City of Chicago

City of Chicago Launches the First Comprehensive, Public Data Dictionary

Smart ChicagoOctober 15, 2013

Today the City of Chicago launched the City of Chicago Data Dictionary, a single, comprehensive database catalog for the City of Chicago and City of Chicago sister agencies. The data dictionary contains detailed information on every data set held by City agencies and departments, how and if it may be accessed, and in which formats it may be accessed.

The City of Chicago Data Dictionary marks an important advance in open government data because it provides vast insight into how local government works. In concert with the City’s data portal, which is one of the largest raw data stores for a municipality anywhere, residents can now download available data, as well as examine the structure of all the data the City uses to make things work around here.

Tom Schenk Jr, Director of Analytics and Performance for the City of Chicago, announced the launch at the Code for America Summit in San Francisco. The City also published the underlying code for their data dictionary (titled “metalicious”). This code allows governments, businesses, and nonprofits– any organization that maintains multiple databases– a great resource for publishing their own data dictionaries.

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Smart Chicago Collaborative and the City’s Technology Plan

Smart ChicagoSeptember 26, 2013

Earlier this month, Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva unveiled the city’s very first technology plan. The plan was a result of a year-long process of research, brainstorming, and thinking about how to make all of Chicago competitive in the new digital economy.

This plan is a comprehensive framework for growing Chicago’s technology sector , getting broadband connectivity for everyone, and ensuring that Chicago remains a leader in open government data .

The plan also highlights the work that the civic technology community has been doing in Chicago. From the weekly OpenGov Hack Nights, the Smart Communities Program, and youth STEM programs; Chicago already enjoys a strong set of technology strengths and this plan will enable the city to advance even further.

Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to have a key role in many of these initiatives and is dedicated to implementing this plan. Here’s a look at our role in the plan and the aspects of our existing work in this context.

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Side effects of civic technology partnerships may include healthier cities

Christopher WhitakerAugust 7, 2013

One of the success stories in Chicago’s civic innovation community is the rapid spread of health related apps that have come out of both the volunteer civic technology community and paid development efforts. This started last year with Tom Kompare’s Chicago flu shot app that helped Chicago residents find free flu shots near them. (Later on, this flu shot app spread to Boston and Philadelphia.)

Professionally, Kompare is a web developer with the University of Chicago. In his spare time, he’s one of the most active civic technologists in Chicago.

Kompare’s flu shot app was just the start of the Chicago Department of Public Health partnering up with civic technologists on a number of projects including Foodborne Chicago, the Chicago Health Atlas, and Tom Kompare’s newest app Back to School.

Back to School is an app built for parents to make sure that their child has the immunizations they need to go back to school. CDPH hosts several immunization events for school children throughout the city and the apps helps parents find events near them. This will be also good trial run for the larger immunization effort that CDPH will run this fall.

Not only do these two apps use the same data format, this data format is now a proposed national standard. Shortly after the redeployment of the flu shot app in Philadelphia earlier this year, Philadelphia Chief Data Officer Mark Headd began an effort to develop a national standard for flu shot data. This effort included input from both government officials and civic technologists from Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Oakland, and other cities. By helping to set up one standard, both of these open source apps are deployable in any city that elects to conform to the standard.

This is not the first app that the Chicago Department of Public Health has partnered with. CDPH also partnered with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to run the Foodborne Chicago app. The app, which was made possible through a variety of efforts, listens to Twitter for reports of food poisoning and then prompts the author to a web page that reports food poisoning to 311. Once it’s reported the 311, the city can then dispatch a health inspector to that location.

The Chicago Health Atlas, an app that shows health trends and local resources in Chicago, was another app that resulted from community partnerships. Initially, the Atlas was built on an existing partnership by informatics researchers at five major academic health centers in Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, Stroger Hospital, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Rush University. Since that time, the Chicago Health Atlas has been expanded to include data and researchers from the Chicago Department of Public Health. The site itself was built by Chicago civic app firm Datamade and also uses data from civic startup Purple Binder.

And it’s not just formal partnerships that are producing health related apps. As part of a summer internship program, Chicago Spanish newspaper Vive Lo Hoy hired its first web developer Wilberto Morales. Morales worked with food inspection data provided by the City of Chicago to built eatsafe.co.

Eatsafe.co helps residents find out how the resturants near them fared during their last food inspection. This open source app includes information on how food inspections in Chicago work. (Unlike some other cities, Chicago’s system is pass-fail and not by letter grade.) This is Hoy’s first app and they plan to continue building more apps to help address community issues.

Morales learned to code, not from a formal computer science program, but by being a part of FreeGeek Chicago’s Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew. FreeGeek Chicago, a Humboldt Park non-profit organization, helps the community by recycling and repairing old electronics. FreeGeek trains volunteers on computer repair techniques and offers the opportunity for residents to earn a refurbished computer through their Earn-A-Box Program. In March, FreeGeek’ Chicago’s members decided to launch a program to teach residents how to develop web applications. It’s certainly been a big success, as evidenced by the Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew winning the Chicago Migrahack with their app Finding Care.

So why is Chicago producing so many high quality health apps so quickly?

Lesson 1: It starts with open data

Data is fuel. None of these applications would be possible without the City of Chicago developing an open data policy and executing on it. Chicago has more data sets than any other city. Their deep involvement with the civic technology community allows the city’s data team to meet the needs of civic innovators creating apps that serve the community.

Lesson 2: Partnerships are extremely important

The Chicago OpenGov Hack nights attract some of the city’s best geeks to work at the intersection of technology and civic problems. However, if the hack nights and other civic innovation efforts only attract web developers, designers, and data gurus we end up missing a vital piece of the puzzle: the neighbor that we’re trying to help.

By partnering with city departments, non-profit organizations, and community organizers – the community is able to develop apps centered around the civic problem in a way that helps the people who are working in the trenches. Both volunteer efforts like OpenGov Chicago and the Smart Chicago Collaborative are continuing to do outreach with civic organizations to help foster partnerships between technologists and community activists.

Lesson 3: Grow your own talent

The civic innovation community is growing – but not nearly fast enough. To meet the challenges brought on by the Great Recession, we need more people with technology skills necessary to grow the civic technology space. Efforts by FreeGeek Chicago and the Englewood Codes project by Teamwork Englewood are helping to create more technologists in the city’s neighborhoods.

Lesson 4: Solve real problems

Lastly, it’s important that the civic innovation community solve real problems that matter to real people. Part of the side effect of having strong partnerships in both government and the neighborhoods is the learning what is happening on the front lines of civic work. The Back to School app came about as a result of Tom overhearing a conversation about CDPH’s back to school campaign while working on the update for the flu shot app. Having civic technologists listening to not only tech issues, but issues like education results in web app like schoolcuts.org being created.

Building civic apps is more than just the code – the real secret to success is community.

4 days after Divvy launch, an app prototype and an API presented at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher WhitakerJuly 8, 2013 1 Comment

Lots of Divvy bikes lined up on Daley Plaza on the eve of the launch of Divvy Chicago

Just four days after the launch of the Divvy Bike Sharing program, Chicago’s civic technology community had already put together a prototype app and an API using bike share data.

Chicago OpenGov Hack Night played host to representatives from both Alta Bicycles (The company that manages Divvy) and the Chicago Department of Transportation to talk about the new bike share program and the data that’s available.

divvydatascreenshot

A screenshot of the raw data obtained from the Divvy website.

The first data set, available at (http://divvybikes.com/stations/json), gives information on real-time usage statistics and availability of bikes per station.

This data set reflects the same format from other bike share systems across the globe. This enabled Chicago’s data to be merged into other bike apps such as Oliver O’Brian’s Global Bike Share Map.

globalbikeshareview

Locally, Ian Dees and Steve Vance have been hard at work building applications with this new data set. They have put together google document that contains a list of resources for the civic innovation community who are interested in working with bike share data. Dees has built an API that makes it easier to access the bike data. Vance has already taken advantage of this API to provide bike share information in his Chicago Bike Guide. (As a reminder, this was presented to OpenGov Hack Night just FOUR DAYS after the launch of Divvy.)

Steve Vance and Ian Dees discuss apps that are built using bike share data

Daniel Gohlke from Alta bikes answered questions about the in and outs of the data as well as plans to release information on the most active routes and where people are biking. Gohlke’s stated that in most cities this data is released quarterly, but if CDOT wants to release this data at an increased frequency that it should be possible.

Daniel explains about the data provided by the Divvy system

Question and answer session with representatives from Divvy and CDOT

Given that Divvy was only launched for a little over 2 weeks ago, we’re excited about what’s to come in terms of potential uses for this data. John Tolva, Chief Technology Officer for Chicago, would like to see data from different transportation systems integrated into a single app:

“The speed with which our civic innovation community seized on Divvy data gives me great hope that a truly multi-model, hyperlocal journey planning service — across cabs, public transit, shared bikes — can be assembled fairly easily. Most of the data is there. All that’s needed is an intelligent stitching-together.”

For those interested in working on bike share data, you’re invited to attend the next OpenGov Hack Night – every Tuesday at 6:00pm inside 1871.

Livestream: Brett Goldstein of Chicago’s Department of Innovation & Technology

Christopher WhitakerJune 13, 2013

The City’s Data Portal has swelled to over 450 datasets. City staff use data to make smarter, better decisions. Programs are in place to cultivate internal talent.

Join us for a discussion with Brett Goldstein, Chief Data Officer and Chief Information Officer, who will talk about his work of the past two years to transform information technology at the City of Chicago. This is Brett’s last visit to OpenGovChicago before leaving city government for academia and the private sector.

The live stream of this event will begin at tonight at 6:15ish on this blog post.

Using the new ClearPath API to help communities interact with the Chicago Police Department

Christopher WhitakerMay 14, 2013

On Saturday, civic web developers, designers, and data gurus came together with the Chicago Police Department at Google’s Chicago headquarters to test out and find creative ways to use the new ClearPath API.

ClearPath is the Chicago Police Department’s community information portal. First launched in 2007, ClearPath gives residents information not only about crime in their area, but also information about which police beat they’re on and when their CAPS meeting is.

CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Program) is Chicago’s community policing program. At the center of this program are the CAPS meetings that occur in each police beat. At the CAPS meetings, the police department can hear about community concerns in the neighborhood and interact with local residents.

With the new API, the Chicago Police Department wants to make it easier for residents to interact with the ClearPath website and to report community concerns. CAPS Executive Director Lucy Moy and CPD Information Services Direction Jonathan Lewin explain:

Results of the Safer Communities Hackathon

Photo Courtesy of Brian Fitzpatrick

The hackathon produced a number of creative ways to use the API to make it easier to interact with CAPS and the ClearPath system.

CAPSure by OpenCity Apps

Derek Eder and the OpenCityteam helped to test the API and got an early start on building an app using the API.

The app they launched is called CAPsure. CAPSure helps residents get information about their local CAPS meeting. You enter in your address and the app will tell you which police beat you are in, when your next CAPS meeting is, and where the meeting is located. The app can also add the meeting to your Outlook, Google, or iCal calendars.

The app uses the ClearPath API’s calendar and event data to find events. The app also uses the City of Chicago’s data sets to help find users police district and beat number.

CAPStagram – Hackathon Winner

CAPstagram

Image courtesy of Patrick Brown

The winner of the Hackathon was a team of Patrick Brown, Karl Statz, Donchaa Carroll, and Cathy Deng.

For this concept, the app attaches a picture to community concerns submitted by residents. Currently, the ClearPath API doesn’t allow you to include pictures when making a community concern report. This mobile app allows users to send their local CAPS district a picture of a concern such as an abandoned building or graffiti to help aid in the investigation.

CAPS by Text – Runner Up

The runner-up for the hackathon was the team of Alex Soble, Josh Kalov and Demond Drummer.

Their app prototype allows users to send a community concern to their local CAPS district by text so that residents without the internet could still take advantage of the new system.

CAPs Alerts – Third Place

In third place was an app prototype built by Kevin McMahon. This mobile app not only uses the ClearPath API to help report community concerns, but it will also alert users when crime is reported near them.

Other prototypes:

Other ideas for using the ClearPath API included:

MapThatTrap: An app that residents can use to report abandoned buildings to both 311 and to the ClearPath API

Green Light Program: A concept that would change the colors of Chicago’s Blue Light Cameras from blue to green as crime rates went down in the neighborhood.

Next Steps:

Safer Communities Hackathon at Google Chicago

For groups wanting to continue to work on their apps or for people not at the hackathon wanting to get involved, there are some great resources out there to make that happen.

The first is the Chicago OpenGov Hacknight that happens every Tuesday at 6:00pm at 1871. The OpenGov Hack Nights are a great place to learn about what is happening with civic innovation in Chicago and work on civic app projects.

If you’re looking for a place to host your civic app, the Smart Chicago Collaborative provides free hosting to civic applications. Smart Chicago will also provide user testing for your app for free as well.

If civic developers have questions about the API, they can contact the developers directly by emailing [email protected]

Making our communities safer is an ongoing challenge that will not be solved in a single weekend or by a single web application. To utilize the new API to the fullest extent will require partnerships between the CAPS office, civic technologists, and community groups. If you’re a CAPS group or neighborhood organization that would like to form partnerships with civic technologists, feel free to email cwhitaker @ cct.org for more information.

A big thank you goes out to the Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick for hosting the hackathon, as well as the Chicago Mayor’s Office and Department of Innovation and Technology for putting on the event. A special thanks also goes out to the Chicago Police Department for spending their Saturday with us and their continued service to the City of Chicago.