OpenGrid

OpenGrid on the Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions Blog

Smart Chicago

data-smart-city-solutionsSean Thornton of Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions wrote up a great piece on the launch of OpenGrid. Here’s a snip:

Yet in order for DoIT’s OpenGrid and UrbanCCD’s Plenario to interact, additional software—also called a service layer—was necessary.  Enter the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a local civic organization that focuses on improving residents’ lives through technology.

Smart Chicago’s work focuses on three main areas for residents – increasing access to the internet, enhancing digital skills, and expanding the use of meaningful city data.  For Smart Chicago Executive Director Dan O’Neil, supporting a program like OpenGrid is a natural fit.

“A collaborative union between developers, residents, and government – that’s what Smart Chicago is about, and that’s what OpenGrid is about too,” O’Neil noted at the application’s launch. “This is why we’re on it.”  To build the service layer, Smart Chicago commissioned UTurn Data Solutions, a local IT consultancy focused data storage and Cloud computing projects.

Smart Chicago is also helping ensure that OpenGrid is effective in its mission to enhance transparency efforts between the city and the public. One of Smart Chicago’s marquee programs is its Civic User Testing Group, or CUTGroup.  CUTGroup participants, which include residents from all corners of the city, are compensated to participate in focus groups that test civic websites and apps.  The program has given developers numerous insights and has led to the improvement of many local apps, including theEveryBlock iPhone App, FoodBorne Chicago, and the Chicago Health Atlas. CUTGroup will be testing OpenGrid to help DoIT refine the tool and learn how residents can most benefit from its work.

 

 

Chicago’s Mayor on the OpenGrid Launch

Smart Chicago

Seal_of_Chicago,_IllinoisThe Mayor’s Office of the City of Chicago published a press release about the launch of OpenGrid: Chicago Launches “Open Grid” to Help Residents Explore Their Neighborhoods. Here’s a snip:

Over the past four years, Chicago has led in the publishing of data, leveraging the City of Chicago’s Data Portal to make city data available to all residents. With OpenGrid, the City is making that data even more user-friendly. It allows residents to learn more about their communities, and encourages communities to add their own data and civic developers to enhance the capabilities of the app, all to engage and serve the city’s diverse neighborhoods. For example, a community group can use OpenGrid to determine when and where best to organize an event based on OpenGrid’s ability to show active building permits, street closures, and more.

OpenGrid is hosted by the Smart Chicago Collaborative, an organization housed at the Chicago Community Trust dedicated to making technology available to all Chicago communities. The website and app are available today at opengrid.io

Smart Chicago hosts this application and we also created the code that drives all the data into the system. More here.

City of Chicago Launches OpenGrid

Smart Chicago

OpenGrid_Logo_Horizontal_3ColorToday the Smart Chicago Collaborative helped the City of Chicago launch OpenGrid— a free, browser-based, open source mapping platform displaying Chicago’s robust collection of open datasets.

OpenGrid.io was launched this morning at an event at the University of Illinois Chicago Electronic Visualization Labratory. Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman, Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk, and the Smart Chicago Collaborative kicked off the official launch and demo.

OpenGrid is Public

This important work goes back to WindyGrid, the City’s internal tool displaying all past and present city data. Now, through OpenGrid, the ability to see and layer information about Chicago is in the hands of individual residents. Anyone with Internet access can see Chicago’s data come alive in relation to their homes, communities, and workplaces.

Here is the OpenGrid introductory tutorial:

OpenGrid is Open Source

The City first articulated its plans to build a public-facing WindyGrid and open up the application source code in the 18-month Tech Plan Update. The Plan stated OpenGrid would be “the first open source situational awareness system that other municipalities can use and build upon.”

Smart Chicago’s Role in OpenGrid

Through support from the MacArthur Foundation, Smart Chicago supported the OpenGrid project by creating a service layer to plenar.io, a spatio-temporal open data platform. This layer serves as a data feed to OpenGrid— if the data is in plenar.io, it can get into OpenGrid.

We worked with technology partner Uturn Data Solutions to create the code that drives the data. This easy-to-deploy stack can be used by any municipality or organization to display open datasets on a map. This entire project is dependent on our Amazon Web Services account, which is maintained by Uturn. We also serve many Chicago-based technologists via our Developer Resources program,

We’re proud of our continued work with the City to deliver on the Tech Plan, with local developers to encourage their role in the civic tech ecosystem, and with the University of Chicago to support the plenar.io platform for data ingest.

Here’s a set of photos from launch day: