Month: November 2013

OpenGovChicago Meeting: Process and Products Around the Chicago Municipal Code

Smart Chicago

Julia Ellis of the Office of the Chicago City Clerk Addressing OpenGovChicago Meetup at the Chicago Cultural Center

Last week, Smart Chicago hosted the OpenGov Chicago-land meetup at the Chicago Cultural Center with a great lineup of authoritative speakers:

Susana Mendoza, City Clerk of the City of Chicago, Julia Ellis, Legislative Counsel at Chicago City Clerk, Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org, Waldo Jaquith, an Open Government Technologist who is leading an effort to test the Open Data Institute model for open data standards in the United States, and Seamus Kraft, Executive Director of the OpenGov Foundation talk about the code by which we rule our city.

We’ve compiled all the videos of the presentation below the fold:
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Announcing the winners of the Rockford OpenTech Challenge

Christopher Whitaker

The Smart Chicago Collaborative, the Illinois Science and Technology Coalition, the State of Illinois and the City of Rockford are pleased to announce the winners of the Illinois OpenTech Challenge.

Untitled

The Illinois OpenTech Challenge for Rockford consisted of three challenges.

Patrick Zuroske, Capital Program Manager for the City of Rockford explains the first challenge

Patrick Zuroske, Capital Program Manager for the City of Rockford explains the first challenge

Challenge One: Create an app that will alert Rockford residents of road and lane closures. 

Rockford is undergoing several improvements to local infrastructure. As a result of these projects, roads and lanes have to close in order to complete construction inconveniencing residents trying to drive through Rockford. The City of Rockford is interested in an app that would alert residents to road closures. Currently, the city gets hundreds of phone calls asking about this issue.

WINNER: Barrel Dodger! An app that sends alerts to residents when the city indicates a lane or road has been closed.

Jen Hall talking about the "Moving the Needle" Campaign

Jen Hall talking about the “Moving the Needle” Campaign

Challenge Two: Create an app that allows users to view, post and promote community service projects in Rockford. This challenge was issued by Rockford EDEEN as part of their moving the needle campaign.

WINNER: rockford.What-When-Where.org! An app that lets community members post events and where residents can share what community event people are going to.

Rockford Director of IT Glenn Trommels demoing Rockford's data portal

Rockford Director of IT Glenn Trommels demoing Rockford’s data portal

Challenge Three: Build an app that solves a civic problem or educates the public using government data. This challenge was a ‘wild card’ challenge that gave civic innovators wide latitude in coming up with creative ways to use data to help solve civic problems in Rockford.

WINNER: RaiseUp Rockford! An app that lets make service requests to the City of Rockford.

 

More details to come!

Illinois Public Health Datapalooza and a $10k Challenge

Christopher Whitaker
Raed Mansour Talking About a Day in the Life at the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Illinois Health Datapalooza at 1871 Chicago

Raed Mansour Talking About a Day in the Life at the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Illinois Health Datapalooza at 1871 Chicago

For the second day of the “Making Public Health Data Work in Illinois” event, Smart Chicago helped to MC a Datapalooza event that brought together technologists and health care practitioners to put into practice the ideas discussed on day one.

The morning sessions were about sharing skills between technologists and health care practitioners. These included sessions from Socrata, ESRI, and a session on Healthdata.gov from Damon Davis. We also had sessions that focused on the daily challenges of providing health care including a “Day in the Life” session from Raed Mansour.

The afternoon sessions were geared towards brainstorming ideas for building health apps. You can see the different ideas (and notes for the whole day) on our on-going google doc.

Unconference session on leapfrogging electronic medical records

Unconference session on leapfrogging electronic medical records

The Making Public Health Data Work Challenges

All this brainstorming around civic health apps leads up the the Making Public Health Data Work Challenges.

For the first challenge, The Illinois Department of Public Health, Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are awarding $10,000 to the team that builds the app the provides the best use of health data in solving a problem faced by health care community in Illinois. There is an additional $5,000 being awarded for the runner-up. You can enter this challenge by filling out this entry form.

For the second challenge, Esri is offering a prize for the best app based on the Esri platform. The winner will get to choose from one of two prizes: a seat at the 2014 Esri Developer Summit, or a seat in an Esri instructor led online class. These prizes are both valued at approximately $1,000. Developers will be able to leverage Esri developer tools, e.g., the JavaScript API for cross-platform deployment, or the device-specific mobile SDKs for iOS and Android. You can enter this challenge by filling out this form.

Here are some guidelines for the challenge:

  • The deadline for the challenge is November 30th.
  • Entries must use health data either from a city, state, or federal source such as healthdata.gov.
  • Web apps don’t necessarily have to be complete.
  • Apps that have a better chance of becoming a real product used by healthcare practitioners or residents will be judged more highly.

If you have any questions about the challenge, feel free to ask us by emailing Christopher Whitaker.

Making Public Health Data Work in Illinois Day 1 Roundup

Christopher Whitaker
Stephen Konya speaking at 1871 during the "Making Public Health Data Work" event

IDPH Chief of Staff Stephen Konya speaking at 1871 during the “Making Public Health Data Work” event

This past weekend, health care policy makers, practitioners, and technologists gathered together at 1871 to talk about how we could make public health data work here in Illinois.

The event was hosted by a number of partners including the Health Data Consortium, Illinois Department of Public Health, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

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Call to Action: Help OSM map areas hit by Typhoon Haiyan

Christopher Whitaker
Typhoon Haiyan

Typhoon Haiyan, photo by Karen Nyberg/NASA

While we’ve featured OpenStreetMap before, what you may not know is the important role they play during disasters.

During a disaster, the Humanitarian OpenSteetMap Team (HOT) activates to help coordinate mapping of disaster areas. These activities include mapping out roads, buildings, locations of refugee camps, and other resources. In addition, they also maintain a wiki with information about the disaster. To get an idea of what this looks like, here’s what the OSM community did after the earthquake in Haiti.

OpenStreetMap – Project Haiti from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

Currently, OpenStreetMap is looking for people to help in this effort. If you have an OpenStreetMap account, you can log into the OSM Tasking Manager and select tasks. Most of the current tasks involve tracing buildings and roads to help relief workers on the ground navigate.

If you don’t have an OpenStreetMap account, you can sign up for an account for free here. OpenStreetMap is easy to use and there are several tutorials available, including this one by Chicago’s very own Ian Dees.

If you have time available, please consider spending some time assisting OSM in the effort. For questions directly relating to the HOT Team at OSM, you can email them at [email protected].