OpenGovChicago

The Smart Chicago Collaborative hosts OpenGovChicago meetups at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust. We livestream the events and archive them here as well.

Get Covered Illinois at OpenGov Hack Night

Christopher Whitaker

At the last Chicago OpenGov Hack Night, Charles Watkins from Get Covered Illinois talked about the  Affordable Care Act and its implementation here in Illinois.

OpenGovHack Night - Get Covered

Get Covered Illinois is an effort by the State of Illinois to make sure that all residents in Illinois get health insurance. Here’s Charles Watkins explaining the effort.

The Affordable Healthcare Act brings about several benefits that weren’t available before including a restricting insurance companies from denying claims based on pre-existing conditions, allowing residents to remain on their parents insurance until age 26, and more coverage for preventative services. Watkins explains the benefits of the ACA below:

There are a number of websites that people can use to get information about the Affordable Healthcare Act and get pre-screened for benefits.  Those sites are:

  • GetCovered Illinois: Which helps to inform Illinois residents about the new healthcare law.
  • Abe.Illinois.Gov: Which enables residents to get prescreened for benefits.  This helps residents determine if they should apply for medicare, SNAP (food stamps), cash assistance, or medical assistance before trying to go to the healthcare.gov website.
  • Healthcare.gov: Which is where residents can search for healthcare coverage. In Illinois, the marketplace is run in partnership with the State of Illinois. There are currently eight insurance companies that are on the marketplace in Illinois.

Charles explains the details of each site below.

After presenting Charles also answered questions from the civic innovation community.

You can find out more about Illinois’ efforts to implement the ACA by going to GetCovered Illinois.

 

GeoGit & GeoGinger: GitHub for Catrographers

Christopher Whitaker

At last week’s OpenGov Hack Night, Nick Dorian spoke about GeoGit and GeoGinger and how they can help with the process of making maps.

Untitled

One of the issues with GitHub is that it’s not a great tool for tracking changes in maps.

GitHub has a great feature that will show the differences in changes in a repository. For example:

githubdiff

You can see in red what has been deleted and the green text shows what was added for this particular commit. However, when changing arounds map data – the difference looks like this:

geodiff

Image Courtesy Nick Dorian

It doesn’t really show the changes that were made in a way that anyone can understand.

Using GeoGit, you can easily keep track of the differences in geographic data from one commit to another.

Nick explains how it works here:

While GeoGit helped to identify changes in geographic data, there wasn’t an easy way to push this information back into GitHub. So, over the summer Dorian built GeoGinger as a way to bridge GeoGit and GitHub. Here’s Nick explaining GeoGinter:

Both GeoGit and GeoGinger are open source projects that can be found on GitHub.

 

OpenGovChicago Meetup: Open Data, Chicago, and the Return EveryBlock

Smart Chicago 1 Comment

Tonight, we will be hosting the OpenGovChicago meetup, Open Data, Chicago, and EveryBlock  at the Chicago Community Trust. If you have questions for the speakers, enter them here in this document and come back to this post at 6PM CST for a Google Live Hangout. Questions? Daniel X. O’Neil, [email protected].

Here’s info on speakers:

Paul Wright: Director, Local Media Development, Comcast. Paul is the day-to-day leader of EveryBlock and has led the relaunch efforts. He’ll talk about the relaunch and how it got done.

Sheila Willard: SVP Local Media Development, Comcast. Sheila leads the unit under which EveryBlock is being managed. Sheila will talk about the importance of EveryBlock to Comcast.

Matt Summy: Regional Vice President, External & Government Affairs, Comcast Greater Chicago Region. Matt has worked closely with the EveryBlock team to relaunch in its hometown. He’ll talk about his role in bringing EveryBlock back to Chicago.

opengovchicago-logo-meetupThis meetup is filling to capacity very quickly, and we expect the Hangout to be very popular. The livestream will occur right in this blog post on the night of the event.

If you are signed up for the event, please be sure to keep your RSVP status updated– if something changes, please change your status so someone from the waitlist can be automatically added.

If you are interested in this event, it’s very important that you sign up on Meetup and join the OpenGovChicago group, This will ensure that you get communications about this and other topical events.

Meantime,  use this document for your questions for our speakers.

With these tools, and robust communication among us before and after the event, we hope to make remote participation as meaningful as in-person.

Let’s do this.

Hack Dash + opengovhacknight.org: Making it easier to get involved

Christopher Whitaker

One of the challenges in organizing volunteers around building civic web applications is that there are a lot of people with a lot of different skills and many projects to choose from – particularly in Chicago.

This weeks projects #civichacking

Over the past few weeks, Derek Eder, Forest Gregg,  Eric van Zanten and others have been building opengovhacknight.org to help aggragate information on civic innovation projects in Chicago. Now, with the addition of Hack Dash – it just became much easier for people to get involved in civic hacking!

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