This week is a great week for civic innovation—the Code for America Summit in San Francisco is here. Smart Chicago will be there in force. I will be there, as well as consultants Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov. (Along with about a dozen other representatives from Chicago’s civic hacking community)
We’ll be live tweeting the event on our @SmartChicago account, but you can also follow along using the #CfAsummit hashtag. Below the fold, we’ve all the details of the Chicago area delegation.
Note: this is a guest post from Jonathan Giuffrida. Jonathan has been working at 1871 in one of the seats we maintain there for innovators in civic technology. Here’s more on that program.
Jonathan Giuffrida
This summer, I’ve been using Smart Chicago’s space in 1871 to help work on a new product that is intended to change the way we use open data.
Plenar.io was conceived as a centralized hub for open datasets from around the country. Funded by the NSF and the MacArthur Foundation, and led by a team of prominent open data scientists, researchers, and developers, it is a collaborative, open-source solution to the problems inherent to the rapid growth in government data portals.
The primary innovations of Plenario focus on making data easier for anybody to find, access, and download, regardless of its original source or format, and to do so in a free and efficient manner. The result is an enormous improvement to the ecosystem that returns us to the core promise of making the data open in the first place – that it can help improve our cities, our governments, and our lives.
Take a listen right here.
Note: this is the first Smart Chicago blog post by Andrew Seeder. Andrew has worked for the Chicago Community Trust on data projects for CEO and President Terry Mazany, and has been doing lots of thinking and writing from the Chicago School of Data project. Here’s his presentation of what we think can be a helpful classification system for seeing and understanding our regional data ecosystem. He will be at our conference this Friday and Saturday— please talk with him about what you think! — DXO
After months of interviews and hundreds of surveys we’re beginning to see how the regional data ecosystem fits together. The ecosystem grows and develops because we create data for others to use, we consume data made by others, and we enable each other to do the same. We found data creators, data consumers, and data enablers.
Some organizations create packaged data sets of data they’ve collected, while other organizations make it a business of cleaning free, public data. Others donate hardware and their expertise to local schools or, as an institution, they fund organizations working in the field. But data creators consume data and data consumers enable others to create data. These broad categories aren’t mutually exclusive.
Among data creators, some organizations provide their data for free, at no charge to either the public or other organizations. These “open” organizations include a lot of large (especially public) institutions, like the City of Chicago or the U.S. Census Bureau. They have the resources and capacity to develop full toolchain platforms. They are one-stop shops for pre-packaged data, also known as data that can be uploaded into and illustrated by common workplace software. There are far more organizations that offer data for a fee, or only under special circumstances.
Data!
On Monday, Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Sonja Marziano appeared on WBEZ’s OpenTech Shift to talk about the this weekend’s Chicago School of Data event.
You can listen to the whole interview here:
On September 9th, Dan Platt and Craig Booth from Narrative Science stopped by OpenGov Hack Night to talk about their Quill platform.
