Governor Pat Quinn has declared April 3rd to be Illinois Innovation Day. Christopher Whitaker, consultant to Smart Chicago, will be representing us in Springfield tomorrow. Here’s a look at the work that Smart Chicago Collaborative has done at the state level.
IDPH Chief of Staff Stephen Konya speaking at 1871 during the “Making Public Health Data Work” event
This past weekend, health care policy makers, practitioners, and technologists gathered together at 1871 to talk about how we could make public health data work here in Illinois.
The event was hosted by a number of partners including the Health Data Consortium, Illinois Department of Public Health, the California HealthCare Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
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.
Illinois Governor Pat Quinn announced the Illinois Open Technology Challenge last week. Here’s an excerpt:
The State of Illinois Open Data site, Data.Illinois.Gov, is a searchable clearinghouse of information from state agencies that is helping inform residents about the operation of state government and encouraging the creative use of state information, including the development of applications for mobile devices that can be built around the data. This site, which the governor launched in June 2011, now contains more than 6,500 data sets.
Sponsors of the Illinois Open Technology Challenge include The Chicago Community Trust, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Google, and the Motorola Mobility Foundation. Additional support is being provided by Comcast. Administrative support for the project is provided by the Illinois Science & Technology Coalition and Smart Chicago Collaborative.
This is an important project for Smart Chicago, and it is deeply embedded into our entire program around data. Smart Chicago is housed at the The Chicago Community Trust, which has partnered with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to create the Civic Innovation in Chicago project, which brings together government, developers, journalists, and nonprofits to better understand data and use it to solve community problems.
The Trust and Knight has jointly pledged $50,000 to support prizes for the Illinois Open Technology Challenge because it brings governments, developers and communities together in a common mission to use public data and create digital tools that will serve today’s civic needs and promote economic development.
If you’re interested in participating, join our list and let us know.
