Denise Linn Joins Smart Chicago as Program Analyst

Smart ChicagoJune 22, 2015

AshDenise4 copy smaller copy Today Denise Linn joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as the Program Analyst. She will manage citywide ecosystem initiatives like Connect Chicago and the Chicago School of Data.

Denise comes to us from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she completed her Master in Public Policy degree and researched civic innovation and city-level Internet access projects. In 2015, she published “A Data-Driven Digital Inclusion Strategy for Gigabit Cities” and co-wrote the “Next Generation Network Connectivity Handbook.” She previously worked as an Economics Research Assistant in the Auctions & Spectrum Access Division of the Federal Communications Commission and is an alumna of the AmeriCorps VISTA program.

As Program Analyst, Denise will develop, execute, and manage the evaluation of Smart Chicago Programming. She has primary responsibility for the day-to-day activities of Connect Chicago, the Chicago School of Data, and other data engagement projects like the Array of Things and the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership.

You can follow her work on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slideshare.

Please join me in welcoming Denise Linn.

Chicago at the White House Tech Meetup

Demond DrummerApril 17, 2015

Today leaders, organizers and innovators from across America convened for the first-ever White House Tech Meetup. We came together to share strategies and methods for tackling a central question facing our communities, cities and country today: how do we bring more people into the digital economy?

Megan Smith, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, opened the meetup with a clarion call to action. “The are a lot more neighbors in our communities who aren’t in on this game,” she noted. “How can we work together to figure out our inclusion strategies?”

Jeffrey Zeints, Director of the National Economic Council, emphasized the urgency of this question for America’s continued competitiveness. “This is not only the right thing to do,” said Zeints, referring to the TechHire Initiative. “It’s really important for our country’s position in the global economy.”

It was an incredibly diverse crowd that assembled in the South Court Auditorium of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building (“from the ‘hood to the holler,” as one attendee from Kentucky observed). Half of the participants were organizers of tech meetups; the other half were people doing innovative work in community tech. A key theme driving the day was the power of local communities.

“Community unleashes opportunity,” declared Meetup CEO and co-founder Scott Heiferman. “And people have more power than ever to create community.”

Here, it is worth noting that Meetup is a vital tool in Chicago’s civic tech ecosystem. At Smart Chicago we use Meetup to convene and communicate with members of our Connect Chicago meetup group and the Open Government Chicago meetup we host and help organize.

Chicago had a strong presence in the room for the day-long session. It was great to see Mike Stringer, organizer of Data Science Chicago. Mike was one of 50 Meetup organizers personally invited to the event by Meetup HQ. Laurenellen McCann, a Smart Chicago consultant, delivered a spotlight talk charging participants to build with, not for people and communities. Tiana Epps-Johnson, co-founder of the Center for Technology and Civic Life (a Smart Chicago partner), shared her organization’s work delivering tech solutions and training for the unsung enablers of our democracy: local election administrators. Rounding out Chicago’s presence in the spotlight talks, I presented on why tech organizing is a foundational component of Chicago’s efforts to achieve full participation in the digital economy (my remarks are at the end of this post).

I was proud to see Chicago in the room, but there was much to learn from people doing similar work in other cities. I was particularly compelled by the story of Felicia and Jamal O’Garro, the dynamic husband-wife duo who co-founded Code Crew in New York. When they found themselves out of work at the same time, Felicia and Jamal decided to turn a crisis into an opportunity to retool their skills. They looked far and wide for a way to get into tech, but to no avail. When they didn’t find a program that suited their needs they took matters into their own hands and organized the Code Crew meetup group. That group has since grown into an organization that delivers tech training to thousands of people in New York. Find a way or make one – that’s the ethic that drives innovation from the bottom up.

My biggest takeaway from the White House Tech Meetup was that the answers to these pressing questions will not be found in Washington. Rather, we will find the answers in communities and cities across the country creating new ways to build inroads into the digital economy. At stake is nothing less than our continued competitiveness.

There is some tremendously valuable and innovative work happing right here in Chicago: the CyberNavigators, YouMedia and Maker Labs at the Chicago Public Library; the Smart Communities program model piloted by LISC Chicago that drives households online, improves digital skills and increases real incomes for working families; and the deliberate ecosystem-building work we do at Smart Chicago. Programs like i.c. stars. Places like BLUE1647. Projects like LargeLots.org. There are many, many others.

It was a real privilege to participate in the White House Tech Meetup, learn from leaders from all across America and share one part of Chicago’s comprehensive approach to driving full participation in the digital economy.

We truly have an opportunity to be a model for the nation.

Tech Organizing in Chicago

Adapted from notes for a talk delivered at the White House Tech Meetup
April 17, 2015

Good afternoon. I’m Demond Drummer and I bring greetings from Englewood, on the south side of Chicago.

In Chicago I lead a cross-sector partnership to engage residents and local businesses in every neighborhood to achieve full participation in the digital economy. We call this effort The Connect Chicago Challenge.

Tech organizing is a core component of our strategy to engage communities across the city. This is the work I’ve done in my neighborhood, Englewood, for the past 4 years. This is the work I want to talk to you about today.

I’m a tech organizer. Tech organizers trace our lineage to the Mississippi Freedom Movement. If you recall, the Jim Crow South used literacy tests to create a wall to block black people from fully participating in our democracy. Savvy organizers focused on literacy to build power and tear down that wall.

Despite its obvious advantages technology, by default, reinforces existing patterns of power and inequality. In my neighborhood – and in communities across America – technology is a wall blocking many people from fully participating in society and the digital economy.

Tech organizers focus on digital literacy to build power and tear down that wall.

Digital literacy is more fundamental than skills. Digital literacy is understanding. Digital literacy means we see technology for what it is: a tool to make our lives better and our communities stronger. Digital literacy is about power.

We’ve found that digital literacy is cultivated best in context and in community – a gathering at the senior center, a block club, a parent group at a neighborhood school, or teens working together to build a website for a local business.

In Chicago we seek to achieve full participation in the digital economy. We see tech organizing as a model for driving us toward this goal – in every neighborhood, from the bottom up.

Englewood Codes, summer 2013.

Connect Chicago Meetup re: Badging

Sonja MarzianoApril 17, 2015

Today we a Connect Chicago meetup around badging. Here’s the meeting notes and here’s the video:

We talked about digital badges and connected learning programs and how that relates to the work that happens in technology centers all over the city.

First, members from the Hive Chicago’s Community STEM Badging Ecosystem Equity Group talked about their work around finding ways to make digital badging more accessible to all learners.

Presenters included:

Amaris Alanis-Ribeiro, Manager, Secondary Education and Career Programs at Chicago Botanic Garden
Jennifer Bundy, Program Manager at Adler Planetarium
Michael Garrity, Communications Coordinator at The Anti-Cruelty Society
Syda Taylor, Director of Programs and Community Relations at Project Exploration

The Community STEM digital badge ecosystem (CSTEMBE) is continuing the Hive-supported work of the C-STEMM digital badge working group, which developed and pilot tested a STEM digital badge ecosystem to recognize youth and communicate out-of-school learning across institutions.

There are 14 organizations, across Chicago and nationally, that are developing the badging ecosystem, expanding the scope nationally, and addressing the critical challenges of equity/access, how badges are valued and integrated across institutions, and the creation of a seamless badging technology that supports student learning.

There are 4 working groups – equity, integration, technology, and valuing. The Equity working group is specifically exploring ways to make technology-based badges accessible to all learners!

Tené Gray, Director of Operations & Professional Development at Digital Youth Network (DYN), will also talk about DYN’s role in the Chicago City of Learning.

Digital Youth Network (DYN) is a project that supports organizations, educators and researchers in learning best practices to help develop our youths’ technical, creative, and analytical skills. They also helped to develop and implement the Chicago City of Learning (CCOL).

CCOL is an initiative that joins together learning opportunities for youth and allows them to earn digital badges that provide permanent recognition of the achievements made through their activities.

Also, it’s easy to share information about your programs right here in this meetup. Just sign up and let us know what you are up to!

Erin Simpson: Assessing the Use & Impact of Public Computing Centers in Chicago

Christopher WhitakerFebruary 2, 2015

At our last Connect Chicago Meetup, Erin Simpson presented about her study on public computing center use in Chicago. Simpson is a Public Policy Student at the University of Chicago & Civic Tech Fellow at Microsoft, and stopped by to talk about her research of Connect Chicago locations, occurring over the next two months.

Erin Simpson presents at Connect Chicago

Simpson’s goal is to create a base of knowledge for future research in this area. The final report will be a thirty to fifty page thesis. Public computing centers are funded and run by several different organizations each with their own goals . The study aims to see what goals have been accomplished since Chicago first set out to close the digital divide.

The study will also try to learn more about digital-physical interaction in communities.

The study will be on current research being done about the digital divide in Chicago. As Simpson points out, the main predictor of somebody not having broadband internet at home is their socioeconomic status.

Simpson will try to survey at least 250 people who use public computing centers. The survey will be available in both English and Spanish and will offer three cash prizes to participants as a way to encourage people to take the survey.

Simpson is also wanting to hear stories from community organizations that run public computing centers in order to get their stories.

You can listen to the entire presentation here:

You can find our more information about the Connect Chicago here.

Connect Chicago Featured in Report on how mapping is used to expand access to education environments

Smart ChicagoJanuary 30, 2015

The Connect Chicago website, a resourced maintained by Smart Chicago showing free computer access and digital skills locations across the city, is featured in Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities. Published at New America, an organization “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age” and authored by Lindsey Tepe, Policy Analyst in their Education Policy Program, here’s how they frame the report:

Rising income inequality has been the subject of heated debate in 2014, and education is often proffered as a remedy. But do all American learners have access to the educational opportunities that lead to success in the 21st century?

In a new report, Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities, author Lindsey Tepe argues for the greater use of community-level mapping to answer this question, exposing at the local level where resources are abundant and where there are disparities. The report spotlights examples of mapping initiatives that span the education spectrum—across early learning, public school, higher education, and informal learning environments such as computing centers and public libraries.

Here’s an extended snip about the Connect Chicago site:

Recognizing that many other public institutions, in addition to community technology centers, provide access to computing technologies and wireless connectivity, the city of Chicago began the project Connect Chicago. The project was designed to help residents throughout the city identify spaces where they could go to access information online. As Chicago’s Office of Innovation and Technology explains, “Connect Chicago brings all these resources to one virtual place, allowing residents and visitors—including those with limited digital skills—to easily find convenient and publicly-accessible technology resources and services.”

To easily find these resources and services, Connect Chicago mapped their locations, along with pertinent information such as operating hours. Residents of the city can search on smartphones by address—or by physical maps posted throughout Chicago’s public transit system—to locate the closest places where they can access computers to go online. The map includes community technology centers along with other informal learning environments that have online access, including public libraries and schools, city college campuses, senior centers, workforce centers, youth career development centers, and even Chicago Housing Authority locations that provide wireless Internet access.

You can download the report directly here.

Thoughts on the Gigabit City Summit

Smart ChicagoJanuary 20, 2015

Last week, I traveled with Kyla Williams, Sonja Marziano, and Christopher Whitaker to Kansas City, MO for the Gigabit City Summit – A three-day learning and networking opportunity exclusively designed for leaders in current and emerging Gigabit Cities.

Gigabit City Summit

The host city of Kansas City was chosen to be the first city with Google Fiber. Gigabit cities have internet download speeds of up to one gigabit of data per second. To compare, Chicago has an average internet download speed of 23 mbs/s. Clearly, this gives Kansas City a significant advantage.

There are many technology solutions that are limited by the bandwidth currently available in most homes and businesses. Gigabit speeds allow developers to use much more data and information to power their apps. It’s not just making Netflix load faster – there are several examples of applications that only work with gigabit speeds. This line of technological development would have huge impact into economic development as gigabit speeds would attract high tech companies.

At the other end of the spectrum, are advocates in cities who see gigabit internet as a way to close the digital divide. Gigabit internet requires substantial investment in infrastructure and the process of adding the necessary fiber lines can be a boon for digital access. This can be used for the delivery of regular Internet connections via wifi and other less speedy but still critical modes.

At Smart Chicago we care about digital access and digital skills, so we care about the city-based networks that are necessary to support people. That’s why we sent a whole delegation to Kansas City— so that we can share our model with others who toil in these fields.

We’ve got a pretty good history of this, including co-hosting a US Ignite conference in June 2013. This long-form attention is critical to our work— we don’t give up.

I was impressed with at the conference was the effort that Kansas City took to ensure they used the project to both connect every neighborhood with fiber and make serious investments into digital literacy.

Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, MO delivering the welcome at the Gigabit City Summit

In 2012, the Mayors’ Bistate Innovation Team published the playbook “Playing to win in America’s Digital Crossroads.” The team, made up of experts from both Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KC, had begun to work on the playbook after the announcement that Kansas City would be the first metro area with Google Fiber.

Right from the beginning the playbook made digital inclusion a priority stating, “high-speed fiber can not reach it’s potential if large segments of society are excluded from it’s benefits.”

One of the ways that Kansas City is working to ensure digital inclusion is the Digital Inclusion Fund. It is housed at the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and made possible by Google Fiber, the Sprint Foundation, The Illig Family Foundation, Polsinelli, Global Prairie and JE Dunn. In 2013, they spent $311,600 on digital literacy programs in Kansas City.

Kansas City also has programs that provide refurbished computers to low-income residents thanks to the work being done by Connecting for Good.

This one-two punch goes a long way to bridging the digital divide in Kansas City.

The story of how gigabit internet impacts education

The Gigabit City Summit also featured an education track to discuss education’s role in building a smart connected city.

For this track, the conference organizers invited teachers from the area to participate in the Summit. The group discussed STEM education, job skills, and next generation learning.

There are several apps that take advantage of gigabit speeds to help in the classroom. One of our favorite examples is the software lending library that allows Kansas City residents to use their gigabit connections to go onto the library’s servers and use commercial software like Photoshop and Microsoft Office from their home computers.

President Obama’s big push for gigabit internet

One of the big challenges with generating greater speeds and access is lack of competition among internet providers. Communities like Burlington, Vermont decided to tackle this issue by just building their own network. The city provides gigabit broadband in the same way that they provide water to residents.

Larger cable and internet companies have pushed to have laws passed in states to forbid the practice.

Last week, during the conference, the White House released a report about the benefits of community broadband solutions and the President came out in full support of net neutrality, gigabit internet, and community-based broadband solutions. President Obama also announced several federal initiatives help cities get gigabit internet including expanding grants and loans to help expand broadband internet to rural communities.Here’s the President on the issue:

Susan Crawford’s passionate call for equal access to high speed internet

The Summit’s keynote was author Susan Crawford. Crawford spoke about how access to reliable high speed internet is a social justice issue. She linked the current struggle for high speed internet for all with the electrification debates in the 1920’s and how it took federal intervention ensure that all homes were provided with electricity.

Crawford praised the President’s plan to knock down the federal regulations that make it more difficult for cities to build their own gigabit networks. She called the speech “Obama’s FDR moment” and spoke about how there is no better time to be building fiber in America.

It’s hard to capsulize Susan’s Crawford into a single blog post – so we definitely recommend checking out her book Captive Audience.

There’s more work to do

There’s a lot more work do to when it comes to ensuring every resident of Chicago has the access and skills needed to take full advantage of the power of the internet. In 2015, we’re going to be going to be launching additional initiatives to help bridge the digital divide here in Chicago. Join us!

Connect Chicago