Open Gov Hack Night

Open Gov Hack Night is Chicago’s weekly event to build, share, and learn about civic tech. Smart Chicago livestreams this event and writes up blog posts about the presentations on a regular basis. Read more from the organizers of Open Gov Hack Night here: http://opengovhacknight.org/

The ACLU of Illinois at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker 0 Comments

aclu-logoKaren Sheley, staff attorney at the American Civic Liberties Union of Illinois, stopped by Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night to give an overview of the ACLU’s work and describe how they use data to inform their advocacy.

The ACLU has a long and storied history, first being formed in 1929 and focusing on racial justice, religious liberty, freedom of expression, the rights of children and people with disabilities, criminal justice reform, fairness for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender individuals and reproductive justice. They have over 20,000 members in Illinois.

The ACLU advocates for transparency through legislation, litigation, and FOIA requests through the following reports:

  • CPD Traffic Stops and Resulting Searches in 2013
  • Stop and Frisk in Chicago
  • The War on Marijuana in Black and White

Criminal Justice Reform 

One of the main focuses of the ACLU is criminal justice reform, but every aspect of their work is data focused. The ACLU of Illinois is currently working on a a disparate impact case on response to 911 calls. They’re also working on an lawsuit regarding the Mayor of Peoria who responded to someone making a parody twitter account by issuing warrant for arrest.

One example of their works is the Traffic stop statistical study act — 625 ILCS 5/11-2012. It creates a database that records the details of the all the traffic stops in the state. They’ve used the datasets to find disparities in the race distribution of stops relative to population. They found that African-Americans are disproportionately stopped and with even greater disparity in white neighborhoods. The hit rate (the rate in which the police actually find something) is much higher for whites that other races. The conclusion of the ACLU is that the bar is set higher for stopping a white person than other races. You can see the details of that study on the ACLU website.

The ACLU has also used data to produce a report about the impact the War on Drugs has had on African-Americans. Almost all of the data that the ACLU was already open to the public. The study found that even though drug use is about even between white and black people, the arrest rate for black people is much higher. They’ve used this data to lobby Illinois state government for changes in the law.

Most recently, the ACLU has created a report on Stop and Frisk in Chicago. Stop and Frisk is when a police officer stops a residents because they have reasonable suspicion that they are about to commit a crime, and that the resident may create a danger to the officer because you may have a weapon. The ACLU feels that the policy has been abused in Chicago.

A most lawsuit that the ACLU was in involved with was the stop and frisk of Olympic gold medal speed skater Shani Davis. Shani was aggressively stopped a few blocks from his mother’s house in Roger’s park. The case was settled with one of the clauses being that the city had to collect more information about stops including an explanation for the reason of suspicion.

As part of a FOIA request by the ACLU, they found that 2014 Chicago had four times the number of stops compared to New York City. (Which really shocked them) The ACLU recommends that the city improve their data collection, have Chicago Police Officers issue receipts when they’re stopped, and require additional training on the use of stop and frisk.

Another effort by the ACLU is to regulate Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs). These devices can be attached to police cars and can collect all information on every car on the street and geotags it. Currently, there aren’t any restrictions on how this information is stored. State House Bill 3289 regulates this and it’s waiting on action in the Illinois Senate.

You can view the entire presentation here:

The value of small wins in building the civic innovation community

Christopher Whitaker 0 Comments

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.

There Are No Innocents: Data Rebroadcasting and Server-Side Responsibility – Karl Fogel at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker 0 Comments

karlOn April 14th, Karl Fogel of Open Tech Strategies and QuestionCopyright.org presented at OpenGov Hack Night on data rebroadcasting and server-side responsibility.

Data rebroadcasting is when one datasource posts data from another source. Civic apps tend to do this all of the time. For example, clearstreets.org rebroadcasts data from the City of Chicago’s plow tracker website and chicagoflushots.org rebroadcasts data from the city data portal.

Fogel used several examples to showcase the problems that can occur when people rebroadcast data that may invade someone’s privacy or may be downright inaccurate.  The first example was Chicago Councilmatic. A resident’s name had been placed on the record after filing a dispute about a very high water charge. The resident had asked that her name be removed from the site. However, this proved difficult since the app scrapes the Chicago City Clerks’ Legistar Website and is part of the official public record. Whatever’s in the public records ends up being placed on the Councilmatic website.

Another example that Fogel used to talk about the problem of data rebroadcasting is expungement. Whenever you get your criminal record expunged, the law considers reality as you having never committed the crime in the first place. So, when you’re applying for the a job and they ask “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” you can answer no and be legally correct.

However, if you start googling sometimes you’ll find the information about your criminal record still exists on the internet. Most infamously, there are sites that make money by posting mugshots online and charging for their removal. Additionally, news sites about the case may still come up as a top hit in a google search. Fogel used one news site as an example where the news site posted an updated disclaimer at the top of the site saying that the person charged with the crime had been exonerated – but it the site still came up high in the search results.

Fogel proposed a set of working principles when thinking about rebroadcasting data.

  • Techies are binary: Fogel points out that tech minded people can be pretty binary. The data is or isn’t available. It either is open sourced or it’s not. For people outside of tech, questions like this can have a whole range of answers. (It’s available, but it’s really hard to get.)
  • Is the info there through the subjects own actions?
  • Can you make all the important follow-up visible? If something changes (like a record being expunged or a credit report being fixed), will the changes be reflected?
  • Is there a customary legal forgetting process involved?
  • How would you feel if it were your kid?

You can watch Fogel’s presentation in full below:

Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

new-logo1At this week’s OpenGov Hack Night, the Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council came and spoke about their work and how they use data to advise policymakers.

SPAC was created to collect, analyze and present data from all relevant sources to more accurately determine the consequences of sentencing policy decisions and to review the effectiveness and efficiency of current sentencing policies and practices. They’re a four person team split between Chicago and Springfield that advises the Illinois Legislature on how certain laws will impact prison populations.

The criminal justice system is complicated – any change in the law could affect the prison population and the cost to the state. SPAC uses a variety of data sources to analyze the effects of new laws and let Springfield know what’s working and what’s not. While you can FOIA SPAC, SPAC doesn’t actually own any of the data that it uses – rather it consumes data from other agencies.

Here’s Research Director Nate Inglis Steinfeld introducing SPAC.

You can see SPAC’s full slide deck below. If you’d like to get involved in using technology to aid the efforts in criminal justice reform, you should check out the Safety and Justice Breakout Group at OpenGov Hack Night.

Public Lab and the Southeast Side Coalition Against Petcoke at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

publiclab-logo-largeOn March 24th, Public Lab and the Southeast Side Coalition against Petcoke presented at Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night about their homemade environmental monitoring kits.

Their project was in response to petcoke being dumped all over Chicago’s southeast side. Petcoke is a byproduct that oil refineries produce that’s used to as a fuel source for power plants. However, they never burn the fuel in the US because it’s illegal – instead it gets shipped overseas to burn in places without as much environmental regulation.

In Chicago, most the petcoke pollution comes in as a result of the KCBX Terminal in Indiana – which is owned by Koch Industries. Energy company BP was placing piles and piles of petcoke along the river as it was awaiting shipment. When the winds get strong, petcoke dust from uncovered shipping containers blows into southeast Chicago.

One of Olga Bautista‘s first encounters with petcoke was at a birthday party being held in a city park. A gust of wind quickly covered everyone and the birthday cake – rending the cake completely unedible. Bautista and her neighbors began to organize against petcoke in their neighborhood. To help with the effort, the Coalition worked with Public Lab to create Balloon Mapping Kits to help gather data on petcoke pollution.

The Balloon Mapping Kit was used to measure air quality on the southeast side and provide evidence of the pollution petcoke was creating.

They then put pressure on the city to pass ordinances regulating petcoke in the city. In response, the city passed an ordinance requiring that all petcoke shipments be enclosed and that companies must take measures to limit the spread of petcoke. Rather than the build the facilities to enclose the petcoke, BP has opted to simply send the petcoke elsewhere.

Petcoke is still a problem in Chicago as it still can get shipped through the city limits. The city has capped the amount of petcoke that can move through the city at any one time, but the Coalition wants to get that number to zero. The coalition urges people to call 311 and to tell elected officials that the only acceptable amount of put through for petcoke is zero. The Coalition will be continuing their work with Public Lab – which recently received a grant to conduct additional air quality monitoring.

In addition, if you see petcoke the City urges you to report it to 311.

For more ways to get involved, you can check out the environmental breakout group at OpenGov Hack Night.

 

Design for America at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

DfA_Grey_Logo_400x400Design for America is an award-winning nationwide network of interdisciplinary student teams and community members using design to create local and social impact. Design for America teaches human centered design to young adults and collaborating community partners through extra-curricular, university based, student led design studios to look locally, create fervently and act fearlessly.

Rob Calvey and Julian Bongiorno from Design for America stopped by OpenGov Hack Night to talk about their partnership with MIT to use data and empathy to streamline the process of connecting homeless shelters with excess capacity to those who need a place to stay.

Here’s their talk:

Design for America is housed at Northwestern University and is the home to their flagship studio. They recently partnered with the Center for Neighborhood Technologies and Floodlothian Midlothian to host a panel discussion on urban flooding.

If you want to get involved, you can visit Design for America’s site. You should also check out the Civic Design Camp in April!