Month: January 2016

City of Chicago Launches OpenGrid

Smart Chicago

OpenGrid_Logo_Horizontal_3ColorToday the Smart Chicago Collaborative helped the City of Chicago launch OpenGrid— a free, browser-based, open source mapping platform displaying Chicago’s robust collection of open datasets.

OpenGrid.io was launched this morning at an event at the University of Illinois Chicago Electronic Visualization Labratory. Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman, Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk, and the Smart Chicago Collaborative kicked off the official launch and demo.

OpenGrid is Public

This important work goes back to WindyGrid, the City’s internal tool displaying all past and present city data. Now, through OpenGrid, the ability to see and layer information about Chicago is in the hands of individual residents. Anyone with Internet access can see Chicago’s data come alive in relation to their homes, communities, and workplaces.

Here is the OpenGrid introductory tutorial:

OpenGrid is Open Source

The City first articulated its plans to build a public-facing WindyGrid and open up the application source code in the 18-month Tech Plan Update. The Plan stated OpenGrid would be “the first open source situational awareness system that other municipalities can use and build upon.”

Smart Chicago’s Role in OpenGrid

Through support from the MacArthur Foundation, Smart Chicago supported the OpenGrid project by creating a service layer to plenar.io, a spatio-temporal open data platform. This layer serves as a data feed to OpenGrid— if the data is in plenar.io, it can get into OpenGrid.

We worked with technology partner Uturn Data Solutions to create the code that drives the data. This easy-to-deploy stack can be used by any municipality or organization to display open datasets on a map. This entire project is dependent on our Amazon Web Services account, which is maintained by Uturn. We also serve many Chicago-based technologists via our Developer Resources program,

We’re proud of our continued work with the City to deliver on the Tech Plan, with local developers to encourage their role in the civic tech ecosystem, and with the University of Chicago to support the plenar.io platform for data ingest.

Here’s a set of photos from launch day:

Expunge Design Day at Stanford d School

Sonja Marziano

On Saturday, November 7, I visited Stanford University’s dSchool to participate in Expunge Design Day to “work with young people in the Bay Area to imagine what more user-friendly ways to clean and seal their record might be.” Chris Rudd, who previously led the Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council (JJC) and laid out plans for Expunge.io, is now a dSchool Fellow who wanted to use Expunge.io as a platform for youth in California to think about what their own expungement website and app would look like.

Twelve youth participated alongside adult coaches, lawyers, and technologists. The goal was first to learn about design thinking methods (such as interviewing and prototyping) and then use those practices to review Expunge.io, plan and wireframe a new piece of technology to get records expunged. Once the youth decided what they wanted to see then the technologists helped create real examples of what those websites might look like.

Review of Expunge.io

In small teams, youth looked at Expunge.io and listed out what they liked about the website, what they didn’t like, what could be better, and what they wanted to add. Overall, youth liked that Expunge.io was simple, easy to use and had a lot of good information. All of the youth teams liked the mission behind the website and thought this helped with an important issue and liked that you could be connected with free legal resources.

There was a lot discussion around making the website more engaging. Some youth felt that completing the questions and form “felt like homework” and was not sure about what would happen afterwards. Also, a few people were confused about the language like the term “rap sheet.” The youth teams had a lot of great ways to make this website better:

  • More photos and videos to make it more engaging (some youth even wanted to see a game!)
  • Help finding lawyers by seeing who they are, a short description of what they work on, and reviews
  • Different ways to talk with lawyer such as text message and Snapchat
  • More youth-oriented language from people (including celebrities) that youth trust
  • Youth also wanted to have more information about resources, their chances for expungement and what they might expect in court. We talked a lot about including success stories from real people about expunging their records and describing why it’s important to expunge your juvenile record

Project ideas & examples

Once all of the youth presented their ideas, they were invited to take a tour of Stanford while a team of tech volunteers worked together to make examples of what their websites might look like. When they came back, the tech teams presented each of their designs and got feedback from the youth.

The first example was a website where the user would view stories from different people who went through the justice system and the expungement process. We added this because we heard from the youth that it was important for them to hear first why they should expunge their record. In addition, they upgraded the FAQs section so that instead of reading a list of questions the format was changed to a messaging interface (like Kik) that allowed you to ask questions and then the answers would show up from a celebrity that the youth wanted to hear from (we heard specifically that hearing answers from Kevin Hart would be a good touch, so we added it!).

Expunge Design Day exampleThe second example focused on a website where youth could read about potential lawyers who could help them expunge their records. Not only would they be able to read about who they are and their reviews, but also be able to message or chat with the lawyer before meeting in person.

The last example would be an ideal solution in expunging records where youth would be able to input their name and birthday and immediately find out if they have a record, what it was for, and if it could be expunged.

Youth-Led Tech

Expunge Design Day was a great example of youth leading tech solutions. It was successful because of the youth’s ideas, but also the coaches and technologists who volunteered their time to work alongside the youth. We need more events like this one, where we as adults are taking a step back and listening to youth, and together are thinking about solutions that really work for youth.

As we continue our Expunge.io work at Smart Chicago, I am also thinking of ways that we can incorporate ideas from youth into our own website to make it a better resource for youth.

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Listen In: The First Episode of Smart Health Center Podcast, “Chicago Food Justice” Is Live!

Chris Walker

Smart Health Navigator and Chicago Health Corps member, Anne Lin, debuted the first episode of her podcast “Chicago Food Justice” today entitled “Teaser”. It is described as follows:

Chicago Food Justice is a monthly podcast series which explores the various ways in which Chicagoans are working to increase access, affordability, and sovereignty over healthy food. Tune in!

As an added bonus, it also features two of our other Smart Health Navigators, Bendarius King and Akya Gossit.

Tune in here:

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Check out the whole Smart Health Centers Podcast Playlist here:

 

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Suzy Connor on the Future of Arts Infusion Initiative

Suzy Connor

Arts Infusion Report TitleIt’s intriguing to see how intuitively Dan O’Neil dives into the 5-year evaluation by the Urban Institute to outline the confluence of circumstances that too many of our teens have come to accept as normal – poverty, danger, and insecurity. The research documents systems that are broken; communities that are in decline; social problems that remain intractable even after generations of “reform”.

But for me and for the 48 teaching artists who are the life-blood of the Arts Infusion Initiative, the data also has names and faces full of hope and promise. Our faith in and respect for these irreplaceable young people is unshakable; for some of them, that is unprecedented. The arts are not part of The System; they are not an “intervention” designed to fix something about them that is broken. The right to express themselves, to nurture the talent within, and to translate their passion into a career is as fundamental as their right to safety, to a good public education – and often just as illusive.

Access to high-end equipment, instruction, and role models in arts and digital media, is common in high-performing schools and high-income communities, but most teens at the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center report that they were exposed to these opportunities for the first time while incarcerated through the Chicago Community Trust funded Arts Infusion programs. The recent evaluation documents the broad appeal and sustainable impact that these arts and media offerings have on a population that is known for voting with their feet.

In upcoming posts, we will be examining the implications of the report for both the arts and tech sectors.

New Expunge.io Video

Sonja Marziano

We recently worked with the Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council to create a video about Expunge.io and why expungement matters. 

 

We did this as part of our Expunge.io work, which is to increase public awareness, support the work of institutions, and document the juvenile expungement application process.

This is a youth-led project, and it was important that our outreach, and this video, is also youth-led. Therefore, this the JJC’s direction that they created from the prompt: “If you had only a minute to tell someone about Expunge.io and why expungement matters, what would you say? What would you tell them to get them to visit Expunge.io and kick off the process of getting their records expunged.”

Here are a couple of quotes from the video:

There’s no reason you or any of your friends should be struggling to get a job or go to school.

Really bright and ambitious kids get into trouble in their youth and that says nothing about who they are as a person.

Expunge.io is important to me because it gives children who have been in the juvenile system a second chance, without letting other people know that this is their second chance making it.

The youth from this video all are part of the Mikva Challenge JJC.

This video was created by Kamal Williams (a Youth-led tech instructors from last summer!).

We are members of Literacenter, and filmed this video in their space.

Arts Infusion Evaluation: Research on The Crushing Effects of Poverty

Smart Chicago

As I wrote earlier this week, Suzy Connor, former senior program officer for arts and culture at The Chicago Community Trust, has joined Smart Chicago as a consultant working on a series of projects focused on arts, education, and justice.

In this context, we’re also taking on the Arts Infusion program, which Suzy has led for the last six years.The Urban Institute recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of this program: Arts Infusion Initiative, 2010–15: Evaluation Report. We are serializing some of the findings of this report that resonate with our work.

First up is a look at some of the research that is cited in the report to highlight the crushing effects of poverty, especially on neighborhoods in Chicago’s south and west sides. here are a number of the passages from  the report— and links to the underlying research.

The neighborhoods served by Arts Infusion programs each have their own distinct communities and histories, yet they all reflect disturbing national trends that disproportionately affect communities of color, such as high unemployment, a high crime rate, segregation, social disenfranchisement, and poverty (Coates 2014; Moser 2014; Sampson and Wilson 1995).

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More recently, changes in the landscape of public housing have also affected neighborhood dynamics and the lives of youth. In the 1990s, mid- and high-rise public housing complexes concentrated in the south and west sides of Chicago came to be viewed as the epicenter of the city’s problems, and public officials moved to demolish the buildings over the course of several years. The decision to tear down those properties was accompanied by a promise to improve the lives of residents, cut crime, and provide housing vouchers into mixed- income communities (Newman 2015; Eads and Salinas 2014; Crump 2002).

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The recession also had direct and indirect effects on neighborhood stability and housing, as housing values fell across the city and sales prices fell even more steeply (Chicago Rehab Network 2011). The housing crash was felt particularly acutely in Chicago’s south and west sides: for example, by the end of 2010, one in six properties in Back of the Yards was vacant as residents abandoned their homes after falling victim to predatory lending for home equity loans (Gallun and Maidenberg 2013; Rugh and Massey 2010). The growing number of abandoned buildings in those Chicago neighborhoods further weakened their property value and contributed to social disorder (Wallace and Schalliol 2015; Chicago Rehab Network 2011).

The full citations for those links are below, but I want to call out a number of observations:

  • The evidence of systematic racism and deprivation in our city is immense, astounding, and recent. This provides a setting for our work
  • The number and quality of current and former Chicago-based thinkers, developers, writers and researchers in the field is heartening. These are the people with whom we toil. I’m thinking specifically of people cited here like Whet Moser, David Schalliol, David Eads, and the Chicago Rehab Network
  • As we continue with the Arts Infusion project, pulling together the teaching artists who work directly with young people on careers in the arts, we have to see the work in the context of justice

More to come!

David Schalliol shooting an image in his Isolated Building Studies series

David Schalliol shooting an image in his Isolated Building Studies series

Coates, T. (2014). This town needs a better class of racist. The Atlantic. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/

Moser, W. (2014). Housing discrimination in America was perfected in Chicago. Chicago Mag. Available at http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/May-2014/The-Long-Shadow-of-Housing-Discrimination-in-Chicago/

Farmer, S. (2011). Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing Chicago, USA. Environment and Planning A, 43, 1154-1172. Available at http://blogs.roosevelt.edu/sfarmer/files/2013/02/Environmnet-and- Planning-final-version.pdf

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Newman, J. (2015, March 13). Dismantling the towers. Chicago Reporter. Available at http://chicagoreporter.com/dismantling-the-towers/

Eads, D., and Salinas, H. (2014). Demolished: The end of Chicago’s public housing. National Public Radio. Available at http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/publichousing/.

Crump, J. (2002), Deconcentration by demolition: public housing, poverty, and urban policy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(5): 581 – 596. Available at http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d306.

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Chicago Rehab Network. (2011). Building Our Future Chicago: A Toolkit for Residents and Community Leaders. Chicago Rehab Network: Chicago, IL. Available at http://www.chicagorehab.org/resources/docs/research/buildingchicago/buildingourfuturechicagofulltoolkit. pdf

Gallun, A., and Maidenberg, M. (2013, November 9). Will the foreclosure crisis kill Chicago? Crain’s Chicago Business. Crain’s: Chicago, IL. Available at http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20131109/ISSUE01/311099980/will-the-foreclosure-crisis-kill- chicago

Rugh, J. S., and Massey, D. S. (2010). Racial segregation and the American foreclosure crisis. American Sociological Review, 75(5), 629-651. Abstract available at http://asr.sagepub.com/content/75/5/629.abstract.

Wallace, D., and Schalliol, D. (2015). Testing the temporal nature of social disorder through abandoned buildings and interstitial spaces. Social Science Research, 54, 177-194. Abstract available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X15001258.