Month: April 2015

Data is Small: On The Table Conversation on Data and Society

Andrew Seeder

Editor’s note: Andrew Seeder is a consultant to Smart Chicago who has worked on Chicago School of Data and other important initiatives. Join his On the Table session about the techniques and resources available for people who want to use data to make society a better place to live.

I tried to settle on an attention-grabbing lead for this post about ethics, something that would make you wonder about equity and ownership, about the differences between data big and small — maybe the monkey selfie, Facebook’s emotional contagion study, UPS’s happiness algorithm, or that it would take you a month to read a year’s worth of privacy agreements. I thought about my cousin loading pallets in a warehouse, his movements timed by fractions of seconds and measured against his pay. People reading this post likely do not need to be convinced that data has had — and will continue to have — a positive impact on society. Examples abound.

Smart Chicago is focused, in part, on making sure that data works for people. Not just anybody, though. Everybody. In the words of Jane Addams: “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” Information is data that works. Information helps people make decisions, makes people’s lives easier, makes cities better, more efficient. We think more information from the bottom up will make society a better place to live for everybody.

Look at the work we’ve already done. Expunge.io helps people slice through bureaucracy to erase their juvenile record. The CUT Group is developing a methodology for including people in the application design process. Connect Chicago helps build access digital skills in all neighborhoods. Foodborne Chicago uses Twitter and machine learning to help people with food poisoning communicate with the Department of Public Health.

These projects do good. They make data work. But making data work for people isn’t an easy thing. Using data to help make society a better place to live— data ethics—  requires imagination. It comes from a place of empathy. It means thinking about what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. And it also means asking people questions and then collaborating together. Civic tech tries to imagine and create real positive changes in people’s lives, the sort of changes you can point to and see, cause if you can’t see what changes you’ve made, have you actually changed anything at all?

When people talk about data and ethics together, the conversation often revolves around experiments that use “human subjects.”  Responsible use of data about people is a keystone in data ethics, especially in terms of anonymization and privacy protection.

For this year’s On the Table, held on May 12th, I’m going to host a conversation about the techniques and resources available for people who want to use data to make society a better place to live. The end-result will be a fully documented discussion about consent and, hopefully, an open consent agreement template. In the spirit of collaboration, though, I’m happy to see our efforts develop organically. Consent is an important topic in many different parts of society. No one solution is going to affect all the places where consent is needed.

If you’re interested you can sign up here. Or tweet me. The conversation is tentatively scheduled to start at 1pm and end at 3:30pm. I’ll follow up with another blog post and I’ll incorporate what we find in Smart Chicago’s upcoming Chicago School of Data book. This will include a draft open consent agreement template to work from. Stay tuned.

Terry Mazany speaks at the Chicago School of Data Days conference

Terry Mazany speaks at the Chicago School of Data Days conference

The ACLU of Illinois at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

aclu-logoKaren Sheley, staff attorney at the American Civic Liberties Union of Illinois, stopped by Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night to give an overview of the ACLU’s work and describe how they use data to inform their advocacy.

The ACLU has a long and storied history, first being formed in 1929 and focusing on racial justice, religious liberty, freedom of expression, the rights of children and people with disabilities, criminal justice reform, fairness for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender individuals and reproductive justice. They have over 20,000 members in Illinois.

The ACLU advocates for transparency through legislation, litigation, and FOIA requests through the following reports:

  • CPD Traffic Stops and Resulting Searches in 2013
  • Stop and Frisk in Chicago
  • The War on Marijuana in Black and White

Criminal Justice Reform 

One of the main focuses of the ACLU is criminal justice reform, but every aspect of their work is data focused. The ACLU of Illinois is currently working on a a disparate impact case on response to 911 calls. They’re also working on an lawsuit regarding the Mayor of Peoria who responded to someone making a parody twitter account by issuing warrant for arrest.

One example of their works is the Traffic stop statistical study act — 625 ILCS 5/11-2012. It creates a database that records the details of the all the traffic stops in the state. They’ve used the datasets to find disparities in the race distribution of stops relative to population. They found that African-Americans are disproportionately stopped and with even greater disparity in white neighborhoods. The hit rate (the rate in which the police actually find something) is much higher for whites that other races. The conclusion of the ACLU is that the bar is set higher for stopping a white person than other races. You can see the details of that study on the ACLU website.

The ACLU has also used data to produce a report about the impact the War on Drugs has had on African-Americans. Almost all of the data that the ACLU was already open to the public. The study found that even though drug use is about even between white and black people, the arrest rate for black people is much higher. They’ve used this data to lobby Illinois state government for changes in the law.

Most recently, the ACLU has created a report on Stop and Frisk in Chicago. Stop and Frisk is when a police officer stops a residents because they have reasonable suspicion that they are about to commit a crime, and that the resident may create a danger to the officer because you may have a weapon. The ACLU feels that the policy has been abused in Chicago.

A most lawsuit that the ACLU was in involved with was the stop and frisk of Olympic gold medal speed skater Shani Davis. Shani was aggressively stopped a few blocks from his mother’s house in Roger’s park. The case was settled with one of the clauses being that the city had to collect more information about stops including an explanation for the reason of suspicion.

As part of a FOIA request by the ACLU, they found that 2014 Chicago had four times the number of stops compared to New York City. (Which really shocked them) The ACLU recommends that the city improve their data collection, have Chicago Police Officers issue receipts when they’re stopped, and require additional training on the use of stop and frisk.

Another effort by the ACLU is to regulate Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). These devices can be attached to police cars and can collect all information on every car on the street and geotags it. Currently, there aren’t any restrictions on how this information is stored. State House Bill 3289 regulates this and it’s waiting on action in the Illinois Senate.

You can view the entire presentation here:

Real-world Civic Tech Strategies

Laurenellen McCann

At the Experimental Modes convening, practitioners from all over civic tech to came together to discuss, in their own words, how they do what they do. You can see our full meeting notes here. We tore into this subject, looking at how we relate to civic tech explicitly, the general tools we use in our work, and the strategies & tactics we wield.

The case study sprint, a documentation project inspired by booksprints, is one way we’re continuing to capture this information and open the door to people who couldn’t be in the room with us. On site, we also conducted an active listening exercise to bust the language barriers of our professional and personal backgrounds and explore ways to explain our work to new audiences.

As part of this exercise, which you can try for yourself here, we reviewed the 5 Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech, which I created based on my own analysis of these and other practitioners’ work, and dug into the similarities and differences in the strategies we use.

Below is results of our share-out, taken from our meeting notes. Each pair reflected back to the group on what techniques were present in both their projects or what made finding commonalities difficult.  Taken together, this forms a picture of the lack of one-size-fits-all in civic tech.

The comments have been slightly edited for formatting and clarity and annotated, when appropriate, with corresponding Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech for further reading. You can read the raw meeting notes of the share-out here.

Stef Milovic of the Hidden Valley Nature Lab and Naheem Morris of the Red Hook Digital Stewards program discuss strategy at the Experimental Modes Convening. April 4, 2105. Photo by Dan O'Neil.

Stef Milovic of the Hidden Valley Nature Lab and Naheem Morris of the Red Hook Digital Stewards program discuss strategy at the Experimental Modes Convening. April 4, 2105. Photo by Daniel X. O’Neil.

Strategy Share-out

Marisa Jahn (of the The NannyVan App) and Tiana Epps-Johnson (of ELECTricity)

Anca Matioc (of AbreLatAm) and Josh Kalov (of Smart Chicago Collaborative)

Laura Walker McDonald (of SIMLab) and Geoff Hing (of Chicago Tribune)

  • Didn’t have commonalities. Work is done at very different orientations. Geoff’s work as a code writer VS Laura’s work coordinating stakeholders around technology
  • Geoff drew images to show the tangle of networks each works in (see below), and they both found the people left out of that tangle tend to be the community (the people you’re serving): they are not necessarily the people who are raising the funds and having to produce “outcomes” or the bottom line

Robert Smith (of Red Hook Digital Stewards) and Sanjay Jolly (of The Prometheus Radio Project)

Jennifer Brandel (of Curious Nation) and Danielle Coates-Connor (of GoBoston2030)

Demond Drummer (of Large Lots Program) and Maegan Ortiz (of Mobile Voices)

Asiaha Butler (of Large Lots Program) and Allan Gomez (of The Prometheus Radio Project)

Sabrina Raaf (of University of Illinois at Chicago) and Sonja Marziano (of CUTGroup/Smart Chicago Collaborative)

Maritza Bandera (of On The Table)  / Whitney May (of ELECTricity)

Adam Horowitz (of US Department of Arts & Culture) and Diana Nucera (of Allied Media Projects)

The value of small wins in building the civic innovation community

Christopher Whitaker

One of the most common pieces of advice I give to civic innovation communities that are just starting up is to start with small wins.

Chicago’s civic innovation ecosystem has been up and running for awhile and we’re currently working on some big, substantial, and complicated projects. The ecosystem here has launched companies, startups, conferences, and boasts one of the largest hack nights in the country.

Even though it seems like Chicago is far far ahead, these efforts didn’t come out of nowhere fully formed. It’s taken time, investment, and effort to get the civic innovation engine running at full power. It’s also a process that’s repeatable. What’s helped to build the ecosystem here has been a series of small wins that grew into bigger ones. With each small win, we spread the news of what we can do with civic innovation – and that gives the community members more credibility to do bigger things.

A good example is the work surrounding the Chicago Department of Public Health. The Chicago Department of Public Health was one of the first government agencies to engage in the civic technology community. (September 11th, 2012 at OpenGov Hack Night to be exact!) That session at hack night resulted in the Chicago Flu Shot app by Tom Kompare. That app quickly spread and was hailed as a great way to for civic hackers to help their cities fight the flu.

Now, the Chicago Department of Public Health is working on advanced apps like Foodborne Chicago and working with Smart Chicago to run an entire Smart Health Center program.

But it started out small.

The small wins strategy isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon. In Philadelphia, a lawyer named Corey Arci was attending his first Code for Philly meetup when he found a derelict bike tracking app from Austin. He worked with others to redeploy the app to Philadelphia. He then worked with Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to launch a regional study using CyclePhilly data.

Small wins turn into bigger wins.

When first starting out, a small win can ease the fears of those in government who may see the ‘civic hacking’ term and freak out a little. An example of a small win can be something as simple as putting dots on a map. (Like the flu shot app) or redeploying an existing app (like CutePetsDenver).

It doesn’t matter how small the project is. The point is to show what’s possible and then turn around and go. OK, with this static list of flu shots locations we could do this. With a little more open data and support we could do this! 

The other major part of this is that after you get the small win – you have to tell the story. Telling your story not only builds your group’s credibility, but it also helps attract people to come join your group. If you don’t tell your story – nobody else will. Don’t be afraid to brag after you get your wins.

From there, you can use that momentum to help work on other projects which will yield bigger wins. Powerhouses take time to build, but they all start small and the steps are all repeatable. None of this is magic.

If you’d like help in getting your first small win – consider checking out the Organizing Resources page on the National Day of Civic Hacking website.

Active Listening 101 for Civic Tech

Laurenellen McCann

Active listening is the art of focusing: lending your full attention to what a person or a bunch of people have to say and how they say it before responding.

It’s both a skill and a series of practices. Listening exercises have been utilized by community organizers for decades, often in two-way educational spaces. (More info about that and tactics to get you going here.) The goal of listening is to make space for individuals and communities to express themselves and define their own problems and ideas before imposing “solutions” upon them. In this way, listening is an essential civic skill.

Active listening: the art of civic reflection.

Active listening: the art of civic reflection. Photo by Laurenellen McCann.

As part of the Experimental Modes convening earlier this month, we conducted an active listening exercise to reflect on how those of us who do community-driven civic tech tell our stories. This was both part of building a common language for us in the room and to get us into gear for the case study sprint — a collaborative documentation project. (That you can still contribute to!)

Below, I’ve outlined the exercise we used. Try it out with a partner and try discussing your own work. What do you learn? What sticks with people when you tell your story that you didn’t expect? What do you spend time explaining? What resonates and what doesn’t?

Sample active listening exercise

3 – 5 minutes: Define the goal and the rules

The goal of this exercise is to learn how to understand your civic project through the eyes of someone less intimately acquainted with what it is and why you do it. You’ll work in pairs, taking turns playing the role of Speaker and Listener. When it’s your turn to speak, you speak. When it’s your turn to listen, you goal is to be as quiet as possible, focusing on what the other person says. You can take notes or doodle or whatever helps you listen, but your role is to listen. That means, no questions, no clarifications, no corrections. Just focus.

3 minutes: Break into pairs (or grab a buddy).

Pick an “A” and a “B”. Person A will be the first Speaker. Person B will start as the listener.

Round 1 — Discuss WHAT you do

2 minutes: Person A Tells Their Story

. For the next 2 minutes, Person A will be the Speaker, explaining who what their project is, who it’s for/who is involved, and, briefly, how it got started. Person B is the Listener. (Again, offering no feedback or solicitation.)

3 minutes: Person B Tells Person A’s Story.

For the next 3 minutes, Person B will reflect back what they heard from Person A. Person B speaks. Person A is only allowed to listen (and take notes) — no corrections.

5 minutes: Group Reflection.

(Scaled to as many participants are part of the exercise.) What’s hard about this exercise? What did Person B hear that you (Person A) didn’t expect? What did they miss? What words did they use that you don’t normally use to describe your work?

Round 2 — Switch!

2 minutes: Person B Tells Their Story.

3 minutes: Person A Tells Person B’s Story

2 minutes: Reflection.

Round 3 — Discuss HOW you do what you do

2 minutes: Person A Shares How

Person A is the Speaker. Person B is the Listener. Talk about how the project works, how you go about implementing it, connecting with the people you’re working for, etc — the strategic and tactical bits you’d share if you were making a recipe of your work. While you (Person A) talk, Person B will lesson, taking notes on the key strategies and tactics they hear.

2 minutes: Person B Shares How

Switch! Person B is the Speaker. Person A is the Listener. While Person B shares their recipe, Person A takes notes.

5 – 7 minutes: Reflection and review.

Together, look through the strategies and tactics identified. Think about and discuss the language your partner used to capture your description of how you do your work. What stands out? Take another few minutes and review what’s similar and different about the way you approach your work. If you’re doing this exercise in a group setting, after some internal conversation time, open this topic up to the group.

What do you see about your work that you didn’t see before? Which parts resonate — or didn’t? How will that affect your storytelling going forward?

Getting sponsors for your local civic hacking event

Christopher Whitaker

logoPreviously, we had talked about how to plan and run a civic hacking event. Today, we’re going to go into a little more detail about getting sponsors for your event using resources from Code for America’s Brigade toolkit and asking a number of companies that have sponsored events in the past.

Terms to know before we get started

Donations vs Sponsorships

First, it’s important to understand the difference between donations and sponsorships. Donations are tax-deductible and cannot have business benefits for the donor (giving) company. If you’re an official Code for America Brigade Chapter, then Code for America can help intake donations for your local brigade.

Sponsorships are not tax-deductible, require a signed agreement, and will often include specific deliverables.  These deliverables are usually worked out in advance and will include what’s getting purchased and if the company is paying or reimbursing the organizer.

Fiscal Agents 

If you’re working with a local non-profit partner, it may be easier for that partner to accept donations or sponsorships money than for you to handle it as individual organizers. Depending on the organization, they may even be able to pay for things upfront (like food or venue costs) and have the sponsor(s) reimburse the organization. If you do partner with a non-profit partner, it’s recommended that you sign a Memo of Understanding stating what each party will do. (A memo of understanding is a signed document that just lays out 1) the scope of the project or agreement and 2) lays out what everyone agreed to do and when.)

Asking for money – Who to ask

Asking for money can be intimidating, but it’s something that comes with the territory. There are a lot of funders out there – be sure to figure out which ones are most relevant to your organization and interested in your work. They might be corporations, foundations, or wealthy individuals, and they might give anywhere from $1,000 contributions for an Annual Campaign to $500K grants for General Operating Support.

It also helps to know if the company or organization has sponsored similar events in the past. Have they sponsored hackathons for other groups? Have they ever expressed an interest in civic hacking? If they have, then they’re good candidates for sponsoring your event.

The other thing to check on is if any of your non-profit partners have an existing relationship with the organizations you’re thinking about asking for sponsorship. They may be able to make an introduction.

Asking for money – Being prepared

One of the best things that you can do to increase your chances of getting a sponsorship is being prepared.  You should have information about your group and your event that can fit on a single sheet of paper. You should also include information about your group’s previous wins. If this is your first National Day of Civic Hacking event, you can also show what’s been done during National Day of Civic Hacking during previous years.

Once you have all that, all that’s left to do is to reach out and make the ask. The key in making the ask is to show your genuine enthusiasm and passion for your cause, while not being afraid to directly ask for their financial support. You want to be clear when describing how much financial support you are seeking and how you will use their money.

After the event

After the event, be sure to reach back out to the sponsors with a thank you note and to let them know what the results of the event were.

For additional reference, here’s the Code for America Brigade Training video regarding fundraising. You should also check out Code for America’s fundraising toolkit as as well!

 

The Code for America finance and communities team contributed to this blog post.