City of Chicago

The City of Chicago is one of three founding partners of the Smart Chicago Collaborative.

Honorary Chicago at OpenGov Hack Night

Smart Chicago

On Tuesday, August 5, 2014, Linda Zabors of Honorary Chicago talked about her experience mapping out Chicago’s brown honorary street signs with Honorary Chicago.  Smart Chicago’s Christopher Whitaker captured the  entire presentation– see it after the jump or on our YouTube channel.

Kool.

Honorary Street Sign for The Cool Gent, Photo by Flickr user Jessi

The ubiquitous brown street signs are placed to honor Chicago residents and require passage by the Chicago City Council.

Below the fold, Zabors talks about the work she’s done mapping out the streets signs and researching their biographies of who these honorees are.

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Connect Chicago Live: National Day of Civic Hacking

Christopher Whitaker

In our next meetup, we will be focused on Chicago’s vast civic innovation movement, the role of your centers play in that movement, and how we can embed civic tech into our programs (and even our own website!).

The National Day of Civic Hacking is on the weekend right after our meetup (Saturday and Sunday, May 31 and June 1). There are a ton of events– sign up and get involved!

We’ll be live streaming and live tweeting the event starting on Friday at 11:00am! Video stream below the fold..

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City of Chicago launches status blog for data.cityofchicago.org

Christopher Whitaker

Last week, the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology launched a their Tumblr Status Blog to let users of the city data portal know about downtime and technical changes made to the the data portal.

statusblog

The team at DoIT will be writing about their efforts to migrate geographic datasets from attachments to browse-able maps, changing the API call name to correct a spelling error or improve consistency and provide updates if the portal is having a technical issue or working on fixing an out-of-date dataset.

You can check out the status blog at chicagoportalstatus.tumblr.com

Damaged Vehicle Claim = Civic Engagement

Christopher Whitaker

Lots of people in my professional life talk about “civic engagement”. Everybody seems to want it. Fran Spielman reports in today’s Sun-Times that the City Clerk’s office had received over 3,100 damage claims due to potholes. That’s thousands of people engaging.

While we don’t always think of civic engagement as people filling out forms and claims, this is civic engagement at it’s core. Thousands of people going through a multi-step process to get reimbursed for a weaknesses of the civic infrastructure— and being paid back by the taxpayers— is about as engaged as one can be. Each year, the Chicago City Clerk‘s office processes thousands of claims for damaged vehicles.

potholes

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