1871

Smart Chicago is a founding tenant of 1871 and we have been active in helping make it a national center for civic innovation.

Hack Dash + opengovhacknight.org: Making it easier to get involved

Christopher Whitaker

One of the challenges in organizing volunteers around building civic web applications is that there are a lot of people with a lot of different skills and many projects to choose from – particularly in Chicago.

This weeks projects #civichacking

Over the past few weeks, Derek Eder, Forest Gregg,  Eric van Zanten and others have been building opengovhacknight.org to help aggragate information on civic innovation projects in Chicago. Now, with the addition of Hack Dash – it just became much easier for people to get involved in civic hacking!

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Chicago’s Hidden Open Data

Christopher Whitaker

At this week’s hack night, Forest Gregg of DataMade gave a talk about Chicago’s hidden open data. While the civic innovation community has gotten used to going to data.cityofchicago.org for their open data needs, there’s a lot more data that’s not on the portal.

Chicago's Hidden Data

The last few OpenGov Hack Nights have been spent building out a website (opengovhacknight.org) to help gather information on projects, people, and events in Chicago’s robust civic innovation community. Another goal of the project is to list all the resources available to developers (including Smart Chicago’s free web hosting for civic apps and user testing.)

A large part of the page has been documenting all the open data that’s not on the portal. Forest Gregg talks more about that below the fold.

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Hack Night Live: Chicago Open Data Hidden in Plain Sight

Christopher Whitaker

While our local governments continue to do an amazing job of publishing to their open data portals, many datasets still exist solely on obscure websites most of us don’t know about.

Forest Gregg will talk about some of these lesser known, but highly useful, open data sources available in Chicago including river pollution, financial interest statements, schools and more.

This is part of an ongoing hack night exercise to publicly document Chicago’s open data.

The live stream will start at 6:15ish CST

Illinois Public Health Datapalooza and a $10k Challenge

Christopher Whitaker
Raed Mansour Talking About a Day in the Life at the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Illinois Health Datapalooza at 1871 Chicago

Raed Mansour Talking About a Day in the Life at the Chicago Department of Public Health at the Illinois Health Datapalooza at 1871 Chicago

For the second day of the “Making Public Health Data Work in Illinois” event, Smart Chicago helped to MC a Datapalooza event that brought together technologists and health care practitioners to put into practice the ideas discussed on day one.

The morning sessions were about sharing skills between technologists and health care practitioners. These included sessions from Socrata, ESRI, and a session on Healthdata.gov from Damon Davis. We also had sessions that focused on the daily challenges of providing health care including a “Day in the Life” session from Raed Mansour.

The afternoon sessions were geared towards brainstorming ideas for building health apps. You can see the different ideas (and notes for the whole day) on our on-going google doc.

Unconference session on leapfrogging electronic medical records

Unconference session on leapfrogging electronic medical records

The Making Public Health Data Work Challenges

All this brainstorming around civic health apps leads up the the Making Public Health Data Work Challenges.

For the first challenge, The Illinois Department of Public Health, Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation are awarding $10,000 to the team that builds the app the provides the best use of health data in solving a problem faced by health care community in Illinois. There is an additional $5,000 being awarded for the runner-up. You can enter this challenge by filling out this entry form.

For the second challenge, Esri is offering a prize for the best app based on the Esri platform. The winner will get to choose from one of two prizes: a seat at the 2014 Esri Developer Summit, or a seat in an Esri instructor led online class. These prizes are both valued at approximately $1,000. Developers will be able to leverage Esri developer tools, e.g., the JavaScript API for cross-platform deployment, or the device-specific mobile SDKs for iOS and Android. You can enter this challenge by filling out this form.

Here are some guidelines for the challenge:

  • The deadline for the challenge is November 30th.
  • Entries must use health data either from a city, state, or federal source such as healthdata.gov.
  • Web apps don’t necessarily have to be complete.
  • Apps that have a better chance of becoming a real product used by healthcare practitioners or residents will be judged more highly.

If you have any questions about the challenge, feel free to ask us by emailing Christopher Whitaker.