On September 30th, Trina Chiasson presented her open source e-book Data + Design at OpenGov Hack Night. Data and Design is a free three-hundred page creative commons book explaining important data concepts in simple language.
Year: 2014
Catch Christopher Whitaker on WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift talking Code for America Summit
Our consultant, Christopher Whitaker, will be on WBEZ with Demond Drummer and Cathy Deng to talk about the Code for America Summit. The segment should air around 3:40pm this afternoon. You can listen live here.
City of Chicago Launches OpenData ETL Utility Kit
The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology released the OpenData ETL Utility Kit at the Code for America Summit this morning. The ETL Utility Toolkit will give cities the same tools Chicago uses to get data from their own internal systems and unto their data portals.
Photo by Chris Smith Photography
We’ll explain why this is such a big deal and what ETL is below the fold!
Foodborne Chicago on MarketWatch: Twitter bot helps Chicago find dirty restaurants
Great interview of Dr. Bechara Choucair, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Audio here:
Brigade Training: Leveling up Your Civic Hacking Event by Christopher Whitaker
Editor’s Note: Today, Smart Chicago Consultant and Brigade Regional Coordinator Christopher Whitaker will be giving a training on how to level up your civic hacking event. Christopher is one of the co-hosts of the nationally renowned Chicago OpenGov Hack Night as well as running a number of events for Smart Chicago including Chicago’s National Day of Civic Hacking. We’ve put his slides and training notes below the fold.
The Launch of the CUTGroup Book
Today we’re launching a website and book, The CUTGroup Book, http://www.cutgroupbook.org/, centered around propagating the components, tools, and methods of our Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) program.
The CUTGroup is a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps. We started the program in February 2013 and it has grown to include 800 people. We’ve learned a lot and we want to share.
We cover the hardware and software you need, methods for tester and developer recruitment, test design, location scouting, and results analysis. We show detailed budgets, exact website configurations, complete text of recruitment emails, the raw results of every test we’ve conducted, and all the other nuts and bolts it takes to make a CUTGroup in your city.
You can download a PDF of the book for free or order it as a real book on Amazon. Also read about the contributions of dozens of people who made this thing happen.
All hail the people of CUTGroup!
