Applications

The Moxie Awards add Best Civic App category

Christopher Whitaker

moxiecover

Building civic apps is hard work. There’s data that has to be cleaned up, code to be written, and a host of other problem solving issues that are unique to apps that take on civic challenges. Often, these apps are built on a volunteer basis during people’s free time.

Chicago has been at the forefront of civic app development. We’ve had our apps redeployed to cities like Boston, Phillidelphia and Oakland. Chicago’s civic development community has been featured in publications like TechPresident, Atlantic Cities, and Computer World. We’ve seen our apps presented on the air and on television.

It’s been a lot of work.

So, we’re excited that BuiltinChicago is adding a new Moxie Award catagory: Best Civic App.

The Moxie Awards are a celebration of Chicago’s startup community with awards going to startups, venture capitalists, mentors, and CTOs.

This year, BuiltinChicago has added four more award categories including Best Civic App. The category was started after a suggestion from Marty Malone who had been interning with the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology last year.

Any civic app that uses government data to solve civic problems is eligible for a nomination. We know it’s going to be hard to pick a favorite, so you can nominate more than one app. Which is great news since there are over sixty civic apps! (You can see a list of all the apps here – Note that there are probably many more than are on this list.) Anyone can nominate a civic app by filling out a nomination form at the Moxie Awards website. Final award winners will be selected by a combination of 50% public votes and 50% judges’ votes.

The Moxie Awards will take place June 20th at Park West in Chicago. Tickets will be made available for purchase soon.

Did you know, Civic apps can get free hosting and user testing?

While we’re on the subject of civic apps, the Smart Chicago Collaborative offers free hosting on our Amazon AWS cloud servers as well as Heroku servers. Any app that uses open government data and helps to improve the citizen experiance is eligible for hosting. To get more details, you can fill out an interest form here.

The Smart Chicago Collaborative also offers free user testing to civic developers. The Civic User Testing Group is comprised of volunteer testers from all over the city. To have your app tested, simply fill out the interest form here.

Schoolcuts.org: Open Data and Civil Discourse

Christopher Whitaker


Last week, Chicago Public Schools announced that it was closing 61 schools due to budget constraints. Even before the list was announced, the plan to shut down schools was and still is generating lots of heated debate.

CPS has released data on each school, but it isn’t always organized in a way that makes it easy for parents to see what is going on at the school. To find out information on the school utilization, you would first visit a separate 19 page PDF file to see how CPS determines utilization. You then have to download an excel file and search through it to find the school you are interested in. This is a particularly thorny problem for parents and community members who care deeply about their schools as community anchors.

Schoolcuts.org Screenshot

What schoolcuts.org does is pull out all the available data on every school that is either being closed or receiving and put it in one place that’s easy for parents and community members to see.

https://soundcloud.com/morningshiftwbez/130322-morning-shift-seg-c

Listen to Schoolcuts.org’s Jeanee Olson talk about the site on WBEZ Morning Shift

Getting the data out there to the community in a format that’s easy to understand is extremely valuable. Not only is it important for parents to know what kind of schools that their children are being sent to, but having the data readily available makes for a better debate about school closings for all those involved.

One of the points of contention is that Chicago Public Schools has stated that children would only be moved to higher performing schools. CPS places schools into three tiers with regards to academic performance with he first tier being the best performing. However, there are several receiving schools that are Tier 3 – meaning they are the worst academically performing schools in the district. Because this data is open, and is being presented in plain language, community members can use this data to advocate for their schools.

Open data can and does aid in civil discourse.

Another point of contention is the role of charter schools and how they affect the neighborhood schools. One sides states that charter schools do a better job of teaching our children, while the other side states that opening additional charter schools robs resources from struggling neighborhood schools.

The Chicago Tribune wrote an editorial supporting charter schools stating that there were 19,000 students on waiting lists for charters schools in Chicago. This number was then disputed by WBEZ.

https://twitter.com/WBEZeducation/status/316361105410764800

WBEZ’s point was that the list of students on waiting lists for charters was generated by combining the waiting list of each school, some of which had students that had applied to multiple charter schools. 

Instead of just rhetoric, we’re now seeing debates in the public domain about the data. And that’s a good thing. This isn’t the only example of this being done. WBEZ’s Day by Datum blog recently provided a detailed explanation of the recent data spat between the Chicago Sun-Times and the CTA over crime data.

Sometimes the best civic apps are not the ones that give us the answers, but the ones that bring up the hard questions – David Eads

As we talk about open data and the ability of civic apps to solve problems and help us answer questions about civic lift, it’s important to realize the potential that open data has to improve civic discourse. Schoolcuts.org has helped to steer the course of the debate back to the data and that’s a powerful thing.

OpenGov Hack Night: Go2School and Business License Data

Christopher Whitaker

This is a new weekly feature that will highlight what’s happening at the Chicago OpenGov Hack Night. TheChicago OpenGov Hack Nights are weekly events where technologists and community members come together to work with open data and build tools that improve the civic experience. The events, run by Derek Eder and Juan-Pablo Velez, are held at 6:00 pm each Tuesday at 1871. As a founding member of 1871, the Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to be able to provide space for this each week. 

This Week’s Presentation: GoToSchool by Tom Kompare

This week’s presentation is from Tom Kompare and his current app-in-progress GoToSchool. The app is help parents find directions to their kids school during those first few chaotic weeks. Tom is currently building the app hoping to have it released by the start of the next school year.

To use it, simply find your school by typing in the search bar. The app will try and help you by pulling up matching schools as you search. Once you select your school, you can state when you want to be there. Do you need to grab your kids after work? Plan for tomorrow morning? After you state when you need to be there, the app gives you three options on how you want to get there: walking, CTA/Metra, or by driving. It even gives you the number to call in case your kid is sick and can’t be at school.

The app is hosted on the Smart Chicago Collaborative servers and will be one of the first apps taking part in Civic User Testing.

Here’s how it works:

  • The site also uses Twitter bootstrap to make building the appearance of the app easier.
  • Tom used two separate data sets from CPS and placed those into Google Fusion Tables. The first is the school schedule and the second is school location data.
  • Transit directions are delivered through the Google Places API

Current Issues:

The app is still in development and has a couple of issues.

  • The data for start and end times for charter schools in incomplete
  • The “What time do you want to arrive” doesn’t look as good in Internet Explorer

Civic Developers and Designers! You Can Help Improve this app!

  • You can check out the app and submit pull request on the apps’ GitHub repository.

Dataset of the Week: Business License Data

This weeks’ dataset of the week is business license data. See that new construction across from your work? You can use the city’s business license data to pull up information on what is going into it. The city’s also built views that sort the data into different categories. For example, they have a view of the data that filters out everything but liquor licenses. You can turn that view into a heat map that where they are.

Socrata has a number of features that make exploring and viewing data easier. Once you register with the data.cityofchicago.org site you can make your own views and save them for later use.

Join us!

Are you interested in open data and civic innovation? Have something cool you’d like to show us? Register for the next OpenGov Hack Night here!

Adopt-A-Sidewalk is Re-Launched Along With Mayor Emanuel’s Chicago Shovels Program (Just in Time!)

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Mayor Emanuel Announces Chicago Shovels for 2012

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud be a part of Chicago Shovels, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s initiative to help connect the public with City winter resources and empower neighbors to come together to help Chicago navigate winter. We worked with the City of Chicago and the Chicago Code for America Brigade to re-launch of Adopt-A-Sidewalk.

As part of the Race for Reuse Campaign at Code for America, local civic hackers helped to move the City of Chicago’s Adopt-A-Sidewalk app onto servers hosted by the Smart Chicago Collaborative, document the code, and publish it as a fresh instance to Github. This means that developers can continue to improve the site by adding new features and continuing to integrate additional data sets as the city expands on its data offerings.

The Race for Reuse is a nationwide effort to help redeploy civic apps all across the country with 28 cities helping to deploy 31 civic apps. Adopt-A-Sidewalk was originally built as the Boston-focused Adopt-a-Hydrant app that lets citizens adopt hydrants that they agree to take care of in the event of snow.

Chicago has modified this code and added map files of every sidewalk in the city. Residents can claim sidewalks during snow events (like tonight!)– pledging to shovel their own walks or take care of a neighbor’s 25 feet of love. If you can’t shovel your walk and need help, The app will also let people indicate that they need help with their sidewalk. Volunteers can then go into the app and adopt that particular sidewalk.

This Vista Never Fails Me: Lincoln Park Zoo Nature Boardwalk in First Snowfall, December 2010

Lots of people worked on this app. Chief among them is Ryan Briones. He is an IT Director for Software Architecture and Design at the City’s Department of Innovation and Technology, but he worked to configure the server and document the code on his evenings, civic hacker-style. He is longtime member of OpenGovChicago and just flat-out cares about this stuff.

Christopher Whittaker, the Code for America Brigade Captain here in Chicago, shepherded the entire process and did a goodly amount of tweaking as well. He is a tireless organizer and he’s been a a continued link to the key national Code for America organization, from which all of this sprung.

When Adopt A Sidewalk launched last February, it was set up mainly by a group of dedicated team centered around the Obama for America tech team. This included Scott VanDenPlas,  Aaron Salmon, Arun Sivashankaran, Ben Hagen, Chris Gansen, Jason Kunesh, Jesse Kriss, Nick Leeper, Ryan Kolak, Paul Smith, and Scott Robbin.

This time around, Michael Barrientos and Emily Rosengren worked to get us to launch. Derek Eder gave some advice, Rebecca Ackerman enabled zoom, and Joe Olson of Tracklytics helped with DNS configuration.

Chicago is no stranger to community technology for the wintry mix. In 2011, a great group of people emanating from the Chicago Tribune news apps team that created and worked the ChicagoSnow Crowdmap (Ask for help, lend a hand: Blizzard 2011). We spent a couple nights managing and mapping 984 snow help reports for the blizzard of February 1, 2011. Here’s a super-detailed writeup. It was a great test case in community building around a weather event.

People interested in civic hacking are encouraged to meet to talk policy, data, and technology at the OpenGovChicago meetup group. You can also head over to the Open Gov Hack Nights at 1871 located inside the Merchandise Mart. These growing gatherings, hosted and supported in part by Smart Chicago, are a great way to get a mitt and get in the game on civic hacking.

Here’s a video explaining the program:

Help Improve Adopt-A-Sidewalk

Smart Chicago

In February of 2011, a massive blizzard hit the City of Chicago effectively shutting the city down for a day and a half. Lake Shore Drive, Metra lines, and business closed down as the city was buried under 20 inches of snow.

In the storm’s aftermath, Chicago cleaned itself up with neighbors helping neighbors shovel out the snow. In that same spirit of being good neighbors, Chicago is joining Race for Reuse to push adoption of the Adopt-A-Sidewalk app.

Adopt-A-Sidewalk is Chicago’s implementation of the Adopt-A-Hydrant application. Users adopt a sidewalk that they agree to shovel after a snow event. Through the site, you can also share resources like snow blowers and salt as well as let people know that your sidewalk has been cleared. More importantly, those that need help clearing their sidewalk can do so through the app. This will let volunteers, who sign up through the city’s Snow Corps app, know which sidewalks also need to be cleared.

Through a partnership between the City of Chicago and Code for America and the Smart Chicago Collaborative, the Adopt-A-Sidewalk app is getting overhauled for the new winter season. The app has been open sourced on GitHub and civic hackers are invited to help improve the app. The app will be hosted on the Smart Chicago Collaborative AWS account in order to make it easier to implement improvements to the Adopt-A-Sidewalk code.

Christopher Whittaker ([email protected]), the Code for America Brigade leader here in Chicago, is leading this effort. Civic hackers interested in working on Adopt-A-Sidewalk are invited to come to the OpenGov Hacknights Tuesdays at 6:00pm inside 1871. There we’ll discuss needed improvements and enhancements to the app.

Adopt a Sidewalk

Center for Neighborhood Technology Urban Sustainability Hackathon

Smart Chicago

CNT Reinventing Chicago Hackathon Judging Rubrick

Recently I helped out in judging for the Urban Sustainability Hakathon hosted by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT). The event focused on a subset of the data available from the City of Chicago data portal under sustainable development, energy, transportation, water, buildings, parks/ open space/ food access, and climate.

It was a really great event. I haven’t been at a hackthon since the Knight-Mozilla-MIT “Story and Algorithm” Hack Day back in June, and it has been even longer since I’ve been to a local hackathon. CNT wrote a comprehensive blog post about the event. They have details on all six entrants, including the winner (Edifice) and the two runner-ups (Jitney Driver and Hidden Value in Abandoned Property).

Here’s some thoughts:

Community matters

CNT Hackathon: Hidden Value in Abandoned Buildings

The great value of this event is the community that results from people meeting and working together. A great example is the Hidden Value in Abandoned Property team of Audrey Henderson and Dan Fehrenbach. Derek Eder made a great tool for viewing reports of vacant and abandoned buildings, but Audrey had a great idea for this data that goes beyond just seeing the data on a map by pairing it with other data that shows its value. She met a great CNT developer in Dan and they executed on a beta of the idea. That kind of connection is worth everything in this world.

Policy is implicit in apps

CNT Hackathon: Jitney Driver

I was impressed by the team and the thinking behind Jitney Driver. Paula Robinson led us through a presentation about the social and economic benefits of jitney drivers. She referenced August Wilson’s play Jitney, play is set in a worn-down gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in early autumn 1977. Since I actually lived in Pittsburgh in 1977, and well-remember the idea of jitney cabs.

She spoke of how shared rides lead to more connection among neighbors, how jitney driving could lead to local jobs and keeping money in the neighborhood, and how this type of service could fill an existing gap in transportation service. Some in the panel and audience talked about how this plays within the licensing requirements of the City, and even talked about whether we would be customers of such a service.

It was a refreshing example of people coming together to talk about how technology can affect a wide range of areas in society.

Civic Data is Big Business

The winner of the contest was Edifice, created by Cory Mollet and Juan-Pablo Velez. It is a great example of a product that pulls together a series of free things (four types of public data, Open Street Map, Tile Mill, and so on) in a way that creates a whole lot of value. It’s a good reminder that mining public data can lead to great businesses. I have high hopes for Edifice and the entire civic innovation industry here in Chicago.

Edifice Maps

Here’s a complete set of photos I took during the wrap-up of the hackathon. Congratulations to all participants– keep it up, and consider taking part in the Illinois Open Technology Challenge.