Month: February 2014

Smart Chicago Awarded Community Information Challenge Grant from the Knight Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust

Smart Chicago

knight-foundation-logoToday the Knight Foundation announced an award to Smart Chicago, through their longtime partner and our founder & fiscal agent, The Chicago Community Trust, to “continue to design, build and demonstrate the power of digital tools to the community and empower residents to use news and information to improve their quality of life.”

This grant builds off of previous work among The Trust, Knight, and Smart Chicago— the Kick-Starting Civic Innovation grant, which we have used to fund the CivicWorks project.

The Trust and the Knight Foundation have a long relationship in the Community Information Challenge, including the Community Media Matters program funded by both parties.

 

Connect Chicago Toolkit: YouCanBookMe

Smart Chicago

“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is initiative four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. the Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative. 

At our last Connect Chicago meetup, Rene Paccha demonstrated some of the tools that he works with teaching digital skills to residents at their Pilsen and Southeast Chicago locations. One of these tools is YouCanBookMe, which Rene uses to let residents schedule training sessions. 

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Federal Government Challenges Post-Safety Datapalooza

Christopher Whitaker

At last month’s White House Safety Datapalooza, several federal agencies issued challenges to civic minded developers to help the federal government solve real world problems ranging from health care, public safety, education, and more.

Many of the previous winners of these challenges have been civic startups who have leveraged open data released on data.gov to help find creative ways to solve problems.

safetydatapalooza

Sketchnotes at the Public Data Safetypalooa, courtesy @anadiazhernandz

Here’s a list of each challenge along with data resources and some examples of apps that work to solve similar problems. Try to win!

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OpenGov Hack Night: @ChicagoCDO unveils new OpenData Report

Christopher Whitaker

Tom Schenk Jr, Director of Analytics at the City of Chicago, unveiled the City of Chicago’s 2013 Open Data Report.

The Open Data Report overviews the Open Data Executive Order, initiatives accomplished during 2013 such as the launch of the Chicago Data Dictionary, the progress of Chicago’s data portal, and what to expect in 2014.

You can read the report here on the City of Chicago’s website.

 

Hack Night Live: Divvy Data II

Christopher Whitaker

Following up on the successful Divvy Data hack night last summer, Steven Vance and other developers will share what they have created to analyze station locations, track rides, and use hardware to know bike/station availability.

Divvy riders

Photo courtesy of Steve Vance

Elliot Greenberger from Divvy will also be making a special announcement.

We’ll be live streaming the event here on this very blog! We’ll start our broadcast at about 6:15pm CST. Meeting notes will be posted here.