Connect Chicago

Smart Chicago runs the Connect Chicago website, a listing of more than 250 places in Chicago where you can use a computer for free, and the Connect Chicago meetup group, which is devoted to creating a culture of shared learning in these places.

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.

An open source admin tool for fusion tables

Smart Chicago 1 Comment

Smart Chicago’s Connect Chicago campaign is part of the federal Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. Smart Chicago has helped administer millions of dollars of these funds in programs for its partner, the City of Chicago.

The Connect Chicago location tool tool is a Ruby on Rails app that powers the map and detail page section of our site.




Origins

As part of this project, we hired Chicago developer Derek Eder, who has also worked on other Smart Chicago Collaborative since July 2012. The Connect Chicago Locator originated from Derek’s open source Searchable Map Template. It is powered by the free Google Fusion Tables service that lets you take spreadsheets of data and turn them into maps and other visualizations. His template, which can run on any web server, connects to your Fusion Table, reads in the data, and displays a searchable, filterable map. This template is super-useful and has been used by organizations like the City of Chicago, Chicago Public Schools, and the Chicago Tribune to get map-based sets up and running quickly.

The issue with the Searchable Map Template in the context of this project was that once the map is published, the only way to update it is to directly change the underlying Fusion Table through Google’s interface.

At Connect Chicago, we cover more that 250 places where you can use a computer for free, and it’s important that people in each of these locations (librarians, computer lab managers, social services agency leads, and so on) be able to update their detail page easily.

With an admin tool, managers at each location could update its own detail page with images, tables, contact info and transit directions. As far as we can tell know, no one has made a tool like this for Fusion Tables before.

We also knew that this general idea– the ability for non-technical people to update a robust web map with updated information– was broadly useful to Chicagoans. All of the code for this tool, including the underlying admin module, is available in this package.

One nice feature that I wanted in there, based on my long-term love for Flickr (30,000+ Creative Commons photos posted over nearly a decade): all photos on the detail pages are pulled from Flickr using system-generated unique tags. For example, here’s a bunch of photos I took of the Merlo Library on Belmont and tagged with “pcc-merlo-157 “).

Here’s some technical details from Derek about how we got this done:

The fusion_tables gem

The piece of technology that made these advanced features possible was the fusion_tables gem by Simon Tokumine. This gem, or code library, acts as an interface to read and write data to Fusion Tables from a Ruby application. It sounds simple, but in fact, adds a huge amount of power and convenience for building websites that interact with Fusion Tables. With this gem, we were able to fetch a row based on a URL and populate a detail page with the information. 

Here’s a snippet of how it works (viewing the Connect Chicago Fusion Table alongside will help):

#initialize Fusion Tables API
FT = GData::Client::FusionTables.new      
FT.clientlogin(APP_CONFIG['google_account'], APP_CONFIG['google_password'])
FT.set_api_key(APP_CONFIG['google_api_key'])

@location = FT.execute("SELECT * FROM 
1xy_wp4-NhtKPecuDlhsS8MLO0z-g5ayY1OfBhAg WHERE slug = 
‘roosevelt-library-1101-w-taylor-street';").first

From there, we have a handle on this @location object, and I can access different attributes like:

@location[:organization_name] # returns ‘Roosevelt Library’
@location[:address] # returns ‘1101 W. Taylor St’

Ruby on Rails Active Model framework

Now that we had an easy way to dynamically read data from our Fusion Table, we needed to give our site administrators some way to edit their data. On any web form, you want to make sure that the information people are entering is correct and what you expect. Form validation is the way to do this. Because we were using Ruby on Rails 3, we were able to leverage their powerful Active Model framework to handle it.

Active Model allows you to extend the non-database functionality of Active Record (an Object Relational Mapper) to any object. Remember our @location object we got from our fusion_tables gem? That is just a simple list of attributes and values (otherwise known as a Hash). By using Active Model, however, we can treat it like an Active Record object and get our form validation for free!

Inside the locations_controller:

@location = Location.new(location_edit)
if @location.valid?
   # save our data
else
   # oops! didn’t validate, take them back to the edit page
end

And here’s our location model:

class Location
  include ActiveModel::Validations
  include ActiveModel::Conversion
  extend ActiveModel::Naming

  # this line tells ActiveModel to make sure that orgainzation_name and others aren’t empty when validation is called
  validates_presence_of :organization_name, :organization_type, :org_phone, :address, :city, :state, :zip_code

  def create_method( name, &block )
    self.class.send( :define_method, name, &block )
  end

  def create_attr( name )
    create_method( "#{name}=".to_sym ) { |val| 
      instance_variable_set( "@" + name, val)
    }

    create_method( name.to_sym ) { 
      instance_variable_get( "@" + name ) 
    }
  end

  def initialize(attributes = {})
    #read in a hash of attributes from Fusion Tables and set them as attributes of the model
    #for more, see http://railscasts.com/episodes/219-active-model
    attributes.each do |name, value|
      name = "#{name}"
      create_attr name
      send("#{name}=", value)
    end
  end

  def persisted?
    false
  end
end

Advancing the utility of a useful tool

From here on out, if you need a Searchable Map Template with an easy-to-use admin tool for distributed detail page authorship, use the Connect Chicago Locator Tool. We look forward to seeing what comes of this!

 

Poder Connects Work and Learning in Pilsen

Laura

Poder Learning Center, located in Pilsen, is an English learning center currently serving almost 150 students. The center opened in 1997 to meet the needs of Chicago’s growing adult immigrant population, providing first language adult basic education as well as ESL blended with computer training. Unlike at many language academies, computer skills are integrated into all Poder programming, allowing students to develop more comprehensive work skills.

Continue reading →

The National Latino Education Institute Helping to Close the Digital Divide

Laura

The National Latino Education Institute (NLEI) installed 18 new computer terminals at its Community Technology Center, school officials announced.

With the computer upgrade, NLEI reaffirms its intention to increase public access to computers in closing the “digital divide.” Its Community Technology Center is located at NLEI’s main campus at 2011 West Pershing Road in Chicago.

The National Latino Education Institute (NLEI) installed 18 new computer terminals at its Community Technology Center, school officials announced.

With the computer upgrade, NLEI reaffirms its intention to increase public access to computers in closing the “digital divide.” Its Community Technology Center is located at NLEI’s main campus at 2011 West Pershing Road in Chicago.

The National Latino Education Institute (NLEI) installed 18 new computer terminals at its Community Technology Center, school officials announced.

With the computer upgrade, NLEI reaffirms its intention to increase public access to computers in closing the “digital divide.” Its Community Technology Center is located at NLEI’s main campus at 2011 West Pershing Road in Chicago.

The National Latino Education Institute (NLEI) installed 18 new computer terminals at its Community Technology Center, school officials announced.

With the computer upgrade, NLEI reaffirms its intention to increase public access to computers in closing the “digital divide.” Its Community Technology Center is located at NLEI’s main campus at 2011 West Pershing Road in Chicago. Continue reading →