Health

Cook County Burial Locations Featured on WBEZ

Smart Chicago

On October 27, Cook County Chief Medical Examiner was on WBEZ’s Afternoon Shift talking about their burial data. 

The data set  lists the final disposition sites of the indigents buried by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Currently, there are two places where this happens. Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery (which provides Latitude and Longitude coordinates for burials) and Mount Olivet (which provides Grave, Lot, and Block locations.)

homewood

The data set provides the name, age, sex, race, date of death, and case number for each person buried by Cook County.

Our consultant, Josh Kalov worked with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to help set up the tables for the data set. He then educated the Medical Examiner’s office on how to upload data to the portal and made the first initial upload.

You can listen to the WBEZ story here. 

Foodborne Chicago, Humans, and Big Data on the Data Mine Blog

Smart Chicago

Foodborne Chicago, Humans, and Big Data on the Data Mine Blog

Here’s a post on the U.S. News & World Report Data Mine blog covering our Foodborne Chicago project: How Twitter and Your Lunch Can Solve Problems. Here’s a snip:

Daniel O’Neil, the executive director of Smart Chicago, who worked with the government on the algorithm, said the project is an example of how big data can be used by health professionals to help people.

“I think the field of big data often removes human beings from consideration,” he says. “Big data, as I see it being practiced, there’s very little direct engagement with people. All the data related to health care is generated from human beings and is crucial to the health and wellness of human beings. I think this project shows one way for big data to always be driven down to the human being and helping people. We need to always take it from big to small and always find out how technology can be of big use to people.”

Brigade Training: Leveling up Your Civic Hacking Event by Christopher Whitaker

Christopher Whitaker

Editor’s Note: Today, Smart Chicago Consultant and Brigade Regional Coordinator Christopher Whitaker will be giving a training on how to level up your civic hacking event. Christopher is one of the co-hosts of the nationally renowned Chicago OpenGov Hack Night as well as running a number of events for Smart Chicago including Chicago’s National Day of Civic Hacking.  We’ve put his slides and training notes below the fold.

OpenGov Hack Night 1/21/13

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Chicago Region’s Civic Innovation Community at the Code for America Summit!

Smart Chicago

This week is a great week for civic innovation—the Code for America Summit in San Francisco is here. Smart Chicago will be there in force. I will be there, as well as consultants Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov. (Along with about a dozen other representatives from Chicago’s civic hacking community)

2013_1015_071337 CfASummit

We’ll be live tweeting the event on our @SmartChicago account, but you can also follow along using the #CfAsummit hashtag. Below the fold, we’ve all the details of the Chicago area delegation.

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Plenar.io, the next stage in open data

Jonathan Giuffrida

Note: this is a guest post from Jonathan Giuffrida. Jonathan has been working at 1871 in one of the seats we maintain there for innovators in civic technology. Here’s more on that program.

Jonathan Giuffrida

Jonathan Giuffrida

This summer, I’ve been using Smart Chicago’s space in 1871 to help work on a new product that is intended to change the way we use open data.

Plenar.io was conceived as a centralized hub for open datasets from around the country. Funded by the NSF and the MacArthur Foundation, and led by a team of prominent open data scientists, researchers, and developers, it is a collaborative, open-source solution to the problems inherent to the rapid growth in government data portals.

The primary innovations of Plenario focus on making data easier for anybody to find, access, and download, regardless of its original source or format, and to do so in a free and efficient manner. The result is an enormous improvement to the ecosystem that returns us to the core promise of making the data open in the first place – that it can help improve our cities, our governments, and our lives.

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