Year: 2013

Chicago Developers: US Department of Labor Launches Smartphone App Contest Around Fair Labor

Smart Chicago

My colleague Matt Bruce pointed me to this new app contest: US Department of Labor launches smartphone app contest. Here’s a snip:

The DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge, which can be accessed at http://fairlabor.challenge.gov, calls for creating a smartphone app that integrates the department’s publicly available enforcement data with consumer ratings websites, geo-positioning Web tools, and other relevant data sets, such as those available from state health boards.  The winning app is expected to be creative, innovative, easy to use, and will incorporate data from http://ogesdw.dol.gov/index.

“The app we would like to see developed would work with existing social media and would allow consumers to see if an establishment that they want to frequent has been in compliance with federal labor laws,” said Laura Fortman, principal deputy administrator of the Wage and Hour Division. “The app could also prove a useful tool for job seekers and for companies that are deciding which firms they may want to do business with.  It could also help individuals get in touch with the Labor Department if they have any questions.  As we mark 75 years of the job protections afforded by the FLSA, we are looking forward to using new technologies to encourage compliance with the law in the 21st century.”

DOL Fair Labor Data Challenge

Matt runs the just-launched Chicagoland Workforce Funder Alliance (CWFA) that is housed here at the Chicago Community Trust, just like Smart Chicago. One of the issues he’s working on is the deterioration of labor standards in low-wage work.

roc-national-diners-guideA national group called Restaurant Opportunities Centers United (ROCUnited) has the ROC National Diners Guide, which is an app that shows national data around labor practices around national food chains. It would be great if we could see all local restaurants, allow patrons and employees to report issues, and include local labor data in an app that takes this concept further. There is great leadership here at Restaurant Opportunities Center of Chicago (ROC-Chicago) as well.

I’d be happy to look into the types of data available at state, county, and city sources that could be used in such a system  I think this would be a great use of civic technology energy and I hope to find some co-collaborators on this, If you have any ideas or are working on similar issues, hit me up at [email protected].

Christopher Whitaker is a White House Champion of Change for Civic Hacking

Smart Chicago

Christopher Whitaker, a researcher, writer, and organizer for the Smart Chicago Collaborative, is being named a Champion of Change for Civic Hacking this morning at the White House.

Christopher Whitaker at the US Ignite Application Summit
The White House Champions of Change program was created as part of President Obama’s Winning the Future Initiative. Through this program, the White House highlights individuals, businesses, and organizations whose extraordinary stories and accomplishments positively impact our communities.

Here’s the note on Christopher from a White House press release:

Christopher Whitaker, Project Management Consultant at the Smart Chicago Collaborative
Chicago, IL

Christopher Whitaker is a project management consultant at the Smart Chicago Collaborative, utilizing his experience in government and community organizing to advance civic innovation in Chicago. Whitaker also serves as the Chicago Brigade Captain for Code for America, supporting civic hacking events and teaching a weekly Civic Hacking 101 class. He is a graduate of DePaul University (MPA) and Sam Houston State University (BA, Political Science). Previously, Whitaker served with the US Army in Iraq as a mechanized infantryman.

The entire program, which focuses on both Open Government and Civic Hacking, is being streamed live this morning starting at 9AM Central time.

Today marks the third time that a Smart Chicago person has been named a Champion of Change. Prior to today, the most recent was Advisory Committee member John Tolva, recognized for local innovation.

We’re super-proud of Christopher and really grateful for the work he’s done here in Chicago, both on his own and as a member of the Smart Chicago team. His signal accomplishment in this domain revolves around his work around the National Day of Civic Hacking. He lead our efforts to help pull of three huge events. Chicago was the most active city with 412 people taking part in events at Cibola, 1871, and the Adler Planetarium.

Forest Gregg and Derek Eder of DataMade, two of the leading lights in civic hacking anywhere, have also been invited to participate in today’s event at the White House. Their Councilmatic Chicago is without a doubt the best piece piece of finished work that was launched on the NDoCH. Arfon Smith, Director of Citizen Science for the Adler Planetarium, was also invited as a citizen hacking star. Chicago is lucky to have them represent us in the nation’s capitol.

Head on over to Twitter and congratulate Christopher for this great recognition!

#CivicSummer is in Full Swing: Recap of our Friday Session Held at 1871

Smart Chicago

PageLines- civic-summer-logo.pngCivic Innovation Summer— the experimental summer jobs program for teens focused on civics, media, and technology— has been rolling all through July.  This program, funded by Smart Chicago based on a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is largely run by the Mikva Challenge, which develops the next generation of civic leaders, activists, and policy-makers and Free Spirit Media, which provides education, access, and opportunity in media production.

But on Fridays, we pull together all of the youth into one room and teach them about technology and the concept of open. We had our first such session last Friday at 1871. Smart Chicago is a founding member of the digital startup center located in the Merchandise Mart, and days like Friday are exactly we why decided to be one of its first tenants.

Here’s the complete set of photos from our day, and a quick look at some illustrative ones:

The raw space inside one of the largest commercial buildings in the world provides a great palette for teaching youth.

Before the flood: #CivicSummer at 1871

Jacqui Cheng put this entire program together, including arranging for a tour of the space and lining up all of the speakers:

Jacqui Cheng Speaking at #CivicSummer at 1871

It was quite an experience to run 150 youth through a space where hundreds of people are running businesses. We appreciate everyone’s patience!

Tour of 1871 at #CivicSummer

That’s a lotta people.

Youth at #CivicSummer @ 1871

Mari Huertas of Mozilla talked about her path to a career in technology

Mari Huertas Talks About Her Career in Technology at #CivicSummer at 1871

Rayid Ghani showed a video about self-driving cars. Teaching computers how to do things is hard.

Rayid Ghani Talks About How to Teach Computers at #CivicSummer at 1871

Jason Kunesh talked about the importance of designing technology to meet the needs of humans.

Jason Kunesh Talks About Designing for Humans Youth at #CivicSummer @ 1871

Is there anything more important than lunch?

Marlene Ho Works the Lunch SituationYouth at #CivicSummer @ 1871

Gene Leynes spoke of his business, Yolobe

Gene Leynes Speaks About Yolobe at #CivicSummer at 1871

We went ahead and got limbered up over lunch

Lunch Activity! Youth at #CivicSummer @ 1871

Jeff McCarter of Free Spirit Media got everyone fired up about what we’re doing.

Jeff McCarter Fires Everyone Up About #CivicSummer

Dirk McCoy talked about Spendbot and his path to starting the company.

Jimmy Odom of WeDeliver talked about starting a business.

Jimmy Odom from WeDeliver Talks About His Business #CivicSummer at 1871

I talked about the importance of real Twitter accounts and having an authentic voice all day, every day.

DXO @ #CivicSummer at 1871

Lastly, here’s the curriculum we used to guide our day:

Next up: our Friday session this week will be at Tribeca Flashpoint Academy and will have lots of special guests!

The Launch of Smart Chicago Annotations

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City of Chicago – RFP for Municipal Code Printing, Sales, Web Hosting, and Editing Supplementation Service

Today we’re launching our Annotations program, where we publish rich text-based annotations of dense government documents like municipal code, RFPs, contracts, and other documents of this nature.

People in the open government / open data world like to poke fun at documents. Often published in PDF format, and containing stilted language and legal provisions, these files are easy targets for those of us who are unfamiliar with what they say and what they can lead to.

But these documents are important. In many cases, they are lifeblood of cashflows in and out of government. They are the sum total of the rules— the code, so to speak— that we use to run things. They are the objects with the signatures & the stamps, the legal descriptions and the scopes of work. They matter; enormously. And we have to understand them.

At Smart Chicago, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to create sustainable infrastructure for civic innovation. Programs like the CUTGroup (resident-centered design that engages hundreds of Chicagoans), Hosted Web Space (free server space and configuration for people working in open data), and our Github account (open source code from myriad web projects that put real money into the hands of civic developers) are deliberately designed to build this infrastructure.

This annotation project is a step toward addressing another infrastructure issue— funding. We believe that government spending on technology could be used to fund civic innovation while reducing overall spending. Small civic developers— the ones we hire to do our projects— should be bidding on any enterprise software system that comes down the pike. Introducing open technologies, agile methods, and new mindsets to government contracting will lead to more efficient spending and economic expansion.

What we’re trying to do is build the civic innovation sector of the technology industry.

We use News Genius as the platform for our Annotations program. It has a number of features that make it great for our purposes:

  • Rich annotations (links, images, video embeds, etc.) that allow for deeper understanding of specific words and phrases
  • Direct, sharable hyperlinks to specific annotations to stimulate discussion
  • Open platform that allows anyone to improve the annotations
  • There’s a large and growing community of people on the platform, annotating all sorts of text

Join us!

Here are the items we’re annotating upon launch:

  • City of Chicago – RFP for Municipal Code Printing, Sales, Web Hosting, and Editing Supplementation Services: this covers a specific RFP covering the publication of the municipal code. We thought it was a good example to start with because it has all of the boilerplate language and the project also has a technological component
  • City of Chicago – Sample Contract with City of Chicago: this is a boilerplate contract attached to all RFPs. This is somewhat less annotated – we definitely could use your help!

News Genius is a project of Rap Genius, which focuses on annotating the lyrics of rap songs. As you can imagine, the content on that side of the site can get somewhat off-color. If you stay focused on the above-reffed items, you should be able to steer clear of any of that. As we like to say here at Smart Chicago, “open means open”. 

One side effect of this project is that we’ve started the first “Artist” page for our favorite municipal government:  http://rapgenius.com/artists/City-of-chicago as well as the Department of Law (http://rapgenius.com/artists/Department-of-law) and Department of Procurement Services (http://rapgenius.com/artists/Department-of-procurement-services). Those are some great URLs.

Much, much more to come.

Free Spirit Media Documakers Technology Session at Tribeca Flashpoint

Smart Chicago

Today Jacqui Cheng and I talked with the #CivicSummer youth working as Documakers for Free Spirit Media about open technology as it pertains to the media industry. We talked about the building blocks of the web and some specific technologies and standards that help media makers do their jobs.

Here’s a complete set of photos and some representative images:

Jacqui talked about different social networks and how they can be used to spread messages and find content:

Jacqui Cheng speaking to Free Spirit Media DocuMakers at Tribeca Flashpoint Academy for #civicsummer

The huge monitors and great equipment at Tribeca provides a great basis for the youth as they make their media pieces:

Free Spirit Media DocuMakers at Tribeca Flashpoint Academy for Smart Chicago Collaborative's #civicsummer

4 days after Divvy launch, an app prototype and an API presented at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker 1 Comment

Lots of Divvy bikes lined up on Daley Plaza on the eve of the launch of Divvy Chicago

 

Just four days after the launch of the Divvy Bike Sharing program, Chicago’s civic technology community had already put together a prototype app and an API using bike share data.

Chicago OpenGov Hack Night played host to representatives from both Alta Bicycles (The company that manages Divvy) and the Chicago Department of Transportation to talk about the new bike share program and the data that’s available.

divvydatascreenshot

 

A screenshot of the raw data obtained from the Divvy website.

The first data set, available at (http://divvybikes.com/stations/json), gives information on real-time usage statistics and availability of bikes per station.

This data set reflects the same format from other bike share systems across the globe. This enabled Chicago’s data to be merged into other bike apps such as Oliver O’Brian’s Global Bike Share Map.

globalbikeshareview
 

Locally, Ian Dees and Steve Vance have been hard at work building applications with this new data set. They have put together google document  that contains a list of resources for the civic innovation community who are interested in working with bike share data. Dees has built an API that makes it easier to access the bike data. Vance has already taken advantage of this API to provide bike share information in his Chicago Bike Guide. (As a reminder, this was presented to OpenGov Hack Night just FOUR DAYS after the launch of Divvy.)

Steve Vance and Ian Dees discuss apps that are built using bike share data

Daniel Gohlke from Alta bikes answered questions about the in and outs of the data as well as plans to release information on the most active routes and where people are biking. Gohlke’s stated that in most cities this data is released quarterly, but if CDOT wants to release this data at an increased frequency that it should be possible.

Daniel explains about the data provided by the Divvy system
Question and answer session with representatives from Divvy and CDOT

Given that Divvy was only launched for a little over 2 weeks ago, we’re excited about what’s to come in terms of potential uses for this data. John Tolva, Chief Technology Officer for Chicago, would like to see data from different transportation systems integrated into a single app:

“The speed with which our civic innovation community seized on Divvy data gives me great hope that a truly multi-model, hyperlocal journey planning service — across cabs, public transit, shared bikes — can be assembled fairly easily. Most of the data is there. All that’s needed is an intelligent stitching-together.”

For those interested in working on bike share data, you’re invited to attend the next OpenGov Hack Night – every Tuesday at 6:00pm inside 1871.