In our next meetup, we will be focused on Chicago’s vast civic innovation movement, the role of your centers play in that movement, and how we can embed civic tech into our programs (and even our own website!).
The National Day of Civic Hacking is on the weekend right after our meetup (Saturday and Sunday, May 31 and June 1). There are a ton of events– sign up and get involved!
We’ll be live streaming and live tweeting the event starting on Friday at 11:00am! Video stream below the fold..
As part of the kickoff to National Day of Civic Hacking, Christopher Whitaker spoke at the OpenGov Hack Night on May 27th, 2014 about the progress that’s been made since last year’s event.
Over the past year, there’s been a concentrated effort by the city and the county to open up more of their data and to make the data more usable. Additionally, there have been several successful efforts to get data out of the sole domain of geekdom and into the public at large.
One of the most underrated stories of the year has been the City of Chicago’s new data dictionary. The Data Dictionary is a single, comprehensive database catalog for the City of Chicago and City of Chicago sister agencies. The data dictionary contains detailed information on every data set held by City agencies and departments, how and if it may be accessed, and in which formats it may be accessed – even for data not released on the portal yet.
The project was the result a year-long effort of the Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology and Chapin Hall with funding provided through a $300,000 grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
What’s more is that these efforts have been open sourced on the city’s GitHub page so that other cities can take advantage of the work being done.
Part of what makes the Metalicious platform powerful isn’t necessarily the public facing elements. The City is using the tool to manage their own vast disparate sources of data.
How this is important to the future:
Going forward as other cities begin to open up data, the Metalicious platform will be useful to other cities in managing their data.
While Chicago’s continues to be post data to their data portal at a steady rate, the county has not been able to get as much data up on their portal as they’d like. Last December, the County passed an ordinance stating that the county would work to release parcel data along with other highly sought after data sets. In January, the county entered an agreement with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to split the cost for a consultant to help the county open up more data. A few weeks later, Kalov Strategies came on board to help the county with their data. (And we finally got parcel data out the door fueling sites like Largelots.org)
Here’s how it’s important to the future
More data mean more fuel for civic innovation efforts. Additionally, this will also serve as a model to other communities on how to get needed staffing for open data efforts.
Another big event that’s happened recently is the opening of Chicago Architecture Foundation’s City of Big Data Exhibit. This exhibit takes open data sets from a number of different entities, including the Chicago Health Atlas, and lays it out on top of a 3D replica of the City of Chicago.
How this is important to the future:
Exhibits like this will help bring the work we do out into the mainstream. Too often, big data and predictive analytics are portrayed as some kind of magic. The exhibit will help showcase how cities use data and help demystify the field.
The Civic Works Project is a two-year effort to create apps and other tools to help increase the utility of local government data to benefit community organizations and the broader public. This project looks systemically at public and private information that can be used to engage residents, solve community problems and increase government accountability.
Since last year, the program has launched a number of apps and projects with our partners including Crime and Punishment in Chicago, the ACA Outreach App, our efforts with Local Data and SWOP, as well as our collaboration with WBEZ’s Public Data Blog.
One of the most important activities happening in the city is the push to increase digital skills. The Englewood Codes program, ran by Demond Drummer at Teamwork Englewood, is a great example of neighborhood organizations getting students involved in technology. After last year’s demo day, Teamwork Englewood has continued the program taking the top students from last summer and going much more in-depth with this year’s program.
Maybe one of the best examples of technologists working in tandem with community organizations is the story of Expunge.io. The site grew naturally out of work we did over our CivicSummer, interacting with youth on the Juvenile Justice Committee about what interested them, where their research took them, and what issues mattered most to them. Together, we were able to connect Mikva’s Chris Rudd with civic technologist Cathy Deng and Legal Aid Foundation Chicago to develop an app that helps youth expunge their juvenile records.
All of this is leading to the rise of the working app, apps that don’t just display data, but assist in the interaction between civic organizations and residents. These working apps require collaborative efforts from technologists, data owners, and civic organizations. The magic behind these apps is not the technology – but the cooperation between the different elements.
One of the best examples of these working apps is the new Largelots.org program. Under the old program, you could only purchase a vacant lot from the city if you owned an adjacent property. The new program was designed with community feedback with Teamwork Englewood and Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.) spearheading community outreach around the program. Once the new policy was implemented, Drummer reached out to civic technology company Datamade to build a site that could help residents navigate the new program.
Using parcel data just opened up by Cook County, Datamade was able to build a site that help streamline the interaction between residents and government. Through the program’s pilot period, the city received 414 applications during a short time frame from residents wanting to purchase land that’s currently owned by the city. Under the old program, the city only received 34 applications for all of 2013.
A program like largelots.org only works because of the connections made between community organizations, the government, and the technologists. The magic isn’t in the technology, the magic is the connections between the organizations working together towards civic innovation.
During National Day of Civic Hacking, we’ll be focused on hearing from front line community organizations and listening to their needs and challenges. From there, we’ll be brainstorming about creating working apps that can help those organization tackle their challenges.
As we begin another year of civic hacking, we look forward to seeing even more working apps being built and launched.
In preparation for National Day of Civic Hacking, we wanted to show off a tool that helps liberate table data from PDFs called Tabula. Tabula is an open source tool built by Manuel Aristarán with the help of ProPublica, La Nación DATA and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews. We sat down with Aristarán to talk about the app and give a short demo. Continue reading
We’re gearing up for National Day of Civic Hacking and we’re pleased to announce that several more events have been posted right here in Chicago. We’ve got all the events right here, plus our speakers for the event in the Chicago loop!
The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to be a contributing partner to the National Day of Civic Hacking effort. We’ve been providing content to the national website, starting with the Civic Hacking 101 video put together by Smart Chicago consultant and Chicago Code for America Brigade Captain Christopher Whitaker. Our goal is to help spread the lessons we’ve learned in Chicago to the rest of the country.
Additionally, we’ll be hosting a hackathon May 31st – June 1st at the offices of kCura in the Chicago Loop in partnership with Code for America and Random Hacks of Kindness. Each day will be broken down into two sections.
During the first session, we’ll hear from people on the front line of civic work as they talk about their day to day challenges in the fields of education, housing, hunger, disaster response, public safety , and child protective services. In the afternoon, we’ll break out into group and prototype apps that may help address these challenges.
You can register for the event here.
One of the success stories in Chicago’s civic innovation community is the rapid spread of health related apps that have come out of both the volunteer civic technology community and paid development efforts. This started last year with Tom Kompare’s Chicago flu shot app that helped Chicago residents find free flu shots near them. (Later on, this flu shot app spread to Boston and Philadelphia.)
Professionally, Kompare is a web developer with the University of Chicago. In his spare time, he’s one of the most active civic technologists in Chicago.
Kompare’s flu shot app was just the start of the Chicago Department of Public Health partnering up with civic technologists on a number of projects including Foodborne Chicago, the Chicago Health Atlas, and Tom Kompare’s newest app Back to School.
Back to School is an app built for parents to make sure that their child has the immunizations they need to go back to school. CDPH hosts several immunization events for school children throughout the city and the apps helps parents find events near them. This will be also good trial run for the larger immunization effort that CDPH will run this fall.
Not only do these two apps use the same data format, this data format is now a proposed national standard. Shortly after the redeployment of the flu shot app in Philadelphia earlier this year, Philadelphia Chief Data Officer Mark Headd began an effort to develop a national standard for flu shot data. This effort included input from both government officials and civic technologists from Chicago, San Francisco, Austin, Oakland, and other cities. By helping to set up one standard, both of these open source apps are deployable in any city that elects to conform to the standard.
This is not the first app that the Chicago Department of Public Health has partnered with. CDPH also partnered with the Smart Chicago Collaborative to run the Foodborne Chicago app. The app, which was made possible through a variety of efforts, listens to Twitter for reports of food poisoning and then prompts the author to a web page that reports food poisoning to 311. Once it’s reported the 311, the city can then dispatch a health inspector to that location.
The Chicago Health Atlas, an app that shows health trends and local resources in Chicago, was another app that resulted from community partnerships. Initially, the Atlas was built on an existing partnership by informatics researchers at five major academic health centers in Chicago: University of Illinois at Chicago, Stroger Hospital, University of Chicago, Northwestern University, and Rush University. Since that time, the Chicago Health Atlas has been expanded to include data and researchers from the Chicago Department of Public Health. The site itself was built by Chicago civic app firm Datamade and also uses data from civic startup Purple Binder.
And it’s not just formal partnerships that are producing health related apps. As part of a summer internship program, Chicago Spanish newspaper Vive Lo Hoy hired its first web developer Wilberto Morales. Morales worked with food inspection data provided by the City of Chicago to built eatsafe.co.
Eatsafe.co helps residents find out how the resturants near them fared during their last food inspection. This open source app includes information on how food inspections in Chicago work. (Unlike some other cities, Chicago’s system is pass-fail and not by letter grade.) This is Hoy’s first app and they plan to continue building more apps to help address community issues.
Morales learned to code, not from a formal computer science program, but by being a part of FreeGeek Chicago’s Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew. FreeGeek Chicago, a Humboldt Park non-profit organization, helps the community by recycling and repairing old electronics. FreeGeek trains volunteers on computer repair techniques and offers the opportunity for residents to earn a refurbished computer through their Earn-A-Box Program. In March, FreeGeek’ Chicago’s members decided to launch a program to teach residents how to develop web applications. It’s certainly been a big success, as evidenced by the Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew winning the Chicago Migrahack with their app Finding Care.
So why is Chicago producing so many high quality health apps so quickly?
Data is fuel. None of these applications would be possible without the City of Chicago developing an open data policy and executing on it. Chicago has more data sets than any other city. Their deep involvement with the civic technology community allows the city’s data team to meet the needs of civic innovators creating apps that serve the community.
The Chicago OpenGov Hack nights attract some of the city’s best geeks to work at the intersection of technology and civic problems. However, if the hack nights and other civic innovation efforts only attract web developers, designers, and data gurus we end up missing a vital piece of the puzzle: the neighbor that we’re trying to help.
By partnering with city departments, non-profit organizations, and community organizers – the community is able to develop apps centered around the civic problem in a way that helps the people who are working in the trenches. Both volunteer efforts like OpenGov Chicago and the Smart Chicago Collaborative are continuing to do outreach with civic organizations to help foster partnerships between technologists and community activists.
The civic innovation community is growing – but not nearly fast enough. To meet the challenges brought on by the Great Recession, we need more people with technology skills necessary to grow the civic technology space. Efforts by FreeGeek Chicago and the Englewood Codes project by Teamwork Englewood are helping to create more technologists in the city’s neighborhoods.
Lastly, it’s important that the civic innovation community solve real problems that matter to real people. Part of the side effect of having strong partnerships in both government and the neighborhoods is the learning what is happening on the front lines of civic work. The Back to School app came about as a result of Tom overhearing a conversation about CDPH’s back to school campaign while working on the update for the flu shot app. Having civic technologists listening to not only tech issues, but issues like education results in web app like schoolcuts.org being created.
Building civic apps is more than just the code – the real secret to success is community.
