Ecosystem

City of Chicago Tech Plan Update

Smart ChicagoJune 25, 2015

At Techweek, City of Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman announced an 18-month update to Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Chicago’s first Tech Plan was first launched in 2013 and laid out a strategy to establish Chicago as a national and global center of technological innovation.

Since it’s launch, Chicago’s civic technology community has made significant progress towards the goals of the tech plan.

As a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology, Smart Chicago is proud to be heavily involved in the implementation of Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Here are some highlights from the update.

Next Generation Infrastructure

Chicago is working with internal and external partners to improve the speed, availability, and affordability of broadband across the city. The City is preparing to create a Request for Proposal for companies to design, construct, implement, and manage a gigabit-speed broadband network.

In addition to broadband infrastructure, the city is also working to digitally connect it’s infrastructure. Part of this includes the launch of The Array of Things project which will place network of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago collecting real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. (You can listen to their presentation at Chi Hack Night here.) You can already get up to the hour updates on beach conditions thanks to sensors maintained by the Chicago Park District. The Department of Innovation and Technology has loaded the information onto their data portal.

Make Every Community a Smart Community

One of the major efforts of the civic technology community in Chicago is closing the digital divide in every neighborhood.

Much of the work in the coming months will focus on Connect Chicago. This citywide effort, led by Smart Chicago in partnership with LISC Chicago, Chicago Public Library, World Business Chicago, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology aligns citywide efforts to make Chicago the most skilled, most connected, most dynamic digital city in America.

Here’s more from the Tech Plan about the program:

As part of this initiative, program partners are creating a profile of a fully connected digital community that can be used as a benchmark and will provide best-practice toolkits and other resources to help all Chicago communities reach this benchmark.

If you’re interested in getting involved in – you should reach out or join the Connect Chicago Meetup!

Another big part of the City’s strategy to close the digital divide in Chicago involves the Chicago Public Library. Libraries around the city already function as public computing centers and now they provide Internet to Go – a program where residents can check out laptops and 4G modems so that they can access the internet at home.

The City of Chicago and the civic tech community is also heavily focused not only access, but on digital skills. The Chicago Public Library’s Cybernavigator Program is set to be expanded and Chicago Public School is working on implementing computer science curriculum at all schools.

On our end, Smart Chicago is working with Get In Chicago to run a youth-led tech program this summer. The conceptual model for this program is “youth-led tech”, which means teaching technology in the context of the needs & priorities of young people. Youth will learn how to use free and inexpensive Web tools to make websites and use social media to build skills, generate revenue, and get jobs in the growing technology industry. They will also learn about all sorts of other jobs in tech— strategy, project management, design, and so on.

Effective Government

The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is also making great progress in using data to help city government be more efficient and effective. One of their first projects, WindyGrid, is a geospatial Web application designed by the City’s Department of Innovation and Technology that strategically consolidates Chicago’s big data into one easily accessible location. WindyGrid presents a unified view of City operations—past and present—across a map of Chicago, giving City personnel access to the city’s spatial data, historically and in real time, to better coordinate resources and respond to incidents.

The City of Chicago will be open sourcing the project later this year on their Github page.

That’s not the only open source project that the city has on the books. Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr recently spoke at Chi Hack Night to talk about their new system to predict the riskiest restaurants in order to prioritize food inspections. The system has found a way to find critical food safety violations seven days faster. Aside from the important aspect of less people getting sick from foodborne illness in the City of Chicago, there is another very important aspect of this work that has national impact. The entire project is open source and reproducible from end to end.

Since the release of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago has been working with the Chicago Department of Public Health on the Foodborne Chicago project. Foodborne listens to Twitter for tweets about food poisoning and converts them into city service requests. The Tech Plan update has some results from the project.

A study of the system, published by the Centers for Disease Control, found that during March 2013 – January 2014, FoodBorne Chicago identified 2,241 “food poisoning” tweets originating from Chicago and neighboring suburbs. The complaints identified 179 Chicago restaurant locations; at 133 (74.3%) locations, CDPH inspectors conducted unannounced health inspections. A total of 21 (15.8%) of the 133 restaurants reported through FoodBorne Chicago failed inspection and were closed; an additional 33 restaurants (24.8%) passed with conditions, indicating that serious or critical violations were identified and corrected during inspection or within a specified timeframe.

Chicago’s open data portal is also getting expanded as part of the updated Tech Plan having grown by more than 200 data sets over the last two years. Chicago was the first City to accept edits to select data sets through the City’s GitHub account.

Open311 is also getting an upgrade with the city undergoing a procurement processes to build a new 311 system. As part of the process for upgrading 311, the new system will go through user testing through the Civic User Testing Group.

Civic Innovation

A big part of the city’s strategy around civic innovation is supporting the work of civic technologists here in Chicago. As part of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago will continue to provide resources to civic technologists like developer resources, user testing, and financial support to civic technology projects.

The Tech Plan also calls out our work with the Chicago School of Data. The two day experience was wholly based on the feedback we received from dozens of surveys, months of interviews, and a huge amount of research into the work being done with data in the service of people. If you missed the conference, here are some of the key takeaways.

The Civic User Testing Group also plays a part in the Tech Plan and has recently been expanded to include all of Cook County.

Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman stated that Chicago has the strongest civic innovation community in the country. A large part of that community has been the Chi Hack Night, now in it’s fourth year with attendance now reaching over 100 people regularly.

Technology Sector Growth

One of the most thorny issues for civic technologist is the issue of government procurement. One of the things that the city has been doing is meeting with different groups to talk about ways the city can make it easier to buy products and services from smaller business and startups. (You can see Brenna Berman’s talk at the OpenGov Chicago Meetup here.)

As part of the Tech Plan, the City of Chicago is taking this on directly. Here’s the quote from the Tech Plan:

This summer, DoIT will release a Request for Qualifications for start-up and small-sized companies to join a new pool of pre-qualified vendors eligible for future City procurement opportunities. Companies who are deemed qualified will be placed into a pool and receive access to City contract opportunities in the areas of software application development and data analytics.

To further decrease the barriers facing smaller-sized companies in competing for City business, the City has modernized its insurance requirements to allow for pooled insurance plans. Start-ups that are members of an incubator, such as 1871, or smaller companies that come together for a group insurance plan, may now meet the City’s insurance requirements as a group. Insurance requirements were identified as a barrier to conducting business with the City in a series of listening sessions conducted over the past year with these companies.

This is a huge opportunity not only for civic tech companies, but it will enable the city to take advantage of the innovation coming out of these companies.

You can read the full tech plan here.

On Open Data + Mass Joy at the Personal Democracy Forum

Smart ChicagoJune 10, 2015

Last week I spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum about the Jackie Robinson West Little League baseball team, open data, and what we should do as practitioners of civic tech and members of society.

Here’s a video:

And here are the notes I used for the talk:

Yesterday morning here at PDF, we heard, for the first time I can remember in the world of civic tech, a lot about the workers and the masses. Specifically, the morning sessions around Civic Tech and Powerful Movements:

Reckoning With Power
Eric Liu

Creative Collision: How Business and Social Movements Will Reshape Our Future
Palak Shah

Putting Labor in the Lab: How Workers Are Rebooting Their Future
Carmen Rojas

Labor Codes: The Power of Employee-Led Online Organizing
Jess Kutch

Powerful Platform, Powerful Movements
Dante Barry

The Net as a Public Utility
Harold Feld

In the summer of 2014, in the city of Chicago, Illinois, a youth baseball team called Jackie Robinson West came out of nowhere (well, at least according to the vast millions of Chicagoans who don’t follow such things) to compete for the World Championship in the Little League Baseball World Series.

It was a team of African-American kids from Chicago’s South Side, and they competed and won at the highest levels. They beat some kids from Las Vegas to play for world championship. Their uniforms said, “Great Lakes”, which makes sense when you’re looking at a map of the world for a world series.

They lost, but valiantly. For about a week and a half, a segregated city was united on something completely incontrovertible: that these kids were awesome, and they were ours. Cue the parade, the T-shirt sales, the mass joy. This was a shared experience that politicians and regular people crave— to be in communion. A surprise summer experience. So we had a parade. The route was amazing.

The kids were on floats and they got adoration.

Then, one morning in February we learned in breaking news fashion that Jackie Robinson West’s U.S. title was vacated. They had placed players on their team who did not qualify to play because they lived outside the team’s boundaries.

We discovered that a coach from an opposing team from the suburbs of Chicago (the Evergreen Park Athletic Association vice president) had discovered this fact and brought it to the attention of the officials at Little League Baseball.

This matter is based on the stuff that civic tech is made of— boundaries, maps, points, addresses, data, records, municipalities. It felt so “us”. Civic tech methodology.

And I realized this vice-president of a suburban little league baseball association was one of us. Just another person who used public data to answer a question— to achieve his civic goals. And he was right. He was a whistleblower. Based on dots. Based on facts. To be fair— based on true data.

But what should we do— those of us in civic tech— what should we do? what should we work on? Mass joy.

At Smart Chicago, that’s what we focus on. Smart Chicago is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology. We work on increasing access to the Internet, improving skills for using the Internet, and developing meaningful products from data that measurably contribute to the quality of life of residents in our region and beyond. Our three primary areas of focus under which we organize all of our work: Access to the Internet & technology, Skills to use technology once you’ve got access, and Data, which we construe as something meaningful to look at once you have access and skills.

Our Civic Works project, funded in part by the Knight Foundation, a program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support for civic innovation in Chicago. Part of what we do is support an ecosystem of products, people, and services to have more impact. One of the products we support is Textizen, a web platform that sends, receives, and analyzes text messages so you can reach the people you serve. Mass joy through voting on dance competitions.

Another project is Smart Health Centers, a project that places trained health information specialists in clinics to assist patients in connecting to their own medical records and find reliable information about their own conditions. We employ people who have never been a part of the IT industry and give them good jobs helping people with computers. Mass joy through knowledge and jobs.

Another is the Civic User Testing Group, a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps. We tested our product, Expunge.io, with real people. The joy of clearing one’s name and being heard.

I am a father of two boys, both of whom have played youth baseball for years. There’s joy there, I know it. You’re at third base, don’t stay here.

There’s a rainbow over home plate. Go get it.

We have choices every day when we wake up. Let’s make sure we make the right ones.

Sonja Marziano Presents CUTGroup at Civic Design Camp

Sonja MarzianoApril 25, 2015

Today I presented the Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) at Chicago Civic Design Camp. Civic Design Camp is a one-day gathering of practicing designers of all stripes with local government officials interested in using design to improve the services they provide to citizens.

I am excited to be part of this event, since the CUTGroup incorporates feedback from regular residents in the process of design and redesign of civic websites and apps. I will talk about the practical skills in running CUTGroup and how CUTGroup is a new model for UX testing, digital skills building, and community engagement.

Here is my presentation:

CUTGroup Presentation for Chicago Civic Design Camp from smarziano

Data is Small: On The Table Conversation on Data and Society

Andrew SeederApril 25, 2015

Editor’s note: Andrew Seeder is a consultant to Smart Chicago who has worked on Chicago School of Data and other important initiatives. Join his On the Table session about the techniques and resources available for people who want to use data to make society a better place to live.

I tried to settle on an attention-grabbing lead for this post about ethics, something that would make you wonder about equity and ownership, about the differences between data big and small — maybe the monkey selfie, Facebook’s emotional contagion study, UPS’s happiness algorithm, or that it would take you a month to read a year’s worth of privacy agreements. I thought about my cousin loading pallets in a warehouse, his movements timed by fractions of seconds and measured against his pay. People reading this post likely do not need to be convinced that data has had — and will continue to have — a positive impact on society. Examples abound.

Smart Chicago is focused, in part, on making sure that data works for people. Not just anybody, though. Everybody. In the words of Jane Addams: “The good we secure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.” Information is data that works. Information helps people make decisions, makes people’s lives easier, makes cities better, more efficient. We think more information from the bottom up will make society a better place to live for everybody.

Look at the work we’ve already done. Expunge.io helps people slice through bureaucracy to erase their juvenile record. The CUT Group is developing a methodology for including people in the application design process. Connect Chicago helps build access digital skills in all neighborhoods. Foodborne Chicago uses Twitter and machine learning to help people with food poisoning communicate with the Department of Public Health.

These projects do good. They make data work. But making data work for people isn’t an easy thing. Using data to help make society a better place to live— data ethics— requires imagination. It comes from a place of empathy. It means thinking about what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. And it also means asking people questions and then collaborating together. Civic tech tries to imagine and create real positive changes in people’s lives, the sort of changes you can point to and see, cause if you can’t see what changes you’ve made, have you actually changed anything at all?

When people talk about data and ethics together, the conversation often revolves around experiments that use “human subjects.” Responsible use of data about people is a keystone in data ethics, especially in terms of anonymization and privacy protection.

For this year’s On the Table, held on May 12th, I’m going to host a conversation about the techniques and resources available for people who want to use data to make society a better place to live. The end-result will be a fully documented discussion about consent and, hopefully, an open consent agreement template. In the spirit of collaboration, though, I’m happy to see our efforts develop organically. Consent is an important topic in many different parts of society. No one solution is going to affect all the places where consent is needed.

If you’re interested you can sign up here. Or tweet me. The conversation is tentatively scheduled to start at 1pm and end at 3:30pm. I’ll follow up with another blog post and I’ll incorporate what we find in Smart Chicago’s upcoming Chicago School of Data book. This will include a draft open consent agreement template to work from. Stay tuned.

Terry Mazany speaks at the Chicago School of Data Days conference

The value of small wins in building the civic innovation community

Christopher WhitakerApril 23, 2015

One of the most common pieces of advice I give to civic innovation communities that are just starting up is to start with small wins.

Chicago’s civic innovation ecosystem has been up and running for awhile and we’re currently working on some big, substantial, and complicated projects. The ecosystem here has launched companies, startups, conferences, and boasts one of the largest hack nights in the country.

Even though it seems like Chicago is far far ahead, these efforts didn’t come out of nowhere fully formed. It’s taken time, investment, and effort to get the civic innovation engine running at full power. It’s also a process that’s repeatable. What’s helped to build the ecosystem here has been a series of small wins that grew into bigger ones. With each small win, we spread the news of what we can do with civic innovation – and that gives the community members more credibility to do bigger things.

A good example is the work surrounding the Chicago Department of Public Health. The Chicago Department of Public Health was one of the first government agencies to engage in the civic technology community. (September 11th, 2012 at OpenGov Hack Night to be exact!) That session at hack night resulted in the Chicago Flu Shot app by Tom Kompare. That app quickly spread and was hailed as a great way to for civic hackers to help their cities fight the flu.

Now, the Chicago Department of Public Health is working on advanced apps like Foodborne Chicago and working with Smart Chicago to run an entire Smart Health Center program.

But it started out small.

The small wins strategy isn’t just a Chicago phenomenon. In Philadelphia, a lawyer named Corey Arci was attending his first Code for Philly meetup when he found a derelict bike tracking app from Austin. He worked with others to redeploy the app to Philadelphia. He then worked with Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission to launch a regional study using CyclePhilly data.

Small wins turn into bigger wins.

When first starting out, a small win can ease the fears of those in government who may see the ‘civic hacking’ term and freak out a little. An example of a small win can be something as simple as putting dots on a map. (Like the flu shot app) or redeploying an existing app (like CutePetsDenver).

It doesn’t matter how small the project is. The point is to show what’s possible and then turn around and go. OK, with this static list of flu shots locations we could do this. With a little more open data and support we could do this!

The other major part of this is that after you get the small win – you have to tell the story. Telling your story not only builds your group’s credibility, but it also helps attract people to come join your group. If you don’t tell your story – nobody else will. Don’t be afraid to brag after you get your wins.

From there, you can use that momentum to help work on other projects which will yield bigger wins. Powerhouses take time to build, but they all start small and the steps are all repeatable. None of this is magic.

If you’d like help in getting your first small win – consider checking out the Organizing Resources page on the National Day of Civic Hacking website.

Christopher Whitaker Presents at Japan’s Civic Tech Conference

Smart ChicagoMarch 24, 2015

Our own Christopher Whitaker will be giving a keynote speech in Tokyo this weekend at the Civic Tech Forum.

The Civic Tech Forum is a billed as a place to talk about resolving regional issues through the hands of citizens who take advantage of the technology. It is organized in partnership with Code for Japan and will feature civic innovators from around Japan to talk about the future of civic innovation in Japan.

Christopher will talk about the Chicago experience in helping build a civic innovation ecosystem and how it takes collaboration from both government agencies, non-profit foundations, civic technology startups, and community activists to make it work.

Here’s his slides from his talk:

You can get more information about the event on the Civic Tech Forum website or follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #civictechjp.

Reckoning With Power Eric Liu
Creative Collision: How Business and Social Movements Will Reshape Our Future Palak Shah
Putting Labor in the Lab: How Workers Are Rebooting Their Future Carmen Rojas
Labor Codes: The Power of Employee-Led Online Organizing Jess Kutch
Powerful Platform, Powerful Movements Dante Barry
The Net as a Public Utility Harold Feld