Hackathon

Hacking for Chicago’s Youth at the Adler Planetarium

Christopher Whitaker 1 Comment

Youth Hackathon at Adler Planetarium #hackforchange

For National Day of Civic Hacking, the Adler Planetarium hosted hackathon to encourage young people to get involved in civic hacking. The event teamed youth with mentors to help create web applications and info-graphics around issues facing youth. Mentors included representatives from a number of organizations including the University of Chicago, Chicago Architecture Foundation, Mikva Challenge, and the Adler Planetarium.

There were several projects that came out of the weekend which we’re featuring here.

The first team put together a site called Healthy Sex that lets youth learn more about sexual health by entering their gender and sexual orientation. The site also directs youths to free health resources near them.

The next project was one that addressed the issue of peer pressure. The site highlights positive aspects of one neighborhood to help combat negative stereotypes. The project’s concept also includes the ability to provide mentorship opportunities between alumni and current students.

The next project involved raising awareness around the challenges facing undocumented workers. The first was to create an info-graphic showing the scope of the problem. The next step was to create an application that let undocumented residents get more information on their eligibility for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.  Lastly, the project helps to facilitate communication to elected officials for the passage of the DREAM act.

The last project involved the issues of food deserts in Chicago. A food desert is an area where there is a lack of nutritional food choices. Using data sets from the City of Chicago, the team mapped out the locations of food deserts in the city in order to better understand how to provide access to fresh produce. The team also received a tour of the Fresh Moves bus; a converted CTA bus that acts as a mobile grocery store.

You can see more results from the Adler Youth Hackathon by visiting the Adler Planetarium website.

Moving Forward After National Day of Civic Hacking

Christopher Whitaker

Derek Eder teaching at Migrahack #hackforchange
National Day of Civic Hacking is over. It was a great event that brought web developers, journalists, designers, community activists, data gurus, and government officials together for a weekend civic hacking. Chicago was the most active city with 412 people taking part in events at Cibola, 1871, and the Adler Planetarium.
Youth Hackathon at Adler Planetarium #hackforchange
As a city, we should be proud of what’s we’ve accomplished. And not just for what happened during National Day of Civic Hacking, but proud of how far we’ve come since the days where the data portal only showed FOIA requests. We should celebrate these wins and in the coming days, we’ll be featuring these successes on the blog.
The City of Chicago's @ryanbriones talking about the idea for a civic needs app #hackforchange
However, it’s far more important to ensure that these efforts continue past this weekend. Civic issues are complicated, complex, and difficult to solve. It will take more than a single weekend to find solutions to these problems. As a community, we need to continue to connect civic technologists to community activists who are wrestling with civic issues on a daily basis. We must continue to outreach to every neighborhood in Chicago and ensure that the apps we build help the everyday Chicagoan and not just the geeks. While this weekend has been a fantastic weekend to organize around civic innovation there is still a lot of work to be done.
.@JazminBeltran learning data animation at @migrahack #hackforchange

We met a lot of people over the weekend: Journalists, scientists, community organizers, web developers and designers. We need to connect the dots and form new partnerships to help solve problems in our neighborhoods. We would love to stay in touch with everyone who participated in National Day of Civic Hacking. If that sounds good to you, please fill out this quick contact form so we can reach out to you about different projects.

On our end, the Smart Chicago Collaborative is offering the following to any and all participants of Chicago’s National Day of Civic Hacking.

1) We encourage everyone to continue their projects at the OpenGovChicago Hack Nights. They’e every Tuesday at 6:00pm inside 1871. The events are free and these nights are a great way to work on long term projects.

2) If you have a civic app that benefits the people of Chicago, you can get the app hosted on Smart Chicago Collaborative’s servers for free.

3) Smart Chicago will provide user testing to any Chicago civic app for free. Through the Civic User Testing Group, civic developers in Chicago have access to hundreds of testers to help test your app in order to improve it and make the best app possible.

4) We will help you tell your story. At the national level, the organizers are accepting submissions for stories about what came out of National Day of Civic Hacking. Teams with the best stories will be invited to The White House to be featured at an event in late July. If you need help writing your story, email cwhitaker(at) cct (dot) org and we’ll help you get your story ready. We’ll also help put together a short video to include with your submission.
Youth Hackathon at Adler Planetarium #hackforchange
It’s an exciting time to be involved in this movement. There are more and more cities getting involved in civic hacking thanks to the efforts of the Code for America brigade and through events like National Day of Civic Hacking. We’re looking forward to continuing this effort in the future.
National Day of Civic Hacking Chicago

Thank You

Smart Chicago Collaborative would like to thank all those that made this weekend possible:

Event locations: 1871, Cibola, and the Adler Planetarium.

Lead Organizations: Institute for Justice Journalism, The Adler Planetarium,  and  Code for America.

Event Sponsors and Partners: Azavea, Center for Evidence-Based Mentoring, Chicago Architecture Foundation,  The Chicago Community Trust, the City of Chicago, Free Spirit Media, Hive Chicago, Knight Lab, The MacArthur Foundation,  Mikva Challenge, Rob Paral, and Open City Apps

Migrahack Projects

Smart Chicago

Chicago Migrahack  was held from May 31 – June 2, 2013 as a part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. I helped judge the hacktahon. Following is my take on the projects, including notes, screenshots, and images from the day. Here is a copy of the spreadsheet the organizers used to manage the projects, here’s the project page on the Migrahack website, and here’s a bunch of photos I took at the event.

The projects are listed in the order in which they were presented. The descriptions include any award the entry won and the commendation presented by the judges for any award.

Judging Migrahack

Judges!

Recipes for Change
This was a concept for an app to help women build an underground support network. Domestic violence is a leading source of crime. It is under-reported, especially among those who are undocumented and/or are not native English speakers. They call it “recipes” and make it look like a normal recipe site. Dots on a map of women who can help them within a 5-mile radius.

Final Presentations at Migrahack

Finding Care
http://tarbell.recoveredfactory.net/findingcare/
By the Los Almighty Windy City Data Hustlers team of Lucio Villa, David Eads, Maria Ines Zamudio, Yana Kunichoff, and Willberto Morales

“I’m being denied life”, says the homepage of this is explainer of stories surrounding the Affordable Care Act. They looked into PUMS data and pulled out some “By the numbers” stuff. All of this is driven by the Tarbell template as well as javascript and jquery.

Finding Care won “Best storytelling with data visualization”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Coherent, elegant narrative with lots of points of departure. Triggers questions for further research. Polished production in short time frame with simple, effective data visualization. Would love to see calls to action– links to advocacy groups, reporting on pending legislation, and so on.

Finding Care

Chicago MigraHack Web App
http://www.20thirty.com/migra/
By Team DePaul (Paul Duszak, Temuulen Erdenekhuu, and Alex McCarten-Gibbs).

This team created a visualization of persons obtaining permanent resident status in the United States, broken down by region of origin. Mainly uses highcharts and other javascript. Allows the user to export all data.

Chicago MigraHack Web App won “2nd place data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Dead-simple visualization that takes a comprehensive look at a central dataset. Provides an understandable, useful, and portable tool for others to explore, understand, and share. Key insights into immigration.

Chicago MigraHack WebApp

Draw The Border and Naco or Naco?
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/naco.html
By Dan Hill

This person made two related entries, both of which play on geographic perception and reality.

Draw the border! presents itself this way:  2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico divides border city pictured below. Can you draw the line that splits this city? Start clicking on the map to create the points to construct your border line and click “Done!” to see the real border in green and learn about the cities on each side.

Draw the border won “Best insight team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Fun, intuitive tool that engages the user and challenges assumptions. Simple presentation that takes an current meme (GeoGuesser) and adds an education element. Extra points for individual creativity, persistence, and execution. Sometimes collaboration is all about just showing up.

Draw the border!

Inspired by GeoGuesser,  Naco or Naco?  is a website that shows a satellite view of a place that contains the border between two cities and prompts the user to draw that border. Naco or Naco? shows Naco, a city that has a country as a border, and presents some basic demographic information as a clue.

Naco or Naco?

Early Childhood Resource Need App
 http://migrahackranch.weebly.com/
 By Team RANCH (Norbert Winklareth, Carlos McReynolds, Heather Gerberich, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, and Rebecca Harris)

The Early Childhood Resource Need App is a map that shows neighborhoods in Chicago color-coded by their need for early childhood education seats, as calculated by the Illinois Facilities Fund, representing thousands of children unable to access preschool and child care programs.

MigraHack Team Ranch

 

Team Maginificent 7
 Antonio Garcia III,  Adam Pearce, ​Cindy Agustin, and Irene Tostados

Three Alarm Data Fire
No presentation
Kenneth Watkins, Oz du Soleil, Sachi Shirasaka

Illinois in the ICE age
http://geoff.terrorware.com/projects/migrahack/
By Ice Breakers (Geoffrey Hing, Tara Tidwell Cullen, Ruth Lopez, Jimmie Glover)

The Illinois in the Ice Age website is a snapshot of a two-month period of ICE activity in Illinois and a look at the journey of 7 people.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Illinois detained 966 individuals during November and December of 2012. During those two months, 915 people also left ICE custody. Many of these individuals entered a detention facility earlier and one individual had been held for more than one year. Of those who left, 390 were deported and 38 agreed to their own removal.

ICE Breakers won the “Best data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

A complex analysis in an original presentation. Deep journalism that is ripe for further analysis and exploration. Contains a clear call to action for others to continuing the work; connecting the dots.

Illinois in the ICE Age

Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America
 http://migrahack-dandelion.herokuapp.com/
By Dandelion Project (Lauren Pabst, Adriana Diaz, Antonio Oliva, Forrest Blount, Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam, Michael Drouet)

Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America focuses on  the demographic changes in Niles and Lisle Townships. Nile, for instance, is attractive to a growing number of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. Lisle  has become increasingly Indian, Chinese and Mexican. The site offers maps, charts, and analyis of these trends.

Dandelion Diaspora

Team Hello World
http://prominent.mie.uic.edu/Project/index.html
Kevin, Vivek, Gaurav, Ankush, Manju Rupani

Team Hello World created a website that looked for statistical correlations between remittance and immigration. They show a map of remittances and allow the user to explore. They also show some findings.

Hello World (Exploring Remittances)

 

Hello World (Exploring Remittances)

72-10
http://infogr.am/Ana-Just-Wants-To-Be-Safe/
Edie Rubinowitz, Adriana Gallardo, Brandon Huntz, Christopher Rudd & Fanny Sampson

This is an infographic story told on inogr.am that tells the story of children detained at the border.

Infographic Ana Just Wants To Be Safe Children Behind Bars infogr.

Undocumented Immigrant Help Tool
 This is a tool for people who are at high risk for deportation.

Final Presentations at Migrahack

Gentrification Study
11square.net/migrahack

Seeks to compare gentrification patterns in Pilsen and Bucktown.

Final Presentations at Migrahack

National Civic Day of Hacking at 1871

Christopher Whitaker

Chicago will be hosting three different events during National Day of Civic Hacking.

  • ChicagoMigrahack: A hackathon focused on immigration issues at Cibola. (May 31st – June 2nd)
  • Hack for Youth: A youth centric hackathon hosted by the Alder Planetarium. (June 1st – June 2nd)
  • Hack for Chicago: A general hackathon at 1871.

Here are a couple of the projects that will be going on during the Hack for Chicago event.

Civic Needs App: (9:30 IMSA Room)

Safer Communities Hackathon at Google Chicago

One of the challenges of civic innovation is matching the resources provided by open government data, and talent of the civic hacking community with the needs of the community. This app is led by a team of Ryan Briones, Scott Robin, and Chris Gansen. The idea behind this app is to help provide an easy interface for community members to recruit web developers for civic projects.

Civic.json:

A branch of the civic needs app will be focused on creating a database of all civic app projects in Chicago using a new template. This will enable people to search for civic projects already in existence in order to either find a solution to a problem or to help improve an existing app.

App Design Workshop with Knight Lab: (9:30am Auditorium)

.@jmm teaching app design at Chicago #OpenGov Hack Night

Miranda Mulligan will be giving an app design workshop at 9:30. This design process doesn’t start with the latest data set, but instead focuses on user needs.

Everyone partners up for the workshop and takes turns interviewing their partners about a particular problem they face. The workshop encourages participants to dig deeper by determining the user’s needs, insights on how they feel about the issue, and then designing an app that fits those needs.

Chicago-Area Red Cross Tech Recruitment: (11:30 Auditorium)

Red Cross Digital Operations Center - Powered by Dell

Red Cross Digital Operations Center, Dell/Creative Commons

Jim McGowan from the Chicago Area Red Cross will be at the event to recruit tech volunteers for the Red Cross. Jim is the manager of the Red Cross Operations Analysis and Disaster Dispatch for the region.

He’ll also be on hand to talk about the Urban Disaster Planning hackathon with Geeks without Bounds occurring June 21st – June 23rd.

Edit-a-thon with OpenStreetMap

12 bike and ped crashes at the highway

Steven Vance/Creative Commons

Ian Dees will be leading an Edit-a-thon for Chicago’s OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is an open source map that anyone can edit. Users can add data to the map including information about their favorite restaurants, cultural venues, and more. We’ll be adding more data to the map as part of the OpenStreetMap Meetup Group. You can register for the event at the Chicago OpenStreetMap Meetup Page here.

 

Chicago Councilmatic Launch: (12:00pm Auditorium)

OpenCity Apps will be launching the Chicago Councilmatic for National Day of Civic Hacking. Councilmatic was originally a Code for America project built for the City of Philadelphia that makes it easy to track city legislation.

 

Whatever you want:

Hacking on Edifice

Steven Vance, Creative Commons

The Hack for Chicago event as 1871 is not limited to any specific project and so people are more than welcome to come in and work on any civic app they like. Civic problems are tough and there is plenty of work to be done on a variety of issues.

To register for the Hack for Chicago event, simply RSVP on the OpenGov Chicago Meetup page and tell us what you’re interested in working on.

Breakfast will be provided by Azavea at 8:45am. Lunch will be provided by the Smart Chicago Collaborative and will be served at 11:30am.

Using the new ClearPath API to help communities interact with the Chicago Police Department

Christopher Whitaker

On Saturday, civic web developers, designers, and data gurus came together with the Chicago Police Department at Google’s Chicago headquarters to test out and find creative ways to use the new ClearPath API.

ClearPath is the Chicago Police Department’s community information portal. First launched in 2007, ClearPath gives residents information not only about crime in their area, but also information about which police beat they’re on and when their CAPS meeting is.

CAPS (Chicago Alternative Policing Program) is Chicago’s community policing program. At the center of this program are the CAPS meetings that occur in each police beat. At the CAPS meetings, the police department can hear about community concerns in the neighborhood and interact with local residents.

With the new API, the Chicago Police Department wants to make it easier for residents to interact with the ClearPath website and to report community concerns. CAPS Executive Director Lucy Moy and CPD Information Services Direction Jonathan Lewin explain:

Results of the Safer Communities Hackathon

Photo Courtesy of Brian Fitzpatrick

The hackathon produced a number of creative ways to use the API to make it easier to interact with CAPS and the ClearPath system.

CAPSure by OpenCity Apps

Derek Eder and the OpenCityteam helped to test the API and got an early start on building an app using the API.

The app they launched is called CAPsure. CAPSure helps residents get information about their local CAPS meeting. You enter in your address and the app will tell you which police beat you are in, when your next CAPS meeting is, and where the meeting is located. The app can also add the meeting to your Outlook, Google, or iCal calendars.

The app uses the ClearPath API’s calendar and event data to find events. The app also uses the City of Chicago’s data sets to help find users police district and beat number.

CAPStagram – Hackathon Winner

CAPstagram

Image courtesy of Patrick Brown

The winner of the Hackathon was a team of Patrick Brown, Karl Statz, Donchaa Carroll, and Cathy Deng.

For this concept, the app attaches a picture to community concerns submitted by residents. Currently, the ClearPath API doesn’t allow you to include pictures when making a community concern report. This mobile app allows users to send their local CAPS district a picture of a concern such as an abandoned building or graffiti to help aid in the investigation.

CAPS by Text – Runner Up

The runner-up for the hackathon was the team of Alex Soble, Josh Kalov and Demond Drummer.

Their app prototype allows users to send a community concern to their local CAPS district by text so that residents without the internet could still take advantage of the new system.

CAPs Alerts – Third Place

In third place was an app prototype built by Kevin McMahon. This mobile app not only uses the ClearPath API to help report community concerns, but it will also alert users when crime is reported near them.

Other prototypes:

Other ideas for using the ClearPath API included:

MapThatTrap: An app that residents can use to report abandoned buildings to both 311 and to the ClearPath API

Green Light Program: A concept that would change the colors of Chicago’s Blue Light Cameras from blue to green as crime rates went down in the neighborhood.

Next Steps:

Safer Communities Hackathon at Google Chicago

For groups wanting to continue to work on their apps or for people not at the hackathon wanting to get involved, there are some great resources out there to make that happen.

The first is the Chicago OpenGov Hacknight that happens every Tuesday at 6:00pm at 1871. The OpenGov Hack Nights are a great place to learn about what is happening with civic innovation in Chicago and work on civic app projects.

If you’re looking for a place to host your civic app, the Smart Chicago Collaborative provides free hosting to civic applications. Smart Chicago will also provide user testing for your app for free as well.

If civic developers have questions about the API, they can contact the developers directly by emailing [email protected]

Making our communities safer is an ongoing challenge that will not be solved in a single weekend or by a single web application. To utilize the new API to the fullest extent will require partnerships between the CAPS office, civic technologists, and community groups. If you’re a CAPS group or neighborhood organization that would like to form partnerships with civic technologists, feel free to email cwhitaker @ cct.org for more information.

A big thank you goes out to the Google’s Brian Fitzpatrick for hosting the hackathon, as well as the Chicago Mayor’s Office and Department of Innovation and Technology for putting on the event. A special thanks also goes out to the Chicago Police Department for spending their Saturday with us and their continued service to the City of Chicago. 

OpenGov Hack Night: Karen Weigert and the CleanWeb Challenge

Christopher Whitaker 

Energy usage by neighborhood area, picture courtesy of Tom Schenk Jr

Karen Weigert and the CleanWeb Challenge

This week’s OpenGov Hack Night featured a presentation by the City of Chicago Chief Sustainability Officer Karen Weigert and the winners of Chicago’s Earth Day Hackathon showed off their apps.

In September, the City of Chicago released the Sustainable Chicago 2015 Plan focusing on seven areas:

  1. Economic Development and Job Creation
  2. Energy Efficiency and Clean Energy
  3. Transportation Options
  4. Water and Wastewater
  5. Parks, Open Space, and Healthy Food
  6. Waste and Recycling
  7. Climate Change

All together, the city has twenty-four goals and a hundred actions points. “All of which could be enhanced from data, visualizations, apps and stats analysis,” states Karen Weigret.

As part of this effort, the City has been releasing data on sustainability issues – including an API and data set for energy usage by neighborhood. Chicago’s been on the forefront of environmental issues and was recently awarded $30,000 from the World Wildlife Fund to help support sustainability programs in Chicago.

The city also hosted an Earth Day hackathon bringing together 300 civic innovators to think of ways to use technology to create a more sustainable city.

And that is just the beginning: The city recently partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to launch the Chicago Cleanweb Challenge. The Chicago Cleanweb Challenge is a year-long competition designed to promote sustainability in Chicago through community engagement and entrepreneurship. The city has partnered up with several environmental non-profits to host events throughout the year and will be releasing more data sets as the competition progresses. The overall winner of this challenge will get a chance to meet the mayor.

You can follow the progress of both the CleanWeb challenge and Chicago’s progress on sustainability issues by following @SustainChicago on Twitter.

Earth Day Hackathon Winner: Bike Rack Finder

The winner of the Earth Day Hackathon was the Chicago Bike Rack Finder by Patrick French and Jon Freeman.

Chicago has a lot of bike racks. This tool is used to help bikers find bike racks near them or near their final destination if they’re planning a trip. The app is completely mobile and open source. Currently, the app is still in the prototype phase. The team would like to add more features, such as users being able to add new bike racks to the data.

Currently, the city only has data on its own bike racks – but no data on the privately installed bike racks. While the city has put bike rack data on GitHub and is accepting pull requests, the team behind bike rack finder hope that by making it easier to report new bike racks that data gets filled in faster.

Another problem the team would like to address is to report the presence of “sucker poles” – poles that make it easy for thieves to steal any bike locked to it. By warning users that these sucker poles are not a safe place to lock your bike too, the app can help prevent bike thefts.

Earth Day Hackathon Winner: Urbs in Horto

In a very close second is the Urbs in Horto app by Todd Jones. that helps people find new places for urban gardens in Chicago. (If Urbs in Horto sounds familiar, it’s because the name of the app is also the City of Chicago motto: City in a Garden).

The app lets the user see all the vacant lots in Chicago as possible candidates for urban gardening spaces.

Because the hackathon was only 12 hours, both the apps are still just prototypes. However, this is just a taste of what’s to come as the Cleanweb competition continues.

Next Big Thing: Safer Communities Hackathon

Tomorrow, the City of Chicago and Google will be sponsoring a Safer Communities Hackathon at Google’s Chicago headquarters. You can RSVP for the event here.