Month: June 2014

The Adler Hacks for Youth during National Day of Civic Hacking

Christopher Whitaker

At the OpenGov Hack Night on June 4th 2014, Mikva Challenge and the Adler Planetarium presented the projects that came out of the National Day of Civic Hacking at the Adler Planetarium. The group of teens worked on a number of issues including an app that helps homeless LGTB youth find resources and look up student codes of conduct.

OpenGov Hack Night #108

The Adler Planetarium and Mikva Challenge have been working together all year hosting different events and coming up with issue briefs about youth owned problems. These topics included:

  • School Culture
  • Healthy Relationships
  • Juvenile Justice
  • Youth Employment

The group also built a number of apps during National Day of Civic Hacking. Here’s the team talking about their apps below:

App Ideas: 

  • Scoogle: Scoogle is an app that helps students look up their school code of conduct. Not only does this help students understand the code of conduct, but it also helps students understand their rights.
  • Resources for LGBT Homeless: After learning that over 30% of homeless youth are LGBT, a team created a resource page for LGBT youth to find
  • Grounded: Grounded is an electronic tag that’s intended for students who get in trouble for violence. With the app users have to check in on Instagram every two hours to show where their supervisors where they are.

For more information on Mikva Challenge, you can visit their website at http://www.mikvachallenge.org/

The Chicago Area Red Cross at National Day of Civic Hacking

Christopher Whitaker

This is the second post in a series about takeaways learned from National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago. These posts will highlight problem sets, current efforts, and how to get involved in future efforts.

National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago 2014 #hackforchange

At this year’s National Day of Civic Hacking in the Chicago Loop, we had Jim McGowan of the Chicago Area Red Cross describe their work and how it intersects with technology.

In this takeaway post, we’ll describe the problem set, current data, current projects, and possible next steps in creating tools that help to support the work of the Chicago Area Red Cross.

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Chicago School of Data Interviews: An introduction

Christopher Whitaker

As part of our work with the Chicago School of Data, we’re conducting surveys of organizations that use data in the service of public. We’re doing the survey to get a better understanding of roles, connections, dependencies, and potential collaborations between organizations in the Chicago data ecosystem. As we do the surveys, we’ll be following up with in depth interviews of organizations and do a deep dive discovering & discuss opportunities and to bridge gaps. We’ll present our work at the School of Data Conference on September 19th.

Chicago School of Data

Chicago School of Data

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Incomplete List of Cook County Property Data Tools

Smart Chicago

328px-Seal_of_Cook_County,_Illinois.svgAs we continue our work on our Cook County Open Data project,  we are exploring already existing tools for interacting with Cook County Government data. Josh Kalov created this directory of ones that may be useful. Over the next several months we will do tutorials and write more information about many of these. As we work to add more raw data and update existing data, it’s important to see and use the vastly helpful tools that the County has invested in to allow residents to learn more about property.

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