National Day of Civic Hacking

Multiple Events for National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago

Christopher Whitaker

logoFor the third annual National Day of Civic Hacking, Chicago will be playing host to multiple events. We’ve broken down the current events and we’ll be giving more updates as we get closer to the event.

CitySDK Launch at Chi Hack Night 

Hosted by Chi Hack Night – Braintree 6/2 – 6:00pm 

The Census Bureau has developed an open data software development kit (SDK) to enable a community, public, or private sector individuals and organizations to more easily extract value from Census data through user-friendly Application Program Interfaces (APIs). Through the SDK we are aiming to provide a user friendly “Toolbox” for civic hackers to connect local and national public data in order to bring forth innovative solutions for our communities. This national effort is being done to time with National Day of Civic Hacking.

The Census Bureau plans to launch the CitySDK on June 1st and present the CitySDK at the Chi Hack Night on June 2nd.

The Chi Hack Night (formerly known as the Open Gov Hack Night) is a free, weekly event in Chicago to build, share and learn about civic tech, or tools to create, support, or serve public good. It’s one of the largest weekly gatherings of civic innovators and takes place every Tuesday on the 8th floor of Merchandise Mart.

Urban Sustainability Apps Competition 

Hosted by the Center for Neighborhood Technology – 6/5 

The Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT) invites you to make Chicago’s neighborhoods smarter, greener, and more affordable at the 4th Annual Urban Sustainability Apps Competition.
Over the course of the event, community activists and app developers will work together to create workable prototypes of apps that make our neighborhoods more sustainable, both environmentally and economically.

We welcome participants from all corners of the city, whether you’re a local activist working to improve your neighborhood or a coding whiz looking to make a difference in the community.

Organize! Civic Tech Leader Training

Hosted by the Smart Chicago Collaborative – Blue1647 – 8:30am 6/6

For National Day of Civic Hacking, Smart Chicago will be hosting Civic Tech Leader Training to help leverage the power of technology to organize in their neighborhoods. The event will be held at Blue1647 on June 6th, 2015 and is designed to help train new civic tech leaders. We’ll be providing resource and training guides before the event.

Training will include FOIA training by the Better Government Association, community organizing training from the Southwest Organizing Project, Microsoft Excel training from Microsoft’s Adam Hecktman, data portal training by Josh Kalov, and more.

Adler National Day of Civic Hacking

Hosted by the Adler Planetarium – 9:00am 6/6 – 6/7

All Hack Days need problems to solve and those problems need domain experts – that’s where you come it! Civic Hack Day, as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking, focuses on issues to improve our communities. As the problem owner you’ll give a two minute pitch at the beginning of Civic Hack Day to attract hackers interested in creating a technology-based solution to your problem.

Need some inspiration? Check out some of the projects from Civic Hack Day 2014. We also encourage you to share your ideas before the event on the Civic Hack Day Ideas Hackpad.

Civic Hack Day will kick off bright and early at 9:00 am on Saturday June 6th. and will finish at 12:00pm on Sunday June 7th. Problem Owners and Hackers are invited to spend the night at the Adler to hack the night away. You’ll be provided with plenty of food and caffeine to keep the momentum going! If you prefer sleep to hacking you can always go home and return on Sunday morning for the event wrap-up, project demos, and prizes.

Lexhacks

Hosted by Michigan State University and OpenLegal – We Work Chicago – 6/6 – 6/7

Teams of lawyers, developers, designers, and other professionals will work together to develop software-based tools to solve legal problems over the weekend and compete for cash prizes.
Software is eating the legal industry. Join the hackathon accelerating the advancement of the legal industry.
For more information about National Day of Civic Hacking, visit the main page at Hack for Change

 

 

 

“Organize!”— Tech Training for New Civic Tech Leaders on National Day of Civic Hacking

Smart Chicago

logoOne of our three main areas of focus at Smart Chicago is digital skills. In the past three years, we’ve learned a lot of things from our experience running events, building projects, conducting user testing, and writing extensively about civic innovation.

As part of our work around National Day of Civic Hacking, this year we’re going to be focusing our efforts around teaching these digital skills both locally and nationally. As usual, this effort will be led by Christopher Whitaker.

Christopher has written a number of tutorials and guides to help volunteer civic technology groups for the national Hack for Change website.

Here in Chicago, he will run a training camp at Blue1647 for new civic technology leaders centered around the theme of community organizing. (Register here!)  On June 6th,  we’ll be bringing in experts around the city to help train new civic tech leaders on the tools and techniques used to leverage the power of technology to help our neighborhoods. The event is specially set up for people new to civic technology regardless of their technology proficiency. This is a learning event— so bring your questions!

This event will be just one of many National Day of Civic Hacking events happening in Chicago including hackathons happening at the Adler Planetarium, Center for Neighborhood Technologies, the Chicago Public Library’s Maker Lab, and OpenGov Hack Night. We’ll be blogging about these events and more as we get closer to June 6th.

You can register for our event here.

Using Twitter to boost your event

Christopher Whitaker

Twitter Analytics account overview for SmartChicagoAt Smart Chicago, use social media significantly to help spread the word at our events as well as to share what’s happening at different civic events throughout Chicago.

We’re going to go over a few tips and tricks for using social media to boost your event.

You’ll usually have two goals with social media. The first is to get people to attend your event. The second is to add followers so that when you have future events or news you can spread it more easily.

Twitter

We use Twitter when we’re covering live events. Twitter’s ability to post rapid real time updates makes it perfect for things like this.

Our strategy for events is to write up a blog post advertising the event. If we know the hashtag already, we’ll start using that when we tweet the event out.

We use the hashtag so that people can start following other accounts that are also using the hashtag. This also lets our followers know there’s an event going on and that’s the hashtag we’re using.

We’ll also retweet other accounts that are using the hashtag. Sharing is caring.

Just before the event starts, I’ll try and ensure that we’re following all the speakers and organizers. Once the event starts, we begin our livetweeting.

When we’re live tweeting, I’ll normally have an aftermarket tool like Hootsuite or Tweetdeck so that I can tweet from both my personal account and my organization account. I’ll have one column set up just for the hashtag so I can quickly RT relevant tweets.

I’ll also have a phone in my hand and logged into Twitter as my organization account. Tweets with pictures tend to get more engagement. I normally do a photo when we start, when a new speaker comes on stage, or there’s a particularly interesting quote. Whenever we take any photo or mention something somebody said, we almost always tag the person if they’re on Twitter.

For national events like Code Across and National Day of Civic Hacking, I’ll also use the national hashtag as well as mention the @codeforamerica and @civichackingday account. If they retweet your tweet, then that amplifies your tweet by a factor of 20.

After the event, we’ll use the twitter stream as notes for when we blog about the event.

A note about trending and gaining followers

A lot of times, particularly on television networks, you’ll see people encouraged to ‘make something trend’ as if it’s a game you can win. We do not advise this.

Trending doesn’t measure popularity, it measures velocity. It tries to show what ‘new’ topic people are ‘now’ talking about. Once a lot of people have started talking about something, it loses it’s trending topic. That’s also why you don’t see Justin Beaver or any of the other boybands trending all the time. That’s also why during television shows, you’ll see the networks make up hashtags on the fly. They know that the odds of trending go way down over time. It’s easier to get a new hashtag trending rather than an old one. If they tell people to tweet at a hashtag for an upcoming episode, they lose the needed velocity to make something trend. Once it starts trending, it’s tough to get it to stay trending because it relies on ‘new’ people tweeting the hashtag. No points are awarded for the same people tweeting the same thing a bunch of times.

Which brings us, why try to get something to trend in the first place?

For television shows, it’s about advertising. They want people who are just cruising twitter to see the trend and think “Oh wow, a lot of people are watching this – maybe I should tune in.”

For this community, it’s not as important. Your goal isn’t to trend, but to build your audience. This is particularly true if you’re running your Code for America Brigade twitter account. You want people to start following you and learning what you’re about and how you can get involved. That means that buying followers won’t do you any good.

Getting Twitter followers takes time and consistently producing content worth tuning in for.

Analytics for Twitter

It used to be that you had to pay to get stats for Twitter. That isn’t true anymore. You can access Twitter analytics for free by going to https://analytics.twitter.com and see how you’re doing.

For more tools, check out the Code for America Brigade Toolkit!

The value of small wins in building the civic innovation community

Christopher Whitaker

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.

Smart Chicago teams up with Code for America for National Day of Civic Hacking

Christopher Whitaker

logoOnce again, Smart Chicago Collaborative will be a national partner for National Day of Civic Hacking providing training content as well as running our own National Day of Civic Hacking events here in Chicago.

This year, the national organizer for National Day of Civic Hacking is our long-time partner Code for America. Our consultant, Christopher Whitaker will be helping Code for America’s communities team with organizing as well as helping Smart Chicago to provide training content. Our training content will include things like our How to Run a Civic Hackathon and How to Livestream an Event.

Last year, we provided a number of blog posts and videos to help train civic technologists. These blog posts included:

We’ll be updating our old content to ensure it’s current. We’ll also be adding new content to help train civic technologists including lessons on GitHub, Mapbox, WordPress, and more. Additionally, we’ll be writing primers on how to work effectively with governments and nonprofits – as well as primers on subject areas like health, safety and justice, transportation, and education.

Stay tuned for more!

The Adler Hacks for Youth during National Day of Civic Hacking

Christopher Whitaker

At the OpenGov Hack Night on June 4th 2014, Mikva Challenge and the Adler Planetarium presented the projects that came out of the National Day of Civic Hacking at the Adler Planetarium. The group of teens worked on a number of issues including an app that helps homeless LGTB youth find resources and look up student codes of conduct.

OpenGov Hack Night #108

The Adler Planetarium and Mikva Challenge have been working together all year hosting different events and coming up with issue briefs about youth owned problems. These topics included:

  • School Culture
  • Healthy Relationships
  • Juvenile Justice
  • Youth Employment

The group also built a number of apps during National Day of Civic Hacking. Here’s the team talking about their apps below:

App Ideas: 

  • Scoogle: Scoogle is an app that helps students look up their school code of conduct. Not only does this help students understand the code of conduct, but it also helps students understand their rights.
  • Resources for LGBT Homeless: After learning that over 30% of homeless youth are LGBT, a team created a resource page for LGBT youth to find
  • Grounded: Grounded is an electronic tag that’s intended for students who get in trouble for violence. With the app users have to check in on Instagram every two hours to show where their supervisors where they are.

For more information on Mikva Challenge, you can visit their website at http://www.mikvachallenge.org/