#CivicSummer

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.

Smart Chicago, Expunge.io, and Ecosystem

Smart Chicago

This is one in a series of posts that help us at Smart Chicago to develop a cohesive product strategy that helps us deliver on the promise of access, skills, and data. As we’ve grown, more and more cities have an interest in how Smart Chicago works and how the model can be used near them. These detailed posts, showing all of the steps we take, are a way to keep us in check locally while be of service nationally. Here’s more information on our model.

Expunge.io is a youth-led project.

Continue reading →

On the Launch of Expunge.io

Smart Chicago

We host a lot of apps at Smart Chicago through our Developer Resources program. In many instances, we get a request, fire up an EC2 instance, and the site is off and running. In other instances, we provide hours of behind-the-scenes technical assistance, product advice, and general jibber-jabber. Other times, we conceive of and execute on the thing on our own, or develop a site for clients.

Today’s launch of Expunge.io by Cathy Deng and the Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council (JJC) is in a category all by itself. The site, which helps start the process of erasing juvenile arrests and/or court records, is pretty much why we exist. For us, it grew naturally out of work we did over our CivicSummer, interacting with youth on the JJC about what interested them, where their research took them, and what issues mattered most to them.

Then, as summer became autumn, I talked on a regular basis with the intrepid and indefatigable Chris Rudd about the need for an app that helped sort out the essential but obtuse process of expungement.

He never gave up, he never stopped talking about it, and he never stopped learning. We talked about how the core of the app was not the technology— it was the info that he, the JJC youth, and their partners like the people at the Juvenile Expungement Help Desk had and had to share.

Then comes Cathy Deng, a super-smart developer looking to do civic apps that make a difference. We had invited her to join us at our final #CivicSumer session at Roosevelt University, where she got a feel for what everyone was up to and connected to people on Twitter. Then came this:

We set them up with space, and Smart Chicago tech consultant & general civic tech godfather Scott Robbin provided some tech guidance. Mikva Challenge Executive Director Brian Brady supported all of this with the vision of a creative organization not bogged down by process. The legal partners and justice system personnel have been highly supportive.

So here we are today. If you know anyone with a juvenile record and 4 minutes of extra time on their hands, send them to Expunge.io now.