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.
Today is the first Chicago OpenGov Hack Night of 2014!
Benjamin Sugar will introduce us to CivicLab, a new space that has opened up in Chicago to encourage ‘civic making.’ He’ll also touch on the intersection of civic media and it’s relationship to activism and community organizing.
As always, we’ll be live streaming the event right here on this blog. The live stream will start at about 6:15 CST.
At this week’s hack night, Forest Gregg of DataMade gave a talk about Chicago’s hidden open data. While the civic innovation community has gotten used to going to data.cityofchicago.org for their open data needs, there’s a lot more data that’s not on the portal.
The last few OpenGov Hack Nights have been spent building out a website (opengovhacknight.org) to help gather information on projects, people, and events in Chicago’s robust civic innovation community. Another goal of the project is to list all the resources available to developers (including Smart Chicago’s free web hosting for civic apps and user testing.)
A large part of the page has been documenting all the open data that’s not on the portal. Forest Gregg talks more about that below the fold.
While our local governments continue to do an amazing job of publishing to their open data portals, many datasets still exist solely on obscure websites most of us don’t know about.
Forest Gregg will talk about some of these lesser known, but highly useful, open data sources available in Chicago including river pollution, financial interest statements, schools and more.
This is part of an ongoing hack night exercise to publicly document Chicago’s open data.
The live stream will start at 6:15ish CST
It’s somewhat taken for granted that Chicago civic hackers have access to a plethora of data. This includes the city code – which is available online for anyone and everyone to see and download. To get the code to this point takes a lot of work.
Julia Ellis, Policy Director of the Office of City Clerk, spoke at the last OpenGov Chicago Meetup to explain the process of getting the city code online and how the process is far more complicated than it sounds.
We work in the civic innovation sector of the technology industry to improve lives in cities, improve relationships between residents and government, and create sustainable business models that support an innovative ecosystem. Having brass-tacks explications of the actual work (not what we perceive the work to be) is critical.
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Last week, Smart Chicago hosted the OpenGov Chicago-land meetup at the Chicago Cultural Center with a great lineup of authoritative speakers:
Susana Mendoza, City Clerk of the City of Chicago, Julia Ellis, Legislative Counsel at Chicago City Clerk, Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org, Waldo Jaquith, an Open Government Technologist who is leading an effort to test the Open Data Institute model for open data standards in the United States, and Seamus Kraft, Executive Director of the OpenGov Foundation talk about the code by which we rule our city.
We’ve compiled all the videos of the presentation below the fold:
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On October 30th at 6:00pm – Smart Chicago will be live streaming the OpenGov Chicago meetup where we’ll review the City’s Technology Plan below:
