1871

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Get Covered Illinois at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

At the last Chicago OpenGov Hack Night, Charles Watkins from Get Covered Illinois talked about the  Affordable Care Act and its implementation here in Illinois.

OpenGovHack Night - Get Covered

Get Covered Illinois is an effort by the State of Illinois to make sure that all residents in Illinois get health insurance. Here’s Charles Watkins explaining the effort.

The Affordable Healthcare Act brings about several benefits that weren’t available before including a restricting insurance companies from denying claims based on pre-existing conditions, allowing residents to remain on their parents insurance until age 26, and more coverage for preventative services. Watkins explains the benefits of the ACA below:

There are a number of websites that people can use to get information about the Affordable Healthcare Act and get pre-screened for benefits.  Those sites are:

  • GetCovered Illinois: Which helps to inform Illinois residents about the new healthcare law.
  • Abe.Illinois.Gov: Which enables residents to get prescreened for benefits.  This helps residents determine if they should apply for medicare, SNAP (food stamps), cash assistance, or medical assistance before trying to go to the healthcare.gov website.
  • Healthcare.gov: Which is where residents can search for healthcare coverage. In Illinois, the marketplace is run in partnership with the State of Illinois. There are currently eight insurance companies that are on the marketplace in Illinois.

Charles explains the details of each site below.

After presenting Charles also answered questions from the civic innovation community.

You can find out more about Illinois’ efforts to implement the ACA by going to GetCovered Illinois.

 

GeoGit & GeoGinger: GitHub for Catrographers

Christopher Whitaker

At last week’s OpenGov Hack Night, Nick Dorian spoke about GeoGit and GeoGinger and how they can help with the process of making maps.

Untitled

One of the issues with GitHub is that it’s not a great tool for tracking changes in maps.

GitHub has a great feature that will show the differences in changes in a repository. For example:

githubdiff

You can see in red what has been deleted and the green text shows what was added for this particular commit. However, when changing arounds map data – the difference looks like this:

geodiff

Image Courtesy Nick Dorian

It doesn’t really show the changes that were made in a way that anyone can understand.

Using GeoGit, you can easily keep track of the differences in geographic data from one commit to another.

Nick explains how it works here:

While GeoGit helped to identify changes in geographic data, there wasn’t an easy way to push this information back into GitHub. So, over the summer Dorian built GeoGinger as a way to bridge GeoGit and GitHub. Here’s Nick explaining GeoGinter:

Both GeoGit and GeoGinger are open source projects that can be found on GitHub.