Here’s a great position in the City of Chicago for someone looking to have an impact on regulatory reform. If interested, send cover letter and a resume to
Year: 2014
Welcome.
Smart Chicago is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology. We work on increasing access to the Internet, improving skills for using Internet, and developing meaningful products from data that measurably contribute to the quality of life of residents in our region and beyond.
We are a startup that was founded in part by our municipal government and nurtured by some of its most venerable institutions. Our founding partners are the City of Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust. As a funding collaborative, we help bring together municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.
We have a host of current projects and partnerships, and we are actively seeking to connect ideas and resources in all areas of philanthropy in Chicago.
Rakesh Dubbudu: My stay with Smart Chicago Collaborative
Editor’s Note: The following post is from our international fellow Rakesh Dubbudu. Rakesh spent a few weeks with us learning about civic innovation in Chicago. Rakesh works as an open data advocate in India as one of the co-conveners of the National Committee for People’s Right to Information.
Before I arrived in the USA, I was unsure of the learning & exchange during this trip. Though my interest centered on good & effective governance using technology & data, I was unclear about the specifics. During the orientation in Washington DC, I came to know that I would spend three weeks in Chicago with the ‘Smart Chicago Collaborative’. It was time for a quick google search to check what Smart Chicago was doing. I understood a little about Smart Chicago’s work.
The Chicago Red Cross shows us the power of open source
On Tuesday November 18th, Jim McGowan with the Red Cross of Greater Chicago gave a presentation at OpenGov Hack Night about their open source project: DCSops.
The Red Cross uses DCSops to manage their situational awareness information and dispatch volunteers to an incident. This is a huge change from January when they were using carbon paper to record information about incidents.
Add your own data sets to Plenar.io
Today, Plenar.io released a new feature that allows you to add your own data sets to Plenar.io.
Plenar.io was conceived as a centralized hub for open datasets from around the country. Funded by the National Science Foundation 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.
Today, the team added a new feature that allows people to submit their own datasets to be used by Plenar.io. Currently, Plenar.io is able to accept any URL to a comma separated value (CSV) or link to a dataset on a Socrata data portal (like data.cityofchicago.org) that has fields with the following attributes:
- Unique id: a field that is guaranteed to contain a unique number for every row in the dataset, even if rows are updated
- Observation date: a date or datetime field for each observation
- Latitude/Longitude or Location: either two fields with latitude and longitude , or a single field with both of them formatted (latitude, longitude)
If you have a dataset that has these feilds you can enter them on the Plenar.io website and it’ll be reviewed by the team.
Recap of OpenGov Chicago: Park Advisory Council Edition
Last Thursday at the Chicago Community Trust, the OpenGov Chicago Meetup resumed after an extended summer break. It was the first in a series of meetups that will focus on learning about and helping microdemocratic groups that interact with official government functions – starting first with park advisory councils. Here’s the raw meeting notes.
