Civic Works

OpenGov Hack Night: 1 Year Anniversary

Christopher Whitaker

Happy Birthday OpenGov Hack Night!

This week was the one year anniversary of the Chicago OpenGov Hack Night.

The Year in Review (6:30)

Some quick stats on what’s gone on in the past year.

  • 48 Hack Nights
  • 7 Data Potlucks
  • 98 Lou Malnati’s Pizzas
  • 300 unique attendees from 15 cities
  • 24 civic apps (just out of the hack nights)

Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night has been around for a year!

Congrats guys!

The City of Chicago and the Broadband Technology opportunities Grant

Francesca Rodriquez and Danielle DuMerer gave a presentation on the city’s efforts to close the digital divide.

The City of Chicago was one of the few major cities to receive a Broadband Technology Opportunities Grant. This grant is used to fund a number of projects in Chicago aimed at growing broadband adoption in Chicago.

The City received $16 million in BTOP funds to help build out Public Computing Centers and run comprehensive programs in some of Chicago’s more disadvantaged neighborhoods. In addition, the MacArthur Foundation provided matching funds. LISC Chicago and the Smart Chicago Collaborative partnered with the city to administer the programs.

You can find all the public computing centers that are funded by the grant on WeConnectChicago.org.

EveryoneOn campaign

Chicago’s done a lot of work to close the digital divide and continues to hammer away at the issue with the launch of the EveryoneOn campaign. EveryoneOn is a national program that aims to increase digital literacy and access to the high speed intenet. The program is being piloted in Chicago.

As part of the program, the city is partnering with Connect2Compete. Connect2Compete is a non-profit website where residents can search for affordable internet options near them. Residents simply enter their zip code and answer a few questions in order to see their options.

Previously, the City worked with Comcast to provide low-cost internet as part of the Internet Essentials initiative in 2011. The city has now expanded that option to include FreedomPop.

FreedomPop is a wireless router that uses the CLEAR 4G wireless network. (Smart Chicago is currently testing the devices across the city as part of the Civic User Testing Group.) With the FreedomPop routers, residents can get a gigabyte of free data each month. For $10/month, residents can increase that amount to 10GBs.

FreedomPop Routers

The city has made great strides to close the digital divide in the past two years. Here’s some examples of the work that’s gone on. (From the city’s website)

  • Establish free Wi-Fi at 28 public computer center sites and upgraded free Wi-Fi at 66 Chicago Public Library branches;
  • Provide over 180,000 hours of instructor-led technology training to 29,300 Chicagoans citywide;
  • Help at least 570 Chicagoans find jobs through 180,000 one-on-one CyberNavigator assistance sessions at the libraries;
  • Deliver technology training to over 1,000 small businesses;
  • Provide out-of-school digital media programming to 1,350 youth;
  • Establish the Connect Chicago network to bring together over 250 locations that offer free digital skills training throughout the City; and
  • Install over 1,400 computer stations at 170 public computer centers citywide, located in CHA facilities, CCC campuses, community centers, libraries and Veterans Resource Centers.

We’re excited to see what comes next.

Juan-Pablo Valez: Lessons on civic hacking (25:35)

Juan-Pablo Valez presented his thoughts on how we can get citizens involved in civic hacking.

Juan used a number of examples to help explain the process of civic hacking and how citizens can get involved.

Lesson One: It needs to solve a problem – Flu Shot App

The City’s health department distributes free flu shots every year to help keep Chicago healthy. This year the city heavily advertised on CTA to encourage residents to get a flu shot. However, it wasn’t always easy to find where to get a flu shot.

More civic hackers hard at work

Working with the city’s health department, Tom Kompare built the flu shot finder app. Once the app was built, it was adopted by the city.

Juan explains, “While the flu shot app won’t solve public health, it does solve a particular civic problem – and that’s good!”

Lesson Two: Discovering the bureaucracy – SecondCityZoning.org

As civic hackers start to work on these projects is that you discover the intricate of the way the city works. Secondcityzoning.org is an OpenCity website that lets you explore Chicago’s different zones. The site also educates people on what the zones actually mean.

Lesson Three: Spreading the word – Schoolcuts.org

Josh Kalov and Derek Eder discuss the schoolcuts.org app

The other big lesson is that once an app is built you need to get the word out. Jeanne partnered with Josh Kalov and the Open Data Institute to create a website that helps open up school data in a format easily understandable to parents. By helping to provide guidance to what parents needed, the end result was a site that helps parents and the community understand what’s happening with the school closing in Chicago.

Jean found the groups in Chicago that cared about the school closings and worked with them to help get the word out. Schoolcuts.org has now been featured in several press stories and is one of the most accessed civic apps coming out of Chicago.

LISC Chicago (49:00)

Suzanna Vasquez, Executive Director of LISC Chicago, spoke about their Smart Communities program. Smart Communities works to increase digital access and digital literacy in the Chicago neighborhoods of Auburn Grsham, Chicago Lawn, Englewood, Humbolt Park, and Pilsen. LISC works with local partners to help support local initiatives to close the digital divide. A good example is the work done by Teamwork Englewood. (Who is working to raise funds to increase its Englewood Codes class to 30 students.)

LISC is a semi-finalist for the Knight Foundation News Challenge for their proposal “OpenGov for the rest of us” that hopes to use the same model to help open gov and civic hacking projects in the neighborhoods.

The City of Philadelphia – BTOP Partners and Philly Tech Week (57:55)

OpenGov Hack Night was proud to have Linsey Keck and Ashley Del Bianco as guests at this week’s hack night. They were part of the BTOP conference that was occurring in Chicago this week.

Linsey and Ashley run the BTOP grants in Philadelphia. Philadelphia and Chicago have a lot of similarities in terms of their open data policies, their efforts to close the digital divide and both cities have civic hacking events on a regular basis.

At next weeks Philly Tech Week, the team is running several events aimed at getting people to think about digital access issues. This includes an event designed to get all members of the tech community to talk about how we bridge the gap between the tech world and disadvantaged neighborhoods.

Big Data Week in Chicago (1:07)

Next week is going to be Big Data Week in Chicago. There will be a number of events in the Chicago all during the week with many of these events being streamed online. You can get more information about these events by visiting bigdatachicago.com/chicago.

Edit Your Neighborhood On OpenStreetMap

Christopher Whitaker

They’ll be two opportunities for residents to help improve OpenStreetMap. The first is an OpenStreetMap Mapathon designed to help new mappers learn OpenStreetMap.

OpenStreetMap is an open source map that anyone can edit. Users can add data to the map including information about their favorite restaurants, cultural venues, and more.

We took some time out to talk with Ian Dees to show how easy it is to edit your hood with OpenStreetMap. The video is a quick step-by-step walk-through of how to make edits to the map.

OpenStreetMap can be edited using a free tool called idEditor. The editor will automatically find your location when you sign in. At this point, you can search for a location in the address bar or just explore around the map.

For our example, I had noticed that one of my neighborhood restaurants wasn’t showing on the map.

Using the idEditor, Ian was able to show me how to quickly add information to the building.

If you’d like to help edit your neighborhood, then join us this weekend for the OpenStreetMap Map-a-thon.

The  OpenStreetMap Map-a-thon is a national event designed to  teach new mappers the tools to improve the OpenStreetMap in your area.

Chicago’s Map-a-thon  will be April 20th and 21st at 1871 on the 12th floor of the Merchandise Mart, 222 Merchandise Mart Plaza from noon to 6pm. Food and drinks will be provided by the Smart Chicago Collaborative.

You can RSVP at on the Chicago OpenStreetMap meetup page.

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.

Data Potluck: 7 Million Rows of Data

Christopher Whitaker

There were a lot of people at this week’s data potluck

Data Potluck is a monthly event occurring the last Tuesday of every month at 6:00pm inside 1871.  Like the OpenGov Hack nights, these events focus on how open data and civic apps can help improve the citizen experience. However, these events have a more non-profit focus to them. Data Potluck was inspired by last year’s DataKind Data Drive which helped gather data for the Chicago area Red Cross. In order to keep the effort moving forward, Young-Jin Kim, Matt Gee and Nicholas Mader started the DataPotluck Meetup group.

DataPotluck’s other advantage? People bring food.

Rayid Ghani, Chief Scientist for Obama for America

At this month’s Data Potluck we had two presentations. The first was from  Rayid Ghani, former Chief Scientist for the Obama for America 2012 Campaign. Rayid explained how the Obama for America campaign used the power of predictive analysis and social media to help win the election. 

Rayid announced that the same model that made the Obama team so effective at their outreach efforts would be made available to non-profits.

Historical Traffic Congestion Data

The second presentation was by the City of Chicago’s Chief Analytics officer to announce the release of a seven million row dataset. Chicago has just released data on traffic congestion by segment.


To get an idea of just how big this data set is, a traffic segment is about a half mile. The city has 300 miles of road that the city keeps real-time traffic data for. The city refreshes the database that lives on the portal every ten minutes.

The city first released the real-time data in December, but civic developers wanted to take a look at historical data.

So, the city worked with Socrata to enable the city’s data portal to be able to handle such a massive volume of data. Now, civic developers can dig into all of the Chicago’s traffic data.

To help developers dig into the data, they’ve created a very well documented API.

This documentation includes code samples in multiple languages on how to access the data as well as definitions on all the different fields in the data set and the possible errors you could get.

Now that this data has been released, we’re excited to see what cool, useful, and interesting things that people will do with this data.

If you want to work with civic data:

For people who are interested in working with civic data, there are two opportunities that they should look into.

The first is the Chicago Data Science Fellowship. The University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory are recruiting people with statistics, programming, and data skills to work with real world data to make an impact on social issues.

The second is that the City of Chicago is hiring a data scientist to help ensure that Chicago becomes the very best civic data team in the world. The City of Chicago is looking to hire a new data scientist to join their team. If you are interested, you should apply on the city’s website.

OpenGov Hack Night: News Challenge Submissions and Mote.0.Bike

Christopher Whitaker

This is a 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 are held at 6:00 pm each Tuesday at 1871.

This week’s first presentation: Knight News Challenge Submissions

newschallenge

The deadline for submissions for the Knight News Challenge was on Monday. Civic innovators are competing for their share of $5 million dollars that the Knight Foundation will be awarding to projects that help improve the way that citizens get information from their government. (Author’s note: Smart Chicago Collaborative Executive Director Dan O’Neil is on of the readers giving feedback for the Knight Foundation News Challenge. Projects were included in the post solely because they were presented at the hack night and for no other reason.)

Projects who presented at the OpenGov Hack Night included:

Schoolcuts.org / SchoolCircle.org: (4:34)

Their Knight News Entry: SchoolCircle.org engages parents, teachers, students, & community members with data visualizations about their schools made with a combination of publicly available and crowdsourced data. Users will be able to discuss, and advocate for, their school.

Chicago Crash Browser: (5:40)

Their Knight News Entry: Chicago Crash Browser is a new tool needed by planners and engineers to analyze where the Chicago should invest in infrastructure upgrades to eliminate traffic fatalities by 2022, and educate residents & elected officials about transportation safety.

Visible CTA (7:15)

Their Knight News Entry: To give a visual trip on all CTA routes and a bit of a walk in several directions from every stop. To connect a trip with where one could work through the Illinois Department of Employment Security and other government web sites.

Augmenting 311 Systems With Data Sourced From Social Media: (9:00)

Their Knight News Entry: Enhancing Open311 (and 311 systems in general) to accept information captured from social media outlets and filtered via machine learning and human interaction.

WeCountability (10:10)

Their Knight News Entry: WeCountability will flatten a city’s organization so that good ideas can make their ways from the people doing the day-to-day work to the people making the decisions.

Crowdsourcing Building Data: (10:44)

Their Knight News Entry: We will create a smartphone web app/website that community groups will use to share information about buildings that are abandoned or in foreclosure in order to make neighborhoods more stable, make policymaking more effective, and improve vacant building data quality through crowdsourcing.

Closed Loop (12:00)

Their Knight News Entry: A data mining tool that connects the dots between political campaign contributions, lobbying, and legislation – and detects unusual patterns for investigative journalists to look into.

Announcements:

Data Science for Social Good Fellowships (15:10)

This week’s second presentation: Mote.0.Bike (24:14)

School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) professors Doug Pancoast (Professor of Architecture) and Robb Drinkwater (Professor of Sound) dropped by the OpenGov Hack Night to discuss their project involving bike sensors.

The bike-mountable moto sensors

The bike-mountable moto sensors

“The interface reconsidered” was a collaborative course taught by Robb and Doug. They wanted to redefine interface, specifically in the context of the city.

They used an Arduino Micro-Controller combined with a GPS device to help collect data as people biked around the city. The Ardunio device is programmable and can be setup to collect a number of different data points including location, air quality, altitude, light, humidity and more.

Users can upload the data on the project website. The goal is to have multiple users all over the city collect data so that we can learn more about biking in Chicago. The project is being further by Colin Hutton and the site will see improvements over the next few weeks.

Dataset of the Week: Workforce Centers
Datasets don’t have to be big to be important. The City of Chicago has four different workforce centers. The city’s partnered with over 30 different community organizations to provide employment services.

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!