Knight Foundation

Join mRelief at Chicago’s #CodeAcross Food Stamp Hackathon

Christopher Whitaker

CodeAcross2015_Postcard

On February 20th, the mRelief team will be hosting a Food Stamp Hackathon as part of Code for America’s Code Across event.

mRelief.com empowers Chicagoans with a tool to access the welfare system in unprecedented ways by determining food stamp eligibility through text messaging and web tools which direct people to their next step in the application.

Sponsored by Microsoft and in partnership with the Harris Food Policy Advocacy Group, Code for America, and Women of Code, mRelief’s hackathon invites thought leaders in policy and computer programming to expand current eligibility screening for food stamps in Illinois. The event will focus on policy rules that impact overall eligibility, accessibility for students and applicants of varying types of citizenship, and documents that people need for food stamp eligibility.

As part of Code for America’s national Code Across event, mRelief has also set up a national repository for food stamp hackers across the country to view code for their web and SMS tools and submit the code for their states so that mRelief can sustain the work beyond the weekend. CodeAcross is a weekend of civic hacking events hosted by nodes of the Code for America network around the world. It is timed to coincide with both the last weekend of the Code for America Fellows residency and International Open Data Day. The goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.

The local event and mRelief’s national challenge on Github was organized by the all-women software development team at mRelief. mRelief’s tools simplifies the social service qualifying process with for food stamps and many other immediate needs. Illinois residents can check to see if they’re eligible for a variety of healthcare, rental assistance, cash assistance, transportation, and child welfare related programs.

Full details of the event can be found here.

Follow, the team on twitter at @mrelief_form

Attend the local event at: bit.ly/chifoodstamps

Sign up for the national event at: bit.ly/foodstampsusa

Smart Chicago and the Chicago Department of Transportation launch Textizen campaign for placemaking

Christopher Whitaker

CDOT Textizen Poster

We’re partnering with the Chicago Department of Public Transportation to help get citizen feedback on their Chicago Complete Streets Program.

CDOT is using flyers and posters on the Chicago Transit Authority asking Chicago residents to take a quick text survey about how they want to see Chicago’s street spaces improved.

Smart Chicago is helping CDOT through our CivicWorks Project through our Textizen account. Textizen’s web platform sends, receives, and analyzes text messages so you can reach the people you serve with the technology already in their pocket, 24/7.

We are a customer of Textizen because we believe in their product and we believe in helping them make it even better. By connecting them with organizations like CDOT, the Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events for their Public Art Plan, and the Metropolitan Planning Council for transit-oriented development in Logan Square, we’re able to fund not just projects, but products.

All of this leads to a stronger civic innovation sector of the technology industry, one that can support itself with revenue driven by software that people love.

Christopher Whitaker runs the CivicWorks project and has been his amazing self in pulling together this initiaitve. CDOT has also launched a campaign on Chideas.org to get ideas from Chicago residents about placemaking in Chicago.

For more information, you can visit CDOT’s Complete Streets website at http://chicagocompletestreets.org/. If you would like to get started on your own texting campaign for civic engagement, take a look at our Developer Resources.

 

Health Data Ecosystem is Strengthened by Purple Binder’s Adoption of Open Referral

Smart Chicago
Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

At Smart Chicago, we work with a lot of partners to encourage the growth and development of the civic innovation sector of the technology industry. There is a nascent ecosystem that thrives on standards and sharing.

Yesterday we were happy to see a big step forward in the ecosystem as it relates to health data and software, when Purple Binder announced that they had adopted the OpenReferral standard. The announcement centers around some with whom we’ve toiled with over the years.

  • Code for America has been a longtime partner of Smart Chicago— we’ve worked with them since our very start. They have been devoted to an OpenReferral standard to help with the sharing of community resource directory data. Code for America is an indispensable national leader in the work that we care about here at Smart Chicago
  • Purple Binder, a Chicago company that matches people with community services that keep them healthy, has been a partner of Smart Chicago since July 2013, when we hired them to create their first API in order to fuel our Chicago Health Atlas project. They’ve been a shining light here in the civic tech scene— a private company building software that matters while helping others in the ecosystem
  • We also work with mRelief, an app that helps Chicagoans determine their eligibility for government benefits. We support them through our Developer Resources and CUTGroup programs. to help Chicago residents see what social services they qualify for.  Both of these applications use data provided by Smart Chicago’s contract with Purple Binder

Purple Binder’s API is the first to use the Open Referral standard to transmit social services data between two applications. This is a big deal, and a moment worth celebrating, with more work ahead.

Metropolitan Planning Council Uses Textizen for Planning out Logan Square Corridor

Christopher Whitaker

When the Metropolitan Planning Council needed feedback on their planning initiative for the Logan Square Corridor, they turned to Textizen. Textizen is a text based survey tool that delivers real time results for government agencies seeking to get citizen feedback.

Smart Chicago provided access to our Textizen account, allowing them to use their services for free under our Civic Works Project.

Logan Square, photo by Steve Vance

Logan Square, photo by Steve Vance

For this survey, MPC asked several questions regarding development near the Logan Square CTA stop. About 200 people filled out the survey, with public results being posted here. According to MPC, about 60 percent of text respondents consistently responded that they had not attended the most recent meeting. This suggests that the text polling reached a different audience than the meetings themselves. Seventy five percent of respondents found the text polling valuable for this public input experience.

You can read the entire report here.

If you’re interested in using Textizen take a look at our Developer Resource program.

Smart Chicago, Expunge.io, and Ecosystem

Smart Chicago

This is one in a series of posts that help us at Smart Chicago to develop a cohesive product strategy that helps us deliver on the promise of access, skills, and data. As we’ve grown, more and more cities have an interest in how Smart Chicago works and how the model can be used near them. These detailed posts, showing all of the steps we take, are a way to keep us in check locally while be of service nationally. Here’s more information on our model.

Expunge.io is a youth-led project.

Continue reading →