Civic Works

OpenGov Hack Night: IDES and Sunlight Foundation

Christopher Whitaker

Here’s this week’s recap of OpenGov Hack Night Chicago:

This week we live streamed the presentations due to the weather and the CTA Brown line trains not running through the loop.

This week’s first presentation: The Illinois Department of Employment Security and IllinoisJobsLink.com

Gideon Blustein from the Illinois Department of Employment Security dropped by the OpenGov Hack night to talk about employment data available on IllinoisJobLink. IllinoisJobLink is the State of Illinois’ job board designed to help match employers and job seekers.

The Illinois Employment of Employment Security publishes real time labor market information on hiring trends, salary trends, job seeker characteristics, and current labor availability.

The department is currently open to releasing data in new ways or new reports if possible. Currently, the department also released a limited number of reports on the state’s data portal.

People who are interested in working with this kind of data are encouraged to attend our open gov hack nights.

This week’s second presentation: The Sunlight Foundation and local government transparency

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit non-partisan organization dedicated to making government more transparent. Previously, the Sunlight Foundation mainly focused on federal transparency. This resulted in reports on government spending, APIs that help automate reports on government spending, lobbying funds, and congressional action, as well as cool apps like Inbox Influence, Scout, and other transparency tools.
This year, the Sunlight Foundation received a $2.1 million dollar grant from Google.org to help fund transparecy efforts at the municipal level.

In order to get a better idea on how this can be accomplished, the Sunlight Foundation is visiting Chicago and other cities to see what work has been done in this area locally.

Part of this work includes building a living document of open data policy guidelines. This Sunlight Foundation would like to see the open data community get involved in helping to craft these guidelines. Where do we need to expand these guidelines? Where do we need case studies? What fits and what doesn’t? What do you need to work better?

If you’re interested in helping Sunlight with this effort, feel free email the Sunlight Foundation at [email protected].

Next week’s OpenGov Hack Night will be March 12th at 6:00pm at 1871 Chicago. You can RSVP here.

OpenGov Chicago Meeting: The Knight News Challenge, Mayors Challenge, and WBEZ

Christopher Whitaker

If you missed Tuesday’s OpenGov Meeting, the recording is below. Later today, we’ll be putting together a more comprehensive recap of the meeting.

Here’s the meeting minutes.

And here’s my writeup:

On a snowy slushy night in Chicago, civic minded web developers, designers, journalists, and advocates gathered at the Chicago Community Trust to hear about the latest developments of the local civic innovation scene.

You can watch the entire presentation here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMpHZs0F7k&feature=g-user-u

The YouTube video description has been marked at different speakers for your convenience.

First up was Chicago’s Director of Analytics Tom Schenk Jr. who had a number of important announcements.

Chicago named a finalist in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge
http://youtu.be/XSNq7Wg_PxA

The Bloomberg Philanthropies Challenge is a contest where cities submit ideas to compete for a grand prize of $5 million dollars. Chicago’s application to to develop a real time predictive analysis platform.

To help Chicago win this challenge, go to http://bit.ly/VoteChiData and vote for Chicago.

Project Falcon
Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is also working on Project Falcon. Project Falcon is an API that’s focused on time and place of events. Once this is online, data scientists will have a strong tool for spatial analysis.

Project Batman
Project Batman is the name for the city’s project using the University of Chicago’s 3D Cave2 system for data visualization.

What is CAVE2? This is CAVE2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XDbzy7vuE

The city will be using this tool to explore data in a brand new way.

City now hiring data scientists
Tom also announced that the City of Chicago is hiring a new data scientist to help harness city data into ways that can improve the lives of citizens. (And get to work with CAVE2!)

Knight Lab: Miranda Mulligan and Joe Germuska
Next up, was Miranda Mulligan and Joe Germuska to talk about the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. (You can find their presentation slides here)

The Knight Lab helps to develop tools for journalists such as Timeline, Local Angle, and SoundCite. Joe gave us a primer on open government data and journalism, drawing on his experience at the Chicago Tribune News Apps team and at the Knight Lab.

WBEZ
WBEZ’s Matthew Green gave a short talk about their efforts to improve data journalism and the station featuring data stories. You can see some of their coverage in WBEZ’s new blog Day X Datum.

John Bracken: Knight News Challenge
The Knight News Challenge is a contest where innovative ideas to improve the citizen experience compete for a share of $5 million dollars in grant money.

http://vimeo.com/59499707

Currently, the contest in the submission phase which ends March 18th. After the submission phase is the feedback phase. People will be able to applaud and comment on proposals. The Knight Foundation has tapped eight experts (Including our own Dan O’Neil) to give feedback on each proposal. After the feedback phase, authors will then be able to alter their proposals before the judging phase.

You can check out current submission by visiting the challenge website.

OpenGov Hack Night: VA Records, OpenStreetMap, and Chicago’s data on GitHub

Christopher Whitaker

Here’s a recap of OpenGov Hack Night. 

This week’s presentation: Gravitytank wins the White House Health Design Challenge

Gravitytank, a consultancy firm located here in Chicago, recently won the White House Health Design Challenge. The challenge was to help redesign health records from the Veterans Administration.

As part of the VA’s Blue Button program, people under VA care can download their records at any time. However, currently these records look something like this:

The records are not exactly easy to read. So, the White House issued a challenge for people to re-imagine these records in a way that makes it easier for patients to manage their health. Gravitytank took up the challenge and came up with this design.

The design places static information such as name and birthdate on the left hand side of the screen. On the right, the information is dynamic and updates with information when to take medications, doctor’s appointments and test results.

The design also makes records more understandable. When test results come in, a sliding scale displays next to that ranges between “Concerning to Doing Well” so that the patient doesn’t have to ask the obvious “Is that good or bad?” question.

You can check out Gravitytank’s full design by clicking here.

Project of the Week: OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap is an open source map that anyone can use and contribute to at no cost. In Chicago, transportation guru Steve Vance and the OpenStreetMap Chicago Meetup group are working to improve the map around Chicago. Currently, Chicago’s map lags behind other cities. This includes filling in the building footprints, adding information for bikers, and helping to fill in information on Chicago’s west side.

OpenStreetMap is different from maps like Google and Bing because it has no restrictions on how you can use the data. Google has started to charge the most active websites for the use of their maps, but this won’t be a problem for OpenStreetMap. The popular app Foursqaure already uses OpenStreetMap as part of their app.

The only problem with OpenStreetMap is that Chicago’s data portal always held the right to revoke their data. If this happened, OpenStreetMap would have to delete Chicago’s data from the map. OpenStreetMap actually stopped importing data because of this issue. Which brings us to this week’s Data Set Of the Week!

Data Sets of the Week: The City of Chicago releases datasets on GitHub under the MIT license

The City of Chicago’s Director of Analytics Tom Schenk Jr.  announced that the City is now publishing some of their data sets on the city’s GitHub account under the MIT license.

Currently the city’s data portal uses a license that says that the city can revoke access to the data at anytime. Most of the time, this only gets used when there’s a mistake in the data that needs to be corrected. Once the city corrects the data set, the city releases the data on the data portal again.

However, this license limits certain open data activities like OpenStreetMap. So, the city is now releasing datasets on GitHub under the MIT license. GitHub is a website that hosts repositories of code and data that are open to the public and free for anyone to download and copy. The MIT license would enable people to continue to use the data set even if the city revokes access on the main data portal.

Eventually, the city wants to be able to accept pull requests for it’s data. A pull request is a method used on the GitHub platform that allows users to make changes to a project. For example, the city has a data set of all the bike racks. If a business owner installs their own bike rack, the city may not be aware of it and wouldn’t know to put it in the dataset. A resident could update the data and then ask the city to “pull” the updated changes into the official data set.

Next Week:

Next Tuesday, there will be no Open Gov Hack Night. Instead, the next Chicago OpenGov Meeting will feature Knight Foundation News Innovation director John Bracken who will be discussing the challenge. Because of high interest in the event, Smart Chicago will be live streaming the talks on Google+ and will post the video to YouTube. The next OpenGov Hack Night will be March 3rd.

Last week at Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker
People at their laptops working on different civic innovation projects

A full house at last week’s OpenGov Hack Night

This is a new weekly feature that will highlight what’s happening at the Chicago OpenGov Hack Night. The Chicago 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. 

At today’s OpenGov Hack Night, we’re pleased to welcome Amy Guterman from GravityTank. Amy will be talking about their project to help resign how the Veterans Affairs administration displays health records. The design recently won the White House Health Design Challenge!  If you’d like to come check out the hack night, then you can RSVP here. 

Knight News Challenge: OpenGov Edition

Smart Chicago Collaborative Dan O’Neil spoke about the Knight News Challenge. The Knight Foundation News Challenge is a contest that will award $5 million dollars to different projects that help make public information more relevant and useful. Anyone can enter the challenge including governments, non-profits, and citizens.

The next Chicago OpenGov Meeting will feature Knight Foundation News Innovation director John Bracken who will be discussing the challenge. Because of high interest in the event, Smart Chicago will be live streaming the talks as well.

Project of the Week: Vagrant

The process of getting certain web development tools like PostGIS can take hours of painstaking frustrating work. Because every person’s machine is set up slightly differently, the installation of some tools is far more random than installing a normal application on your computer.

 With Vagrant, you can download a virtual machine to your computer that is already pre-installed with the tools that you need. This virtual machine lives on your own computer and lets you start hacking immediately instead of spending hours installing the tool.

Here locally, Young-Jin Kim and Emily Rosengren are working on getting Vagrant to support PostGIS. Anyone interested in helping with the project is encouraged to check out the repository on GitHub or attend a Hack Night.

Dataset of the Week: Food Inspection Data

Tom Schenk talks about food inspection data

Tom Schenk talks about food inspection data

Tom Schenk, Chief of Analytics for the City of Chicago, is a regular attendee of the OpenGov Hack Night. Each week he’ll be featuring a different data set on Chicago’s data portal.

This week’s data set is all about food inspection data. The city has made the comments that food inspectors make about the restaurants they inspect parsable. This means that apps can now draw out the different comments automatically. This is also one of the steps necessary to get Chicago’s food inspection data in the LIVES standard. This standard will enable food inspection data to be imported into the popular review site Yelp.   Tom and other civic developers will be working to get Chicago’s data into the LIVES standard at next week’s hack night.

Anyone interested in civic innovation, open government, and civic web apps is encouraged to come to one of our hack nights. Each week, we conduct a Civic Hacking 101 class to help orient people into the world of civic innovation. People who are trying to solve problems in their community are particularly encouraged to come regardless of their technical skills.

Introducing the CUT Group: Get paid to test civic apps

Smart Chicago

Today we’re excited to launch the Civic User Testing Group, a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test out civic apps.

If you live in Chicago, sign up today and get started.

  • Fill out a CUT Group profile and sign up to be a tester of civic apps, and we’ll send you a $5 VISA gift card
  • If and when you are chosen to test a civic app, you get paid a $20 VISA gift card and bus fare

Here’s how we explain the program:

There is a large and growing community of “civic hackers” in Chicago — technology developers who make websites, mobile apps, and other tools that often have specific use in Chicago. The goal is to make software that helps make lives better in the city.

The problem is that lots of civic apps get attention among a smallish group of other developers and people interested in the world of open data, but do not get wide acceptance by the people they were made for — regular residents of the city of Chicago.

You are going to change all that!

We need people from all over the city, using all sorts of devices, browsers and operating systems.

One of the reasons I’m excited about in this project is it is the first launch with my colleague Chris Gansen, who is working with us as a program manager. He last served as an engineer for Obama for America, where he was responsible for their Dashboard tool, which helped get hundreds of thousands of people involved in the election process. We’re privileged to have him focused on our work here in Chicago.

I recently wrote a post, Turning Civic Hacking Into Civic Innovation, where I laid out the immense assets that are available in this city to support this work, and identified a gap:

What’s currently missing? The people.

All of this is great. Two important components for civic innovation, government and developers, are here in force in Chicago. But dozens of developers looking at each other in conference rooms over pizza is never going to lead to making lives better in Chicago without the active involvement of real residents expressing real needs and advocating for software that makes sense to them. The good thing is that Chicago has assets in this area as well.

We think this is a great step in establishing sustained, meaningful collaboration with residents around the data and technology. CUT Group is a lightweight way to get people involved. The hope is once everyone is involved in this world, we’ll find new ways to innovate that we can’t possibly conceive at this time.