Year: 2016

Smart Chicago at the After School Matters and Borderbend Arts & Tech Fair

Denise Linn

On April 9th, Smart Chicago participated in the After School Matters & Borderbend Arts & Tech Fair at the Segundo Ruiz Belvis Cultural Center.

We met the youth, enjoyed performances from programs like Chicago Kaleidoscopes & Spoken Word Academy of Chicago, and shared information from our Connect Chicago network of programs.

Here are just some arts & tech learning spaces for youth interested in summer STEAM experiences:

YOUmedia at Chicago Public Library Branches

YOUmedia is a library and studio space at Chicago Public Library branches designed specifically for teens. You can hang out, mess around and geek out on projects to create your own music, video, 2D and 3D design, photos and podcasts with help from skilled mentors. YOUmedia equipment is available for free with your valid Chicago Public Library card.

Little Black Pearl

Location: 1060 East 47th Street Chicago, Illinois 60653. Little Black Pearl (LBP) is a nonprofit serving youth in the Kenwood/Oakland, Woodlawn, and Bronzeville neighborhoods. Their Teen Tech Center is a space that enables teens from Chicago to gain access to technological tools, resources and opportunities in music, multi-media, video, graphics, digital photography, engineering and animation.

Street-Level Youth Media

Location: 1637 North Ashland Avenue, Chicago, IL 60622. Street-Level offers free media arts training to youth & young adults from ages 13 to 24. Experienced teachers, artists, and mentors teach year-round workshops at their multimedia center.

Adler Planetarium STEM Teen Programs

Location: 1300 S Lake Shore Dr. Chicago, IL 60605. The Adler’s Teen Programs focus on providing technical and professional skills, mentorship, and a welcoming learning environment for Chicago high school students of all backgrounds, interests, and abilities. They introduce you to new skills like web development, game development, robotics and more.

This list is just the beginning. There are over 250 locations in Chicago where you can access technology, training, & Wi-Fi.

Thank you to all the youth from the Arts & Tech Fair that shared their talents!

Big Data & the Public Good: A Conversation about Array of Things at SAIC

Denise Linn

On April 4th, Illinois Humanities hosted “Big Data & the Public Good” at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The event overviewed the Array of Things urban sensing project and facilitated a conversation on the role of technology in contemporary society. Smart Chicago’s Executive Director Dan O’Neil moderated the event. The featured presenters were Douglas Pancoast and Marissa Lee Benedict.

This program was organized by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was supported in part by the Robert R. McCormick Foundation. On the event website, the event’s framing questions on big data, technology, and democracy were listed: 

What is the relationship between information technology, urban space, and the public good in the age of big data? Where do “smart cities” initiatives like the Array of Things – which doesn’t collect any information about individuals – fit into contemporary conversations about privacy and surveillance? How can the arts and humanities help our society think through these issues?

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Douglas Pancoast, an Associate Professor of Interior Architecture and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, designed the Array of Things sensor enclosures along with Satya Mark Basu. Pancoast gave background on the project and shared the evolving iterations of the design:

Pancoast overviewed the functionality of the Array of Things nodes — that they will measure air quality, standing water, noise pollution, wind, light, pedestrian traffic, and other environmental factors. Wired Magazine called Array of Things a “Fitbit for the City.”

The second speaker, Marissa Lee Benedict, gave an artist’s perspective on Array of Things. Benedict is a lecturer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Sculpture and Fiber & Material Studies, and works as the Program Coordinator for the Arts, Science & Culture Initiative at the University of Chicago. As an artist, Benedict can approach technology with a different perspective — she can see the art in data and fiber-optic cables. She can also assist with activist gestures in a way other people working with technology cannot.

What is the value of open data from urban sensors?

Several themes arose from the audience questions at the event. The first theme centered on the expected benefits of Array of Things and the data it would produce.

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Pancoast pointed out that society has always placed value in creating and investing in archived, searchable collections of information. Organizing and sharing the data produced from an urban sensing project arguably has the same societal value of building and filling a library with books.

Still, communicating the value of collecting data through urban sensors also means articulating compelling, relevant use cases of the data. The value of open data from this smart city infrastructure is less clear unless there are specific examples of how data can be turned into local action:

Pancoast shared several problems that could be identified and illuminated by Array of Things data. Some examples:

  • Understanding how exhaust activity at O’Hare impacts surrounding property values
  • Understanding how noise pollution in certain areas of the city should impact zoning
  • Understanding the source of standing water

One specific case highlighted was Albany Park. Albany Park has a high incidences of flooding. If we could watch it, monitor where the water goes, how long it takes to evaporate and see how it correlates to other environmental factors, the problem can be better defined.

Engagement & Participation

Of course, problem identification isn’t enough to catalyze change. Communities have to be involved and empowered to act on the new information. In this light, another main theme from the event was resident engagement: what type of engagement is needed, who to engage with, and how to do it well. Specifically, there was an interest in how Chicagoans might broadly engage with the Array of Things project outside of targeted efforts in schools and youth programs. At Smart Chicago, we are committed to this broad engagement with urban sensing and the Internet of Things.

Benedict shared the following thought-provoking questions with the audience:

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Dan O’Neil shared some of the best practices that Smart Chicago has gleaned: do engagement work as openly as possibly, document your process and planning, invite everyone, and “fetishize the outputs.” One recent example of model of engagement is Smart Chicago’s work with the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Community Forums.

This event facilitated an interesting conversation about data, participation, and urban sensors — a conversation that needs to be continued openly, interactively, and across different venues in Chicago. Smart Chicago is committed to broad community engagement on the Array of Things project. To learn more about this work, visit our project page.

CUTGroup Collective & The Opportunity Project

Sonja Marziano

Screen Shot 2016-03-31 at 3.52.32 PMSmart Chicago will be partnering with CUTGroup Collective members to help build CUTGroups in other cities and then conduct UX testing on websites and tools that use data that is part of the White House’s Opportunity Project initiative. “The Opportunity Project expands access to opportunity for all Americans by putting data and digital tools in the hands of families, communities, and local leaders, to help them navigate information about the resources they need to thrive.”

Our role is to help organize these CUTGroup events around National Day of Civic Hacking, a national event that “brings together urbanists, civic hackers, government staff, developers, designers, community organizations and anyone with the passion to make their city better.” Smart Chicago has hosted National Day of Civic Hacking events in 2013, 2014 and 2015 and has been a leader in the national planning.

This year, Smart Chicago is interested in creating lasting impact by focusing our time, efforts and resources on direct engagement with residents around technology through the CUTGroup model. All of this work will happen through the CUTGroup Collective, our effort to convene and strengthen organizations and institutions in cities to help establish new CUTGroups, and create a new community to share and learn from one another.

We will team up with developers who have built projects using opportunity data and match them with cities that are part of the CUTGroup Collective. We will then work together to design and implement CUTGroup testing in June as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

We are excited to do this work, and look forward to creating better technology for residents on a national level. If you are interested in the CUTGroup model and being part of the CUTGroup Collective, please let us know by filling out this form.

If you have worked on an website or tool that uses opportunity data, and want to participate in CUTGroup testing, please fill out this form.

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San Francisco’s Public Voice Project & the CUTGroup Collective

Sonja Marziano

San Francisco's The Public Voice: City Service Design CenterThe City & County of San Francisco recently submitted a proposal in the Knight News Challenge: How might libraries serve 21st century information needs? for The Public Voice: City Service Design Center. The goal is to “make San Francisco Public Library a forum for the collaborative design of government digital services through a public user testing program.”

This is an impressive project that will create better tools and systems that serve residents by conducting usability testing and incorporating and responding to resident feedback.

Our Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) work is cited as an inspiration and the City & County of San Francisco will implement the CUTGroup methodologies laid out in our documentation to replicate similar success in San Francisco.

The Public Voice honors the CUTGroup’s pioneering model and builds on it with an explicit focus:

1) We focus on government services being redesigned as part of our citywide initiative to be “digital by default”. The Public Voice creates collaborative environments where public services are built “with, not for” the people of San Francisco.

2) We create structural relationships and feedback loops with agency digital product managers. Feedback and testing will be prioritized for products where feedback is highly actionable and impactful. Librarians assisting people in accessing government services in their day jobs are critical to this feedback loop.

3) We focus on accessibility for people with low digital literacy, non-native English speakers, and people with disabilities. We plan to implement the CUTGroup methodologies laid out in Smart Chicago’s documentation to replicate similar success in San Francisco.

The CUTGroup is a flagship Smart Chicago program to establish sustained, meaningful collaboration with residents around data and technology. We recently launched the CUTGroup Collective as a way to convene organizations and institutions to help establish new CUTGroups in other cities, and create a new community to share and learn from one another. The City & County of San Francisco are members of this network and are committed to sharing lessons learned from implementing CUTGroup processes in San Francisco with the entire CUTGroup Collective. We see immeasurable value from San Francisco participating in the CUTGroup Collective and communicating their lessons and insights to other cities.

Through the CUTGroup Collective, Smart Chicago is dedicated to helping the City & County of San Francisco implement best practices from the CUTGroup based on what we learned. In addition, we are excited to learn what The Public Voice project can teach us about building CUTGroup processes from within government and public libraries and see how that could help other cities implement similar models.

#16NTC Session on Digital Inclusion Program Sustainability

Denise Linn

Last week I led a session at the Nonprofit Technology Conference: “Digital Inclusion Program Sustainability: Documenting Lessons, Sharing Successes, and Transitioning Work.”  

This session was specifically crafted for the Nonprofit Technology Network’s (NTEN) Digital Inclusion Fellows. The Fellowship program was created by NTEN in partnership with Google Fiber and places emerging community leaders in city nonprofits doing digital inclusion work. According to NTEN’s website:

Since there’s no one solution to the digital divide, Fellows approach the problem with a super-local focus. They figure out what digital literacy needs their communities have and build unique classes, programs, and resources to address those needs. Fellows and organizations build sustainable, effective digital literacy programs that can act as the foundation for long-term digital inclusion efforts in their community.

I serve on the Digital Inclusion Fellowship Advisory Board and believe that inserting human capacity into the community technology level of our cities’ technology ecosystems is vital to equity. Also, as someone who began my career as a year-long AmeriCorps VISTA working on broadband adoption and access, I’ve benefited from carrying a community lens in technology work. This Fellowship program is a pipeline of driven people with that apply that same perspective to technology in their own cities. 

At the session I shared several digital inclusion lessons:

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I urged the Fellows to think about three tiers of digital inclusion sustainability and how those tiers interact to shape the legacy and lifespan of their current work. While the Fellow might run projects within local institutions and think about those challenges on a daily basis, that work is informed by organizational sustainability and ecosystem sustainability as well.

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Since many of the Fellow are finishing up their projects, I spent most of the session sharing actionable tips for sustaining and transitioning their work.

This is a big-picture framework I created that might assist with a Fellow’s project transition plan:

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Passing along large records of work in giant paper or digital folders does not equate to an effective hand-off. Translating, prioritizing, and organizing that the raw documentation for the next person is hard work, but makes for smoother project transition!

In addition to planning effective project transitions, I recommended the Fellows capture the narrative of their fellowship and share their best work with their cities and the community of national practitioners who care about this work. Doing so not only serves the organization that they are leaving, but also serves their cities, and their own best interests as they think about their next step. Specifically, I recommended the Fellows do three things:

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Below is my whole presentation from the Nonprofit Technology Conference session “Digital Inclusion Program Sustainability: Documenting Lessons, Sharing Successes, and Transitioning Work.”

Healthy Chicago 2.0: City Sets Broad, Data-driven Goals

Stephen Rynkiewicz
Healthy Chicago 2.0 launch

Allison Arwady, ‎chief medical officer at the Chicago Department of Public Health, discusses infectious disease rates March 29 at the Healthy Chicago 2.0 launch.

Chicago’s 2020 public-health plan is data driven. The city is putting numbers behind 60 health outcomes it wants to improve, from raising life expectancy to reducing infant mortality, gun violence, obesity and even binge drinking.

A 60-page report sets 82 public-health objectives to reach by the end of the decade. Many address larger issues that touch on health. Chicago aims to cut serious injuries in traffic accidents by one-third, and to boost walking, biking and public transit commutes 10 percent.

“The environment is right to bring in new data sets,” said epidemiologist Nik Prachand, the report’s co-author with deputy health commissioner Jaime Dircksen. Facing a 4 percent cut in the department’s funding, health professionals are trying to influence choices throughout the $7.8 billion city budget.

At the report’s March 29 unveiling, the South Shore Cultural Center displayed city maps from the report, with areas of the greatest need colored red. On measures of crime, housing and economic development, the most-afflicted areas matched the neighborhoods with poor health outcomes. (Smart Chicago Collaborative presents much of this data on its Chicago Health Atlas website.)

“Teen birth rates continue to fall,” said Dr. Julie Morita, the city’s health commissioner. Chicago has blown through a 2020 citywide target set in 2011. The city also met its 2011 goal for cutting smoking among high-schoolers, and is on track to cut HIV diagnoses.

“But disparities persist,” Morita said. “This is not acceptable.” The city counts more than 70 per 1,000 teen births in West Garfield Park and West Englewood, but less than 5 per 1,000 in other neighborhoods.

Communities that score low for educational, social and economic attainment also show the most births among teenagers, plus higher risks of outcomes from asthma to homicide. “It became clear to us that this should drive our work with Healthy Chicago 2.0,” Morita said – not only treating poor health but addressing its root causes.

Top priorities in the 2020 plan include behavioral health, adult and adolescent health, chronic and infectious disease, and violence. Each interest comes with numeric targets for change. The behavioral health plan would cut ambulance calls for suspected opiate overdoses 20 percent and mental-health hospitalizations 10 percent, and would step up treatment for severe psychological stress by 10 percent. Specific communities get special attention, including a pledge to cut suicide attempts by 10 percent among gay or transgender teens.

Local residents and health workers helped guide the broader approach in 18 months of agenda-setting meetings. Attendees at the plan’s launch say the approach makes sense: They see similar connections among bad results of all sorts.

“Typically at a restaurant we have found a correlation between labor violations and health and sanitation violations,” said Felipe Tendick Matesanz, development specialist at Restaurant Opportunities Centers United.

Tendick Matesanz was part of a team that set the plan’s community development strategies. It aims to improve well-being by boosting savings and assets among low-income residents. The city still needs baseline measurements for that goal.

The plan’s first deliverables are steps toward better metrics. The city will adopt research principles and launch a “public health data partnership” by July 1. Prachand wants to track health inequities using retail, insurance, land use and other metrics. He also wants to draft standards for data integrity and privacy.

“We’re looking to shake up the private sector,” he said. “People complain about government data being slow, but there’s a firewall around private data. It’s not available to you.”

To build a framework for evidence-based policy, the city pledges to launch a functional data network by July 2017. By the end of 2017, it should have infrastructure in place for training and for publicizing research.

Six public meetings in May will give an overview of the plan and ask for ideas.

Caregivers are enthusiastic about the expansive view of the city’s health. “It’s going to take the whole community of people to work cohesively together,” said public-health nurse Donna Feaster.

“For all of us this is part of our mission. In the end, it’s about people who need services,” said Karen Reitan, executive director of the Public Health Institute of Metropolitan Chicago, who served on the report’s steering committee. She believes the city’s goal-setting collaborators in the health community now will be motivated to act.

Reitan thinks the push for metrics will make agencies more responsive too. “There’s a school of thought, which I don’t agree with,” she said. “If it did not get recorded, it did not happen.”