Tonight on our YouTube Channel, we’ll be live streaming tonight’s Chicago OpenGov Hack Night about the date behind the Chicago Tribune’s Red Light Camera Ticket investigation.
We’ll start our live stream at about 6:15pm tonight.
Year: 2014
Twitter Bot Helps Chicago Officials Find Dirty Restaurants (Popular Science)
Twitter Bot Helps Chicago Officials Find Dirty Restaurants. Snip:
The Chicago Department of Public Health’s Twitter bot, plus a new online complaint form, helped the department identify 133 restaurants for inspections over a 10-month period. Twenty-one of those restaurants failed inspection and 33 passed with “critical or serious” violations. Not a bad haul.
Read the full article here.
Tweets Identify Food Poisoning Outbreaks – Scientific American
In Chicago monitoring Twitter for reports of food poisoning led to 133 restaurant inspections for health violations, with 21 establishments shut down. Dina Fine Maron reports.
During a 10-month stretch last year, staff members at the health agency responded to 270 tweets about “food poisoning.” Based on those tweets, 193 complaints were filed and 133 restaurants in the city were inspected. Twenty-one were closed down and another 33 were forced to fix health violations. That’s according to a study in the journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.[Jenine K. Harris et al, Health Department Use of Social Media to Identify Foodborne Illness — Chicago, Illinois, 2013–2014]
Foodborne Chicago on MeatPoultry.com: EXCLUSIVE: Foodborne illness in the age of Twitter
Here’s an article in a leading industry magazine about Foodborne Chicago. Snip:
An added benefit for public health agencies is that FoodBorne Chicago is an open-source framework, which will enable other health departments adopt the application free of charge, Harris said. Richardson said the cost of developing the FoodBorne Chicago program was “minimal between staff time and a few nominal costs for the server, the URL and things like that.”
Funding Civic Technology | Data-Smart City Solutions
Funding Civic Technology: A Look at the SmartChicago Collaborative Mode
Read here. Snip:
Such operations show how SmartChicago’s model depends on each founding partner’s unique assets. DoIT, in addition to its federally-funded initiatives, provides a wealth of city data via its open data portal that fuels SmartChicago’s civic tech projects. As host for the organization, CCT provides a home and community-driven pulpit for SmartChicago. MacArthur, meanwhile, sustains crucial SmartChicago initiatives and investments that help create and maintain a strong civic tech network.
How To Blog
Editor’s note: One of the most important roles we play here at Smart Chicago is to serve as an archivist to the movement . We currently have over 330 posts published and are producing content at a prodigious rate. Many of the blog posts we produce cover civic innovation solutions like our posts on Largelots, Schoolcuts, Expunge.io, and others.
I’ve been using blogs to help me and other organizations express themselves for about a decade now. I had an obituary-themed blog on Salon in the early 2000s, helped my brother develop CTA Tattler, and taught a couple hundred people how to use blogs to publish themselves.
In the course of this work, and with the huge help of the prolific Christopher Whitaker, I’ve developed some pretty clear thoughts on how to blog. Christopher has written up this post on the steps we take to do what we do. –DXO
It always starts with a nice Creative Commons photo that we import from Flickr.
Flickr is a fantastic tool for finding pictures. I personally have more than 30,000 photos licensed as Creative Commons) We use Flickr’s embed tool to publish directly into WordPress.
WordPress is wonderful and has several features that make blogging easy. The first of which is the “More” feature. After we introduce subject of the post, we’ll include the “More” tag to the text to create the post’s ‘fold’ so that our home page doesn’t get too cluttered. Like so:
