Census Reporter is a tool that helps journalists, innovators, and students explore census data. The Census Reporter is a great way to get detailed information about demographics, income, health insurance coverage, poverty, and even commute times. The apps is powered by the American Community Survey which gathers detailed information about community areas. Joe Germuska sat down with Christopher Whitaker to give a demo of the tool and tell us more about it.
On the OpenGov Hack Night on April 15th, Demond Drummer presented at OpenGov Hack Night about the Large Lots Program. This city program is designed to allow residents to purchase vacant lots in their neighborhoods for just a single dollar in an effort to help revitalize the neighborhood.
We love text.
And as big fans of texting, Smart Chicago has had Twilio as part of our offerings for civic developers since the say we started the program. We’ve recently expanded our partnership with Twilio, and their local developer relations guru, Greg Bagues, to offer Twilio as a separate service through Smart Chicago. Twilio is a great product that makes it easy to create apps that can make and receive both calls and texts.
We use it in our own products:
We are also a customer of Textizen, which uses Twilio, including around the Creative Chicago Expo. Civic software developers like Chris Gansen use it to power apps like HealthNearMe.
Like we said, we’re big fans of texting. If you’re new to Twilio, we’ve put together a how-to post of how the app works.
If you’re a civic developer and are interested in using Twilio for your app, please fill out the form below.
in our next meetup, we will be discussing youth and digital and technology programs that serve youth.
Watch the livestream here!
We’ll be live streaming and live tweeting tonight’s OpenGov Chicago Meeting starting at 6:15pm CST.
Springfield Sunset, Photo by Ann Fisher
This meetup will focus on open records. Here’s a description of the meeting from our two speakers:
The open data movement in Chicago provides a wealth of opportunity to analyze, publicize and criticize the functions of city government. But it falls short of the kind of transparency that lets the public see how Mayor Rahm Emanuel actually governs. For that, you need open records. And those are too often in short supply. Join Chicago Tribune investigations editor Jim Webb and Tribune investigative reporter Dave Kidwell for a discussion about government transparency, why records are worth fighting for and what works or doesn’t under Illinois’ weak Freedom of Information Act.
The US Open Data Institute is hiring an Open Data Circuit Rider (yay Screendoor!) to help government agencies, businesses, and organizations who want to produce or consume open data.
