Year: 2013

Foodborne Chicago Covered in Food Poisoning Bulletin

Smart Chicago

Here’s some  more coverage today from the food safety industry: New Twitter App Tracks Foodborne Illness Outbreaks in Chicago. Snip:

Food Poisoning BulletinWe’ve told you before about apps that can help keep you safe from food poisoning, and how Twitter may be playing a role in foodborne illess outbreak investigations. Now a company in Chicago has created a new Twitter app called Foodborne Chicago. The project is part of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, an organization “devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology.”

The app asks people who think they contracted food poisoning at a restaurant to fill out a form, which is sent to the Chicago Department of Public Health. The app also uses computer codes to search Twitter for anything relating to food poisoning in the Chicago area. People review the tweets and reply back to people who posted about them, asking them to fill out the web form. The form asks which restaurant the person believes is linked to the illness, what the person ate, and when they got sick.

More than 1,000 Photos of Public Computer Centers and Community Technology Centers Were Taken in the Connect Chicago Summer of Data

Smart Chicago

The Connect Chicago Summer of Data is almost over. 14 canvassers travelled the city to visit more than 200 Public Computer Centers and Community Technology Centers. They interviewed center staff, updated detail pages, and took many, many photos.

We outfitted each 2-person team with an iPad that allowed them to take high-quality photos of building exteriors, computer stations, and community rooms. The idea was that as people prepared to visit a public computer center, the more they knew about the place they were about to visit, the more confident they would be about it.

Ends up that the teams took hundreds of great photos. See them all here.

Northeast Senior Center

Here’s all of them, in a slideshow:

Cory Nissen and Joe Olson in Food Safety News re: Foodborne Chicago

Smart Chicago

More than 70 complaints have been submitted since Foodborne Chicago’s April launch, but not all submissions were driven through Twitter interactions.

“Outside of Twitter, a lot of people are finding this form randomly as a way of logging an incident of food poisoning,” said Cory Nissen, one of the app’s developers.

Nissen and Joe Olson, another developer behind the project, emphasized that a receptive and open city health department is needed to get a project such as Foodborne Chicago off the ground.

Full story on @foodsafetynews: Social Media Apps Use Twitter to Track Illness Outbreaks

OpenGovChicago Recap: Creating a more diverse tech scene

Christopher Whitaker

Neal Sales Griffin and Gabe Lyon talk about the Technology Diversity Council

On Thursday, the Mayor’s Tech Diversity Council presented at the Chicago OpenGov Meetup. The Tech Diversity Council is a group of Chicagoans appointed by Mayor Emanuel to find ways to create opportunities for minorities in Chicago’s growing technology industry. It’s headed by the Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva.

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Mikva Challenge Youth using data to talk about health disparities in Chicago’s neighborhoods

Christopher Whitaker

This summer, Mikva Challenge and Smart Chicago Collaborative worked with a group of 140 kids and trained them to use the latest digital tools to organize themselves, amplify their voice, and take positive civic action. On the Mikva side, the work was divided into four different youth councils.

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