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.

Discover civic apps and civic innovators with opengovhacknight.org

Christopher Whitaker

Derek Eder, Eric van Zanten, and Juan-Pablo Valez recently launched Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night website, a great resource for some of the events, projects, and people that make up the thriving civic technology scene in Chicago. Here’s a look at what the site does:

Hacking on Edifice

Home Page

The home page gives an overview of Open Gov Hack Night (“Come join a group of passionate folks working at the intersection of open government, cities, and technology. This is an evening of civic tech hacking, learning, and hanging.”) . It also has info on how the nights are run, sponsors, their monthly joint event with Data Potluck.  They also link to similar events in other cities, some of which are simply simpatico (like those held in London by opengov pioneer MySociety) and some in the Code for America Brigade family that are completely inspired by the Open Gov Hack Night model pioneered here in Chicago.

One of the great things about the event is that it is held every week at the same time and the same place– 6PM on Tuesdays in the IMSA Classroom of 1871 on the 12th floor of the the Merchandise Mart. The format is also the same every week (intros, presentation, projects, and then hack). These reliable patterns has helped make the events popular, fun, and productive.

The three mainstays of Open Gov Hack Night are Derek Eder, Juan-Pablo Velez (two thirds of the leadership of Open City Apps and the creators of the event) and Christopher Whitaker, who leads an onboarding session called Civic Hacking 101. Christopher also livestreams each session and writes up a blog post in his capacity as a consultant for Smart Chicago.

Events Page

The event page has a brief description of recent hack nights as pulled from the Mthe emails they’ve sent out via Mailchimp and edited to include info on sponsors, links to blog posts, and so on.  The first event held at 1871 was on May 17, 2012, when Derek first set up his consultancy, DataMade, in one of the Smart Chicago seat at 1871. Prior to being founding tenants of 1871, we made the following callout:

We have two reserved seats at 1871 and we seek to fill them with small companies, civic leaders, and community members who are interested in building software using city, county, and state data to improve lives and build businesses.

*

If you’re interested, complete this simple form to initiate the process. We expect to be in the space on May 1, 2012, and we’ll manage the schedule for our two seats with a Google calendar.

Derek has put that seat to great use in moving Open Gov Hack Night to 1871 shortly after he moved in. He and DataMade have their own spaces at 1871 now and we house other civic innovators there in the six seats we maintain. We’re really happy to have played a small role in the success of this event.

Events

Projects Page

The Projects page is a great new way for civic innovators to find out what’s going on with projects and see what code is hot.

The uses a Civic JSON Worker that uses the GitHub API to glean information from the project’s repository. The site automatically updates the gallery as the project continues to progress.  The only thing a user needs to do to contribute a project to the gallery is to copy and paste the link to the project’s GitHub page. The Civic JSON worker does all the rest!

 

opengovprojects

People Page

opengovnightpeople

The most important aspect of the new service is that the site instantly connects you to the people behind the projects. This information from the projects is aggregated into a People tab that shows how many GitHub commits that an individual developer has contributed to Chicago civic apps. While the score isn’t that important, what is important is that community members from civic organizations who are interested in civic innovation can now directly connect with the people in the movement.

This app is also open sourced and can be used by other civic hacking communities as well. (Pull Requests Welcome!)

Smart Chicago Collaborative and the City’s Technology Plan

Smart Chicago

Earlier this month, Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva unveiled the city’s very first technology plan. The plan was a result of a year-long process of research, brainstorming, and thinking about how to make all of Chicago competitive in the new digital economy.

This plan is a comprehensive framework for growing Chicago’s technology sector , getting broadband connectivity for everyone, and  ensuring that Chicago remains a leader in open government data .

The plan also highlights the work that the civic technology community has been doing in Chicago. From the weekly OpenGov Hack Nights, the Smart Communities Program, and youth STEM programs; Chicago already enjoys a strong set of technology strengths and this plan will enable the city to advance even further.

Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to have a key role in many of these initiatives and is dedicated to  implementing this plan. Here’s a look at our role in the plan and the aspects of our existing work in this context.

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OpenGov Chicago Recap: DePaul Institute for Housing Studies

Christopher Whitaker 
DePaul Center Photo: Alex Rodgers/Creative Commons

At last week’s Chicago Open Gov Meetup, Tina Fassett of the DePaul University Institute for Housing Studies talked about her work and the data that that university has made available on their web portal.

The Institute for Housing Studies is a research center at DePaul University whose mission is to provide reliable, impartial, and timely data and research to inform housing policy decisions and discussions about the state of housing in the Chicago region and nationally.

As part of this mission, the Institute launched a data portal containing information on housing stock, property sales,  mortgage data, foreclosing filings,  and foreclosure auctions for the metro chicago area.

Here’s Fassett showing some examples of housing indicators:

ihschangeovertime

In this example, the chart shows the cumulative percent of parcels impacted by a foreclosure in a given area since 2005. When you compare this chart to other years on the data portal, you can see the growth of foreclosure filings in the city.

ihs311

In this example, the Institute of Housing added their own data to bring context to a data set from the city’s data portal. This map shows mortgage activity per 100 resident parcels. According to Fassett,  “High levels of mortgage activity are a sign of the health of a housing market because they indicate high demand and the willingness of banks to finance the purchase of new homes and the ability of homeowners to access credit and obtain refinancing…This is a pattern you would generally expect – the higher the level of mortgage activity in a community area, the fewer 3-1-1 vacant building calls.”

If you’d like more information about the work the Institute for Housing Studies is doing, you can visit their website or follow them on twitter.

OpenGovChicago Recap: Creating a more diverse tech scene

Christopher Whitaker

Neal Sales Griffin and Gabe Lyon talk about the Technology Diversity Council

On Thursday, the Mayor’s Tech Diversity Council presented at the Chicago OpenGov Meetup. The Tech Diversity Council is a group of Chicagoans appointed by Mayor Emanuel to find ways to create opportunities for minorities in Chicago’s growing technology industry. It’s headed by the Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva.

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