space, and Healthy Food
  6. Waste and Recycling
  7. Climate Change

All together, the city has twenty-four goals and a hundred actions points. “All of which could be enhanced from data, visualizations, apps and stats analysis,” states Karen Weigret.

As part of this effort, the City has been releasing data on sustainability issues – including an API and data set for energy usage by neighborhood. Chicago’s been on the forefront of environmental issues and was recently awarded $30,000 from the World Wildlife Fund to help support sustainability programs in Chicago.

The city also hosted an Earth Day hackathon bringing together 300 civic innovators to think of ways to use technology to create a more sustainable city.

And that is just the beginning: The city recently partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to launch the Chicago Cleanweb Challenge. The Chicago Cleanweb Challenge is a year-long competition designed to promote sustainability in Chicago through community engagement and entrepreneurship. The city has partnered up with several environmental non-profits to host events throughout the year and will be releasing more data sets as the competition progresses. The overall winner of this challenge will get a chance to meet the mayor.

You can follow the progress of both the CleanWeb challenge and Chicago’s progress on sustainability issues by following @SustainChicago on Twitter.

Earth Day Hackathon Winner: Bike Rack Finder

The winner of the Earth Day Hackathon was the Chicago Bike Rack Finder by Patrick French and Jon Freeman.

Chicago has a lot of bike racks. This tool is used to help bikers find bike racks near them or near their final destination if they’re planning a trip. The app is completely mobile and open source. Currently, the app is still in the prototype phase. The team would like to add more features, such as users being able to add new bike racks to the data.

Currently, the city only has data on its own bike racks – but no data on the privately installed bike racks. While the city has put bike rack data on GitHub and is accepting pull requests, the team behind bike rack finder hope that by making it easier to report new bike racks that data gets filled in faster.

Another problem the team would like to address is to report the presence of “sucker poles” – poles that make it easy for thieves to steal any bike locked to it. By warning users that these sucker poles are not a safe place to lock your bike too, the app can help prevent bike thefts.

Earth Day Hackathon Winner: Urbs in Horto

In a very close second is the Urbs in Horto app by Todd Jones. that helps people find new places for urban gardens in Chicago. (If Urbs in Horto sounds familiar, it’s because the name of the app is also the City of Chicago motto: City in a Garden).

The app lets the user see all the vacant lots in Chicago as possible candidates for urban gardening spaces.

Because the hackathon was only 12 hours, both the apps are still just prototypes. However, this is just a taste of what’s to come as the Cleanweb competition continues.

Next Big Thing: Safer Communities Hackathon

Tomorrow, the City of Chicago and Google will be sponsoring a Safer Communities Hackathon at Google’s Chicago headquarters. You can RSVP for the event here.

Join us for the National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago

Smart Chicago

On May 31st – June 3rd, Chicago will have three separate events in coordination with the National Day of Civic Hacking.

National Day of Civic Hacking is a nationwide effort being coordinated by Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America and the White House to help organize civic minded developers, designers, writers, and data scientists help create innovative solutions to civic problems.



This day— the first of its kind in the nation— has been a long time in coming. Back in January, I wrote about what it takes to turn civic hacking into civic innovation. Here’s a snip:

The civic hacking community in Chicago has produced a variety of civic web applications based on open data provided by local government here in Chicago. These apps do things like show economic indicators in fun ways, let you know if your car was towed, and how & where to get a flu shot.

There are lots of reasons why civic hacking works here in Chicago— a rich baseline of data and technology, an engaged developer community, real discussions with government about policy and data, and the support of institutions are all important factors.

But what we’re missing most is sustained engagement with the residents of the city of Chicago. That’s how we can turn mere hacking into real innovation. The magic combination of government, developers, and community members is what we’re after.

So that’s our focus here in Chicago. While cities across the nation participate in the essential baseline tasks of civic hacking, we’ll be tackling this broader work, seeking to expand the movement we’ve built.

It’s time for all Chicagoans to “meet the movement”– to work hand-in-hand with hackers in order to make our communities better. We hope you’ll join us. Here’s a list of events:

ChicagoMigrahack at Cibola (May 31st – June 2nd)

The purpose of Chicago Migrahack is to foster the use of technology and open data to innovate information around immigration. In Spanish, the word “migra” refers to immigration.

We want to bring together our communities to create innovative platforms around one of the most debated topics today: Immigration

This event will kick off Friday, May 31st with a day of training around civic hacking and data. There will be $7,000 in cash prizes given away for the best projects.

Civic Hack Day for Youth at Adler Planetarium

Image courtesy of Greg Briggs – Creative Commons License

The Adler Planetarium is holding a youth-focussed Civic Hack Day on June 1/2 where Chicago youth, mentors, and highly skilled STEM professionals will work together in teams towards solutions to Chicago Issues. Youth team members will bring problems with them that they, or members of their communities, face on a daily basis, as well as a vision for a technological solution. This unique, youth-focused event is being run in collaboration with the Hive Chicago, Mikva Challenge, the Chicago Architecture Foundation and Free Spirit Media Working. Young people, their mentors and STEM professionals will shape and build working prototypes of their solutions over an awe-inspiring 28-hour period.

Hack for Chicago at 1871 (June 1st)

We’ll be having several different events at 1871 during the weekend. You can register for these events here.

App Design Workshop with the Knight Lab

Miranda Mulligan from the Knight Lab will give a workshop on designing apps that meet the needs of users.

National Civic Hacking 101 Workshop with Code for America

Christopher Whitaker will give a short primer on civic hacking to help orient people who are new to hackathons and civic innovation. This class will be broadcast nationwide in cooperation with other cities.

OpenStreetMap Edit-a-thon with Ian Dees

OpenStreetMap is an open source map that anyone can edit. Users can add data to the map including information about their favorite restaurants, cultural venues, and more. We’ll be adding more data to the map all weekend long. You can register for the event at the Chicago OpenStreetMap Meetup Page here.

General Hack Session with OpenCity Apps

We’ll also be having a general hack session if you’re already working on a civic app.

We’ll be sending more information about the event as time gets closer. Look forward to seeing you at one of the events!

PRESS

Here’s some coverage of the event.

Chicagoan’s prep for massive civic hacakthon
WBEZ Datum blog

Chicago: City of Big Data and National Day of Civic Hacking
Code for America Blog

Join the CUTGroup and Take Part in Test of a Travel-to-School Website

Smart Chicago

We’re organizing a test of a web site that allows you to explore travel options to your Chicago Public School.

If you meet the following requirements, you qualify to be in the test, receive a $20 VISA gift card + bus fare, and help make better software for Chicago!

  • Responsible for taking one or more kid to a Chicago public school this Fall
  • Available on the evenings of Tuesday, May 28 or Thursday, May 30

If you’re already in the CUTGroup, you’ve already received an email to this effect. Otherwise, sign up now, get a mitt, get in the game, and get some money.

CUTGroup as of May 5, 2013

Foodborne Chicago on WBEZ Chicago

Smart Chicago

Yesterday morning I talked with Tony Sarabia of the WBEZ Morning Shift about Foodborne Chicago. Here’s the sound. Listen all the way to the end for a pretty wacky bumper tune.

Key points covered:

  • This site is not about making a cool app. It’s about making teeny tiny connections between the people who matter: residents of the City of Chicago and the municipal government that serves them
  • Chicago’s Open 311 system (funded and supported by Smart Chicago) provides the technological and conceptual basis for this site. Without the ability to write directly to the City’s 311 system, and thereby get into the Chicago Department of Public Health’s normal workflow for dealing with food safety, Foodborne Chicago wouldn’t exist
  • Twitter and other social media is fast becoming important in all sorts of human domains, including health. There are one million health tweets per day and users tweet symptoms 4 days before seeing a doctor. See more here in this presentation out of Johns Hopkins University: Social Media: New Data Source for Public Health

Foodborne Chicago - Report incidents of food poisoning in Chicago

This Week’s OpenGov Hack Night: App Design Workshop with Knight Lab’s Miranda Mulligan

Christopher Whitaker

.@jmm teaching app design at Chicago #OpenGov Hack Night

This week’s OpenGov Hack Night featured an app design workshop by the Knight Lab’s Miranda Mulligan. This design process doesn’t start with the latest data set, but instead starts with establishing empathy with the user.

Everyone partners up for the workshop and takes turns interviewing their partners about a particular problem they face. The workshop encourages participants to dig deeper by determining the user’s needs, insights on how they feel about the issue.

More hacking at the design workshop

Miranda then encourages users to think of radical ways that app designers can meet the users needs. After this, participants get feedback from their partners to help refine their ideas.

Then comes the fun part – arts and crafts time!

Arts and Crafts time at the OpenGov Hack Night

Using a variety of multi-colored paper, participants build mock-up designs of their apps. We then went around the room showing off our work.

Now that's what I call a wireframe

More demos of designs at #opengov hack night

If this sounds like a fun workshop (and it is!) then you’re in luck! Miranda will be giving this workshop again as part of National Day of Civic Hacking June 1st at 1871. The event is free and everyone is welcome. Registration for the event will open up later this week!

And as always, you can join us each and every Tuesday at 6:00 for OpenGov Hack Night at 1871.