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.

OpenGov Hack Night: IDES and Sunlight Foundation

Christopher Whitaker

Here’s this week’s recap of OpenGov Hack Night Chicago:

This week we live streamed the presentations due to the weather and the CTA Brown line trains not running through the loop.

This week’s first presentation: The Illinois Department of Employment Security and IllinoisJobsLink.com

Gideon Blustein from the Illinois Department of Employment Security dropped by the OpenGov Hack night to talk about employment data available on IllinoisJobLink. IllinoisJobLink is the State of Illinois’ job board designed to help match employers and job seekers.

The Illinois Employment of Employment Security publishes real time labor market information on hiring trends, salary trends, job seeker characteristics, and current labor availability.

The department is currently open to releasing data in new ways or new reports if possible. Currently, the department also released a limited number of reports on the state’s data portal.

People who are interested in working with this kind of data are encouraged to attend our open gov hack nights.

This week’s second presentation: The Sunlight Foundation and local government transparency

The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit non-partisan organization dedicated to making government more transparent. Previously, the Sunlight Foundation mainly focused on federal transparency. This resulted in reports on government spending, APIs that help automate reports on government spending, lobbying funds, and congressional action, as well as cool apps like Inbox Influence, Scout, and other transparency tools.
This year, the Sunlight Foundation received a $2.1 million dollar grant from Google.org to help fund transparecy efforts at the municipal level.

In order to get a better idea on how this can be accomplished, the Sunlight Foundation is visiting Chicago and other cities to see what work has been done in this area locally.

Part of this work includes building a living document of open data policy guidelines. This Sunlight Foundation would like to see the open data community get involved in helping to craft these guidelines. Where do we need to expand these guidelines? Where do we need case studies? What fits and what doesn’t? What do you need to work better?

If you’re interested in helping Sunlight with this effort, feel free email the Sunlight Foundation at [email protected].

Next week’s OpenGov Hack Night will be March 12th at 6:00pm at 1871 Chicago. You can RSVP here.

OpenGov Chicago Meeting: The Knight News Challenge, Mayors Challenge, and WBEZ

Christopher Whitaker

If you missed Tuesday’s OpenGov Meeting, the recording is below. Later today, we’ll be putting together a more comprehensive recap of the meeting.

Here’s the meeting minutes.

And here’s my writeup:

On a snowy slushy night in Chicago, civic minded web developers, designers, journalists, and advocates gathered at the Chicago Community Trust to hear about the latest developments of the local civic innovation scene.

You can watch the entire presentation here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMpHZs0F7k&feature=g-user-u

The YouTube video description has been marked at different speakers for your convenience.

First up was Chicago’s Director of Analytics Tom Schenk Jr. who had a number of important announcements.

Chicago named a finalist in the Bloomberg Philanthropies Mayor’s Challenge
http://youtu.be/XSNq7Wg_PxA

The Bloomberg Philanthropies Challenge is a contest where cities submit ideas to compete for a grand prize of $5 million dollars. Chicago’s application to to develop a real time predictive analysis platform.

To help Chicago win this challenge, go to http://bit.ly/VoteChiData and vote for Chicago.

Project Falcon
Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is also working on Project Falcon. Project Falcon is an API that’s focused on time and place of events. Once this is online, data scientists will have a strong tool for spatial analysis.

Project Batman
Project Batman is the name for the city’s project using the University of Chicago’s 3D Cave2 system for data visualization.

What is CAVE2? This is CAVE2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d5XDbzy7vuE

The city will be using this tool to explore data in a brand new way.

City now hiring data scientists
Tom also announced that the City of Chicago is hiring a new data scientist to help harness city data into ways that can improve the lives of citizens. (And get to work with CAVE2!)

Knight Lab: Miranda Mulligan and Joe Germuska
Next up, was Miranda Mulligan and Joe Germuska to talk about the Knight Lab at Northwestern University. (You can find their presentation slides here)

The Knight Lab helps to develop tools for journalists such as Timeline, Local Angle, and SoundCite. Joe gave us a primer on open government data and journalism, drawing on his experience at the Chicago Tribune News Apps team and at the Knight Lab.

WBEZ
WBEZ’s Matthew Green gave a short talk about their efforts to improve data journalism and the station featuring data stories. You can see some of their coverage in WBEZ’s new blog Day X Datum.

John Bracken: Knight News Challenge
The Knight News Challenge is a contest where innovative ideas to improve the citizen experience compete for a share of $5 million dollars in grant money.

http://vimeo.com/59499707

Currently, the contest in the submission phase which ends March 18th. After the submission phase is the feedback phase. People will be able to applaud and comment on proposals. The Knight Foundation has tapped eight experts (Including our own Dan O’Neil) to give feedback on each proposal. After the feedback phase, authors will then be able to alter their proposals before the judging phase.

You can check out current submission by visiting the challenge website.