Chi Hack Night

Chi Hack Night t is Chicago’s weekly event to build, share, and learn about civic tech. Smart Chicago livestreams this event and writes up blog posts about the presentations on a regular basis.

Robert Friedman, Kyla Williams and the Hive Network at the Next OpenGov Hack Night!

Christopher Whitaker

hive_logo_chicago-e1400880053780At this week’s Chicago OpenGov Hack Night, Robert Friedman and Kyla Williams spoke about the Hive Learning Network and the collaborative projects that we’re launching with the Hive Learning Network.

Robert Friedman started the presentation off my talking about what the HIVE learning network is.

Over the last five years, Hive Chicago has emerged as a thriving network of 57 local member organizations across the city of Chicago – joined by dozens of local, national and international collaborating partners – to motivate, inspire and support Connected Learning experiences for thousands of young people who go to the museums, nonprofits, and cultural institutions that make up the network. Open Gov Hack night attendees will recognize Blue 1647, Civic Artworks, and Open Books— some of the members of Hive.

Connected Learning is an educational approach designed to make learning relevant to all populations, to real life and real work, and to the realities of the digital age, where the demand for learning never stops.

Friedman mentioned six moonshots that the Hive Chicago is currently aiming for. These include: Making connections between the Hive and CPS parents, youth engagement, building onramps to connected learning, transportation and a think tank.

Our Director of Operations Kyla Williams also presented and talked about some of our work, including Time to Tech, #CivicSummer, and the Hive Mapping Cooperative, and also how the civic tech community can get involved in the network.​

You can get more information about the Hive Network here.

Aldertrack: Your Guide to the 2015 Chicago Elections

Christopher Whitaker

Aldertrack-logoAt the February 3, 2015 Chicago OpenGov Hack Night, Jimm Dispensa talked about Aldertrack – A project to help residents of Chicago follow the 2015 Chicago Aldermanic and Mayoral elections.  The site offers race forms, analysis, webinars, as well as providing extensive social media coverage of each race.

History of Aldertrack

The site was first started by Dispensa in 2007 as a text only website that tried to gather details about Chicago’s elections and sort them out by ward. In 2010, he was joined by Mike Fourcher and the (now defunct) Chicago News Cooperative to create the first Early & Often site for the 2011 elections.

In 2010 Mike Fourcher became a part of Aldertrack and the group partnered with the Chicago News Cooperative to create the first version of Early & Often for the 2011 Chicago elections. (This may sound familiar since the Sun-Times’ had it’s own Early & Often site that was purchased from the Chicago News Cooperative.)

For this year’s elections, Ramsin Canon has also joined the team and is helping to make the site a more complete guide to this year’s elections.

Using tools to make the site cheap to run

The Aldertrack team uses several tools to make the site inexpensive to run. Here are the ones the teams lists as indispensable:

  • WordPress: WordPress is a popular blogging platform that’s simple to use. (We use WordPress as well!)
  • Mailchimp: Mailchimp is a platform that allows users to send out email campaigns. Aldertrack uses it to send out daily email updates about the election.
  • Slack: Slack is an internal communication tool that organizations use to communicate with each other in real time. It’s similar to the old IRC chat rooms, but it’s got a much better user interface and can integrate with other platforms like GitHub.
  • Stripe: Stripe is a payment system that integrates easily with apps. If you’ve ever used Lyft, you’ve used Stripe
  • Join.Me: Join.me is a screen sharing tool that the Aldertrack teams uses for Webinars.
  • data.cityofchicago.org: The Aldertrack team also makes extensive use of the City Data Portal

The Aldertrack Team also has several tools that they don’t love, but use anyway including

  • Microsoft Word and Excel
  • Adobe Acrobat for PDF reading
  • The Chicago Board of Elections Website: The team uses the site to get information, but says it’s not the most user friendly site.

There were also sites that the team called useless such as Facebook and printing their own newsletters. Dispensa said that while people will print things out themselves, it’s not cost effective to print for a medium-sized runs of things. The team at Aldertrack also finds Facebook useless for small audiences.

Lessons Learned

Dispensa shared several lessons that he’s learned in running the Aldertrack. The first few lessons revolve around knowing their audience. Dispensa says the audience for Chicago politics isn’t as big as you think and that their more interested in raw data than analysis. Dispensa also says it takes a lot of effort and inside knowledge of local politics to produce quality content for political junkies.

The team also found that traditional advertising doesn’t do much for increasing engagement among political junkies. They also found that exposure on other media hasn’t driven up readership or sales either.

The Aldertrack team found that while video doesn’t get many eyeballs – it does make the organization seem more professionals. For their webinars, the team uses two iPhones and a lapel mic.

Dispensa also says that more open government data has leads to more, not less, information arbitrage opportunities.

You can watch the entire presentation below:

To get more information about Aldertrack, visit their website here! 

Slow Roll Chicago Rolls Into Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

At this week’s Chicago OpenGov Hack Night, Oboi Reed and Steve Vance presented about Slow Roll Chicago and about improving equity in bike infrastructure in the City of Chicago.

Oboi Reed of Slow Roll Chicago talks about their work

Oboi Reed of Slow Roll Chicago talks about their work

Slow Roll Chicago is a community bicycle ride in Chicago founded by Jamal Julien and Olatunji Oboi Reed in 2014. Slow Roll Chicago rides on a regular basis from April to October. The ride meets at various locations & venues and takes a unique route for each ride. Slow Roll is for everyone; all ages, skill levels and types of bikes are welcome. They are called Slow Roll as our their slow riding pace keeps the group safe and gives riders a unique perspective of our great city and its beautiful neighborhoods.

One of Slow Roll Chicago’s major initiatives is advocating for more equitable bike infrastructure in the city of Chicago. Currently, the City of Chicago places bike infrastructure where there are the most bikers. Slow Roll Chicago believes that if you place biking infrastructure in places where none exist, more people from those areas would ride bikes.

To help map out the disparity in biking infrastructure, Slow Roll Chicago worked with Steve Vance and the  Transportation Breakout Group at Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night to build the Chicago Bike Equity Map.

Chicago Bike Equity Map

Chicago Bike Equity Map

The map shows current bike lanes overlaid by population density. Clicking on the bike lanes will show you what type of bike lane it is. For example, is it a buffered bike lane or simply a painted one?

You can see from the map that the bulk of the bike infrastructure is on the north side of the city

You can use the map to show different points of interest – including grocery stores.  You can download the data that powers this straight right from the site’s menu bar.

The project is open source and uses the Bootleaf as a base.  You can view their entire presentation below.

If you’d like to learn more about how data and technology can help solve our city’s transportation problems – you should join the Transportation Breakout Group at OpenGov Hack Night! 

Woodstock Institute launches a new interactive map and data compendium at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

On January 6th, 2015, the Woodstock Institute dropped by Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night  to talk about their new interactive map and data compendium.

Julianna Nunez from the Woodstock Institute speaks at OpenGov Hack Night

Julianna Nunez from the Woodstock Institute speaks at OpenGov Hack Night

The Woodstock Institute is a leading nonprofit research and policy organization in the areas of fair lending, wealth creation, and financial systems reform. Thier mission is to create a just financial system in which lower-wealth persons and communities and people and communities of color can achieve economic security and community prosperity. As part of their work, the Woodstock Institute does an enormous amount of research on housing as it pertains to mortgages and the foreclosure crisis.

You can now see some of the results of their research through two new sites. The first is an interactive map that shows geographic patterns of employment, foreclosures, mortgage lending, housing, and more.

woostockmap

The data for the maps comes from a variety of resources including data vendors like Record Information Services.

The second site that Woodstock Institute demonstrated was their data compendium. The Woodstock Data Compendium houses Chicago region datasets on a wide range of topics, from arts to economic development to health services, that provide insight into the health of neighborhoods throughout the region. The data was compiled by Woodstock Institute and the Metro Chicago Information Center.

(The Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC) was a nonprofit active in the Chicago region from 1990-2011, and their data contain historical community indicators.)

The Woodstock Institute used a CKAN instance to build their site in part because it was less expensive than a Socrata instance. Currently, the site has seventy-four data sets including this one that shows foreclosure data for the six county area.

You can see their whole presentation below!