We’re super excited about all the National Day of Civic Hacking happening around the country. We’ll be live streaming our National Day of Civic Hacking in the Chicago
UPDATE: We’ll be live streaming the presentations for Day 1 below starting at 4:00pm CST
(Livestream of presentations start at 4:00pm)
(Recording of this morning’s presentations)
As we get ready for National Day of Civic Hacking, we’ve put together some resources to help get things rolling.
In our next meetup, we will be focused on Chicago’s vast civic innovation movement, the role of your centers play in that movement, and how we can embed civic tech into our programs (and even our own website!).
The National Day of Civic Hacking is on the weekend right after our meetup (Saturday and Sunday, May 31 and June 1). There are a ton of events– sign up and get involved!
We’ll be live streaming and live tweeting the event starting on Friday at 11:00am! Video stream below the fold..
Tonight I co-presented at the Chicago: City of Big Data Pecha Kucha with my colleague and friend Lola Chen.
Here’s the presentation, along with complete text below.
3.
And much of my career has been devoted to data. I’ve made data-driven web products for the last decade. Smart Chicago Collaborative is a national leader in the creation of civic apps. We were the impetus behind bringing Open 311 to Chicago. I guess the point is, I know of what I speak.
4.
In my work at Smart Chicago, I’ve come to deeply appreciate the value of humans. They make all data. Data is a subset of humanity, not the other way around. I’ve seen first-hand what happens when the fetish of data can make everything go wrong.
5.
So I am dubious of any discipline that seeks to help people that doesn’t seem to really include people in meaningful ways. Remember how stoked Burgess Meredith was in the Twilight Zone when all the people were gone and he was left with his books?
6.
Pretty much every time I see something in the world of “big data” or “predictive analytics”, there is never any mention of humans. As if the machines are autochthonous, indigenous, comes from nowhere and knows everything. Empty of humans.
7.
But of course humans have made everything. And they are the most versatile and capable objects on earth. Burgess Meredith got pretty bummed when he immediately broke his glasses and couldn’t read any of his glorious books. His myriad word repositories were of no use. If only there was one other human left to read to him.
8.
I’ve come to know Lola through the OpenGovChicago meetup and she’s helped me greatly in my work at Smart Chicago. She is an amazing Chicago resident. She values data and technology, and is one of the best humans I know.
9.
Lola Chen is the master of the email. As I was preparing for this event, and I was pondering the value of humans in big data, she wrote me one of her missives. In it, she wrote, “Any alert person can ride the streets of Chicago and see the pattern of pothole problems. The ride might take 4 hours or so. The making notes might take 1 hour.” This is what I mean. This is the value of humans. So I yield the remainder of my Pecha Kucha to the great Lola Chen.
10.
Hi there, my name is Lola Chen, a self-confessed extreme data hog. I moved to Lincoln Park in 1969, right around when the federal government declared the area the first urban renewal blight zone. I first bought properties in Bucktown in 1984. I moved to East Garfield Park in 1998. All throughout, I collect data.
11.
Everywhere I go I ask the question “when might data be flawed”. I interviewed all sorts of residents and visitors from all over the world. All have seen Chicago Potholes. Data can be incomplete, biased, omitted, inaccurate, misclassified, or falsified. I have seen all of these.
12.
Here’s a practical example of the lack of data sharing. I had parked far from the curb due to a deep pothole. They gave me a ticket for being more than 13 inches from the curb. One piece of data that should relate to another. I GOT OUT OF THE TICKET.
13.
Data can be falsified faster than you think. I monitored grass cutting in vacant lots owned by the City. The workers knew they had GPS installed on the tractors, and they went up and down the lot, showing through through data that the lot was cut. But they lifted the blade so that no grass was cut. The lot was marked as done. It was not.
14.
Here we have a KINZIE INDUSTRIAL CORRIDOR series of long potholes going down the street that are DEEP. Chicago is currently promoting a return to manufacturing with hopes of creating new jobs. THAT IS WHY THESE POTHOLES ARE RELEVANT. There are patterns, visible, if you look.
15.
This lovely Lincoln Park ALLEY Pothole has a mural as a backdrop. Stanley’s is a neighborhood fruit market institution opened by Greek immigrants in the 1960s who have succeeded in expanding almost every decade. DON’T REALLY THINK AN ALGORITHM COULD PREDICT POTHOLE/MURAL
16.
This Humbolt Park CATCH BASIN Pothole seems to be accessorized with roadwork paraphernalia. Today the paraphernalia runs for almost 1 block it has been there so long. The paraphernalia becomes permanent. COULD AN ALGORITHM SPEED UP ROAD REPAIR?
17.
This sewer pothole was misclassified as fixed. It was not, however, fixed. This is shoddy workmanship that leads to multiple visits to the same issue, leading to more work for contractors and more dollars out of our pockets. The data saw “fixed”, but it was nothing of the sort.
18.
Here you can see the impetus of my note to Dan. Any alert person can see the issue with the seam in the asphalt. I’ve seen it all over, and reported it to a number of commissioners. The Inspector General is now looking into this.
19.
The City collects and stores enormous amounts of data, but the data is flawed, and there’s not enough. We need drones, satellites, patrol cars, garbage trucks, all collecting data and making 311 requests. There are no mechanisms to address these flaws. We need more people— smart City workers who know the data— cleaning this up. Let’s do it.
20.
So thank you to all the people who helped me put this together. If anybody in the world knows how to fox potholes, please send us some ideas!
At today’s OpenGovHack Night, our own Christopher Whitaker will be talking about the progress made since last year’s National Day of Civic Hacking and the Rise of the Working App. Our coverage starts at 6:15pm.
As part of the kickoff to National Day of Civic Hacking, Christopher Whitaker spoke at the OpenGov Hack Night on May 27th, 2014 about the progress that’s been made since last year’s event.
Over the past year, there’s been a concentrated effort by the city and the county to open up more of their data and to make the data more usable. Additionally, there have been several successful efforts to get data out of the sole domain of geekdom and into the public at large.
One of the most underrated stories of the year has been the City of Chicago’s new data dictionary. The Data Dictionary is a single, comprehensive database catalog for the City of Chicago and City of Chicago sister agencies. The data dictionary contains detailed information on every data set held by City agencies and departments, how and if it may be accessed, and in which formats it may be accessed – even for data not released on the portal yet.
The project was the result a year-long effort of the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology and Chapin Hall with funding provided through a $300,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
What’s more is that these efforts have been open sourced on the city’s GitHub page so that other cities can take advantage of the work being done.
Part of what makes the Metalicious platform powerful isn’t necessarily the public facing elements. The City is using the tool to manage their own vast disparate sources of data.
How this is important to the future:
Going forward as other cities begin to open up data, the Metalicious platform will be useful to other cities in managing their data.
While Chicago’s continues to be post data to their data portal at a steady rate, the county has not been able to get as much data up on their portal as they’d like. Last December, the County passed an ordinance stating that the county would work to release parcel data along with other highly sought after data sets. In January, the county entered an agreement with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to split the cost for a consultant to help the county open up more data. A few weeks later, Kalov Strategies came on board to help the county with their data. (And we finally got parcel data out the door fueling sites like Largelots.org)
Here’s how it’s important to the future
More data mean more fuel for civic innovation efforts. Additionally, this will also serve as a model to other communities on how to get needed staffing for open data efforts.
Another big event that’s happened recently is the opening of Chicago Architecture Foundation’s City of Big Data Exhibit. This exhibit takes open data sets from a number of different entities, including the Chicago Health Atlas, and lays it out on top of a 3D replica of the City of Chicago.
How this is important to the future:
Exhibits like this will help bring the work we do out into the mainstream. Too often, big data and predictive analytics are portrayed as some kind of magic. The exhibit will help showcase how cities use data and help demystify the field.
The Civic Works Project is a two-year effort to create apps and other tools to help increase the utility of local government data to benefit community organizations and the broader public. This project looks systemically at public and private information that can be used to engage residents, solve community problems and increase government accountability.
Since last year, the program has launched a number of apps and projects with our partners including Crime and Punishment in Chicago, the ACA Outreach App, our efforts with Local Data and SWOP, as well as our collaboration with WBEZ’s Public Data Blog.
One of the most important activities happening in the city is the push to increase digital skills. The Englewood Codes program, ran by Demond Drummer at Teamwork Englewood, is a great example of neighborhood organizations getting students involved in technology. After last year’s demo day, Teamwork Englewood has continued the program taking the top students from last summer and going much more in-depth with this year’s program.
Maybe one of the best examples of technologists working in tandem with community organizations is the story of Expunge.io. The site grew naturally out of work we did over our CivicSummer, interacting with youth on the Juvenile Justice Committee about what interested them, where their research took them, and what issues mattered most to them. Together, we were able to connect Mikva’s Chris Rudd with civic technologist Cathy Deng and Legal Aid Foundation Chicago to develop an app that helps youth expunge their juvenile records.
All of this is leading to the rise of the working app, apps that don’t just display data, but assist in the interaction between civic organizations and residents. These working apps require collaborative efforts from technologists, data owners, and civic organizations. The magic behind these apps is not the technology – but the cooperation between the different elements.
One of the best examples of these working apps is the new Largelots.org program. Under the old program, you could only purchase a vacant lot from the city if you owned an adjacent property. The new program was designed with community feedback with Teamwork Englewood and Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.) spearheading community outreach around the program. Once the new policy was implemented, Drummer reached out to civic technology company Datamade to build a site that could help residents navigate the new program.
Using parcel data just opened up by Cook County, Datamade was able to build a site that help streamline the interaction between residents and government. Through the program’s pilot period, the city received 414 applications during a short time frame from residents wanting to purchase land that’s currently owned by the city. Under the old program, the city only received 34 applications for all of 2013.
A program like largelots.org only works because of the connections made between community organizations, the government, and the technologists. The magic isn’t in the technology, the magic is the connections between the organizations working together towards civic innovation.
During National Day of Civic Hacking, we’ll be focused on hearing from front line community organizations and listening to their needs and challenges. From there, we’ll be brainstorming about creating working apps that can help those organization tackle their challenges.
As we begin another year of civic hacking, we look forward to seeing even more working apps being built and launched.
