Foodborne Chicago

Foodborne Chicago Affected by Twitter Geocoding Issue

Cory NissenApril 7, 2015

Foodborne Chicago is an application that provides an easy online interface to report incidents of food poisoning to the Chicago Department of Public Health through the city’s open311 interface. This allows residents to fill out a simple online form to report an incident instead of calling 311 directly.

Regardless of the mode of reporting, the reports end up at the Health Department, where they are reviewed. If a given case meets the Health Department’s criteria, a CDPH inspector is sent to the restaurant to do an inspection. In many cases, nothing is found, but in some cases, serious violations are found and fixed.

The second part of the application uses the Twitter API to proactively find folks complaining of food poisoning in Chicago and send them a link to the form to fill out a report. The Twitter API takes a bounding box (the Chicago area) and a search term (food poisoning) and returns those tweets. Since the end of November 2014, the number of tweets that the API returns have gone down drastically. Here’s a graph of the number of daily tweets since 2014:

Foodborne Chicago was not the only application to be affected by this issue.

There was an issue logged on the twittercommunity.com message board. An engineer from Twitter replied that there are two issues affecting the number of tweets returned. One is low coverage of tweets with explicit geocodes attached and the second issue is the lack of fallback to the user profile for location approximation. At first the engineers gave an estimate of days to get the issue resolved. The final update has a start date for work on the fix no earlier than April 1, 2015. Hopefully, a team has been assembled and is working on it now.

The Foodborne Chicago application continues to see an increase in the number of submission via the web form, but this Twitter issue has affected our ability to be proactive and respond to those directly affected with food poisoning. This is a graph of the number of submissions per week through the Foodborne Chicago web form since January 2014:

This Twitter API issue hasn’t prevented us from being effective in Chicago, but it’s unclear how many more submissions and cases of food poisoning would have been caught with a proactive approach that is enabled using the Twitter API. Twitter has been a great tool for us, and we hope they can fix this issue soon.

Foodborne Chicago and Flooding the Box

Smart ChicagoNovember 4, 2014

It was interesting to see on Twitter a discussion started when Foodborne Chicago was clumped with the Boston’s Streetbump app. I jumped in a bit, but I’m not much of a Twitter convo person, as I use it more to make art (first tweet!) than anything else. So I thought it write a bit about our conceptual models for creating software.

First off, at Smart Chicago we have a software philosophy:

We believe in making the smallest amount of software to be useful to the largest amount of people in connecting residents to their government, their institutions, and each other.

In the longer explication of that philosophy, we have this:

It also means that we acknowledge and use the immense World Wide Web for what it is, rather than what part we own. An example of this is Foodborne Chicago, where, instead of making a new place for people to post messages about food poisoning, we go to the place where people are already talking about it.

I really wish that more developers published their philosophy of software. It helps guide things, and helps us understand that when we make things, we aren’t just publishing code to be forked, but models to be emulated and improved upon.

Flooding the box

One of my favorite conceptual models for software is “flood the box”. Flooding the box for us means making it easier for regular residents to kick off an official process.

Expunge.io floods the box for the long and complicated juvenile records expungement process. Foodborne Chicago floods the box for the process of investigating possible instances of food poisoning.

In each instance, there are many other routes to the “box”. Our goal is to use the smallest amount of software to connect more people to those processes, to those boxes.

If someone chooses to call 311, which they do hundreds of thousands times per year (take a look at the staffing plans, call volume per shift, efficiency rates, and other stats here), they can do that. If they saw something in the paper and it stimulates a service request through the Open 311 system in Foodborne, that works, too. More routes to the box.

Then the CUTGroup comes in. We watch what happens as people use the software we made. We design tests to elicit feedback on what we see are the current flaws in our system, and we talk with people in public libraries and computer centers all over the city.

Then we look honestly and directly at the results. We use qualitative & quantitative data and we make changes to our software in order to increase our effectiveness at direct connections between people who need help and the people who can help them.

Moar

In the context of our Knight Foundation deep dive project, we are working on new models for working directly with real residents, wherever they are, to find new boxes, and new floods. Always open.

Here’s analysis from our Foodborne Chicago CUTGroup test. It includes 74 pages of raw data and the complete text of every response from all 17 testers. As an aside, 71% of our 840 CUTGroup testers— drawn from every ward in the city— answered “yes” to the question, “have you ever called 311?”.

Sometimes its the simplest things. And always we find value in the process. When coupled with our software philosophy and sound conceptual models, it leads to work with integrity. More to come!

CUTGroup #9 – Foodborne Chicago

Sonja MarzianoJune 18, 2014

We conducted our ninth Civic User Testing Group as a part of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build communication strategies to engage with targeted communities through Foodborne Chicago, an app that searches Twitter for tweets related to food poisoning and helps report these incidents to the Chicago Department of Public Health.

Here are the outcomes we will achieve through the Knight grant:

This project will result in improved communications strategies for targeting key cultural groups on social media. The team will conduct research activities to identify the best approaches for communicating with these groups, implement and test new strategies in Food Bourne software and release a report with the findings of the research.

Continue reading →

Video Interview with Joe Olson of Foodborne Chicago

Christopher WhitakerMay 22, 2014

Foodborne Chicago is a website that connects people who complain about food poisoning on Twitter to the people who can help them out— the Chicago Department of Public Health. This Smart Chicago Collaborative Project recently had it’s one year anniversary and has responded to over 300 food illness tweets and has initiated over 60 different restaurant inspections in the City of Chicago.

An early schematic of Foodborne Chicago

To learn more about how the site works, we sat down with Joe Olson to talk about how they’re using machine learning and APIs to help the health department combat foodborne illness.

Continue reading →

Knight Prototype Fund Grant Awarded to Joe Olson to be Administered by Smart Chicago

Smart ChicagoJanuary 1, 2014

Today the Knight Foundation awarded a Prototype Fund award to Joe Olson, one of the developers of Foodborne Chicago, to “develop strategies to engage with targeted communities currently being missed through Chicago’s Twitter-based food poisoning incident detection system.”

Smart Chicago, through our fiscal agent, The Chicago Community Trust, is going to administer this grant. We are also helping out by using our CUTGroup program.

The Minds Behind Foodborne Chicago

Smart ChicagoAugust 12, 2013

Here’s a story in today’s Chicago Tribune about the Foodborne Chicago project (larger snip below).

On the About page of the Foodborne Chicago website, we have a section called “Genesis”. It lists, in chronological order, the people who had something to do with this project. It was such a unique and long-time-in-coming collaboration, so we all wanted to make sure that we got the whole history down cold.

What that page fails to do (and we’re going to fix that) is highlight the core team that brought this product to market: Joe Olson and Cory Nissen, who did all of the heavy lifting on the Twitter and classification side, and Scott Robbin, who customized the admin tool to meet our needs.

Joe and Cory have been the shepherds of this entire project. They submitted their work to the recent Knight News Challenge for Open Gov Data and have been thought leaders on how to take this technology farther and farther. The idea of using the exhaust fumes of social media to power intelligence in separate systems is near-cliche at this point. But Cory and Joe have built a generic system that depends on humans to train the classification models. All of this means real impact, right now, not just mapping tweets and writing papers. Without these guys, we’d all be refreshing Tweetdeck and mentally pasrsing tweets about Justin Bieber’s tummy.

Here’s copy/paste bios on Joe and Cory:

Joe Olson is a data architect from Chicago, Illinois. He is involved with several Chicago area startups, including Akoya, VGBio, and is a co-founder of Tracklytics, and can usually be found working out of 1871.

Cory Nissen is a statistician at Akoya. Prior to Akoya, he spent time at Allstate Insurance doing market research, including social media text mining and survey analysis.

The other core technology person is Scott Robbin. Here’s him:

Scott Robbin is a web developer from Chicago, Illinois. He is the principal at Robbin & Co., a member of Weightshift, and a recent inductee to the Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40, Class of 2012. Scott is an open government enthusiast, creator of SweepAround.Us and WasMyCarTowed.

I really like my job. I get to hang out with smart people who make real things that help real people.

Here’s a video submitted about their work to the recent Knight News Challenge:

Here’s a snip from today’s story in the Tribune:

Food-poisoning tweets get just desserts: Health authorities seek out sickened Chicagoans, ask them to report restaurants.

Foodborne Chicago, which tweets as @foodbornechi, was developed by Smart Chicago Collaborative, which describes itself as “a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology” and counts the city of Chicago as a founding partner.

The app is billed as part of an ongoing effort by the health department to use technology to make its services more transparent and accessible to citizens. In the past couple of years, officials have placed all health department inspections online, nearly in real time, and posted progress on various health initiatives on a regular basis.

With the expansion of social media, complaints of suspected food poisoning, news of regional outbreaks and general whines about food service establishments have gained audiences well beyond their previous scope.