We’ll be live streaming tonight’s OpenGov Chicago Meetup here on the website via Google Plus. We’ll start our broadcast at about 6:15 CST. You can follow along in our meeting notes using the google doc here.
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Fox 32 News Covers Chicago Civic Hacking Community
Tonight Fox 32 9 o’clock news did a story on the civic hacking community here in Chicago. Great stuff, including extensive coverage of OpenGov Hack Night and the presentation about a possible app for restaurant workers.
Hackers use their skills to make Chicago more “user-friendly”
FOX 32 Chicago News Story: Hackers use their skills to make Chicago more `user-friendly` from Daniel X. O’Neil on Vimeo.
Here’s the Rap Genius annotation for the story, with lots of links and some clarifications:
Fox 32 News Chicago – Hackers use their skills to make Chicago more `user-friendly’ Lyrics
And complete text:
Hackers use their skills to make Chicago more `user-friendly`
CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) –
Usually when you think about computer hackers, you think of people doing something illegal with your bank account, but now, a group of people are redefining the term by using their technology skills to develop useful websites that will benefit people living or visiting Chicago.
It’s called “civic hacking” and the city is partnering with private groups and volunteers to try and make life better in Chicago. It’s part of the Smart Chicago Collaborative that has already developed more than 50 apps all aimed at solving city problems, while fostering open government.
All the information used in the apps comes from public city data bases. It’s a trend that more and more cities across the country are doing, but Chicago is among the leaders.
If you’ve ever had your car towed and wondered where it was taken, you are not alone. Who can forget the frustration shared by hundreds of people after the blizzard of 2011 when their vehicles were towed and it took days for some people to find them?
Wasmycartowed.com wasn’t available then or it might have alleviated a lot of angst. Now, using city data, the website allows you to find your towed car simply by putting in the license plate.
It’s an app developed by volunteers working at hack nights sponsored by Open City Apps in cooperation with the Smart Chicago Collaborative.
“We have web developers, designers, data analysts and community organizers that come together to come together to talk about civic issues and how we can use our technology skills to solve those problems,” Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Christopher Whitaker explains.
One of the projects some hack night teams are working on is an open trip planner app similar to Google maps, but one that making using the new Divvy Bikes a lot easier by incorporating info about bike stations.
“So it can give you walking directions to that particular spot, and then it can also give you biking directions from one station to another, so it’s all, sort of encompassing in one spot,” Derek Eder of Open City Apps says.
Other available apps include chicagocouncilmatic.org which allows people to track legislation by subject or by alderman.
There’s another to help find flu shot locations, and one to track complaints about food poisoning on Twitter.
“So if you go to Twitter and complain about food poisoning we have a listener for that, some software that listens for that and we tweet back at you including people from the
Chicago Department of Public Health,” Executive Director Daniel O’Neil says.
That app would provide info to the Health Department so it could send an inspector to the restaurant in question.
Smart Chicago in the Wall Street Journal
Today Smart Chicago was featured, along with many others, in a story in the Wall Street Journal covering the great work of civic hackers in Chicago:
Hackers Called Into Civic Duty
Chicago, Other Cities Work With Programmers to Leverage Data Troves for Public Purpose
Snip:
“People still think hacking is getting people’s credit-card numbers from J.C. Penney,” said Daniel X. O’Neil, executive director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a nonprofit using technology to improve city life. “Now we work pretty closely with the city and the state.”
Smart Chicago consultant Christopher Whitaker reviewed the Open311 project brought to Chicago through a grant to Code for America:
Christopher Whitaker, who heads Chicago’s Code for America team, also showed off 311 Service Tracker Chicago, a program from his group and the city that helps residents track the status of service requests for things such as removing abandoned vehicles or filling potholes.
“Now, when you file a request in Chicago, you get a tracking number like you would from UPS,” Mr. Whitaker said. People can go to the website, enter the tracking number and see which city department is working on the problem and the status of the request.
Full story:
The Launch of Smart Chicago Annotations
Today we’re launching our Annotations program, where we publish rich text-based annotations of dense government documents like municipal code, RFPs, contracts, and other documents of this nature.
People in the open government / open data world like to poke fun at documents. Often published in PDF format, and containing stilted language and legal provisions, these files are easy targets for those of us who are unfamiliar with what they say and what they can lead to.
But these documents are important. In many cases, they are lifeblood of cashflows in and out of government. They are the sum total of the rules— the code, so to speak— that we use to run things. They are the objects with the signatures & the stamps, the legal descriptions and the scopes of work. They matter; enormously. And we have to understand them.
At Smart Chicago, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to create sustainable infrastructure for civic innovation. Programs like the CUTGroup (resident-centered design that engages hundreds of Chicagoans), Hosted Web Space (free server space and configuration for people working in open data), and our Github account (open source code from myriad web projects that put real money into the hands of civic developers) are deliberately designed to build this infrastructure.
This annotation project is a step toward addressing another infrastructure issue— funding. We believe that government spending on technology could be used to fund civic innovation while reducing overall spending. Small civic developers— the ones we hire to do our projects— should be bidding on any enterprise software system that comes down the pike. Introducing open technologies, agile methods, and new mindsets to government contracting will lead to more efficient spending and economic expansion.
What we’re trying to do is build the civic innovation sector of the technology industry.
We use News Genius as the platform for our Annotations program. It has a number of features that make it great for our purposes:
- Rich annotations (links, images, video embeds, etc.) that allow for deeper understanding of specific words and phrases
- Direct, sharable hyperlinks to specific annotations to stimulate discussion
- Open platform that allows anyone to improve the annotations
- There’s a large and growing community of people on the platform, annotating all sorts of text
Join us!
Here are the items we’re annotating upon launch:
- City of Chicago – RFP for Municipal Code Printing, Sales, Web Hosting, and Editing Supplementation Services: this covers a specific RFP covering the publication of the municipal code. We thought it was a good example to start with because it has all of the boilerplate language and the project also has a technological component
- City of Chicago – Sample Contract with City of Chicago: this is a boilerplate contract attached to all RFPs. This is somewhat less annotated – we definitely could use your help!
News Genius is a project of Rap Genius, which focuses on annotating the lyrics of rap songs. As you can imagine, the content on that side of the site can get somewhat off-color. If you stay focused on the above-reffed items, you should be able to steer clear of any of that. As we like to say here at Smart Chicago, “open means open”.
One side effect of this project is that we’ve started the first “Artist” page for our favorite municipal government: http://rapgenius.com/artists/City-of-chicago as well as the Department of Law (http://rapgenius.com/artists/Department-of-law) and Department of Procurement Services (http://rapgenius.com/artists/Department-of-procurement-services). Those are some great URLs.
Much, much more to come.
Chicago Health Atlas Data Feeds
Today we’ve added support for querying the data that appears on Chicago Health Atlas by adding JSON endpoints for the major pages. If you want to get access to the underlying data that drives our maps and charts, just add “.json” to the URL of pretty much any page and we’ve got you covered.
Examples:
You can see all community area and zip code boundaries in Chicago by eyeballing our map:
Or you can see the raw data http://www.chicagohealthatlas.org/places.json:
You can see all birth rate data by year or see the data all at once.
Birth rate data for the Loop area with confidence intervals as json.
Thanks to Dan Sinker and Cory Nissen for asking for this feature and Derek Eder for getting it done lickety-split.
@SmartChicago Awesome. I’d love to be able to ping an API and get each location’s data as a JSON chunk.
— dan sinker (@dansinker) June 18, 2013
@SmartChicago Nice, can the raw data be accessed at all, or are we limited to browsing via the map interface?
— cory nissen (@corynissen) June 18, 2013
@corynissen @smartchicago Seems like you may have just built the official one form them!
— dan sinker (@dansinker) June 19, 2013
See also Cory’s method for querying this site– thanks for doing this, Cory.
Have at it!
Migrahack Projects
Chicago Migrahack was held from May 31 – June 2, 2013 as a part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. I helped judge the hacktahon. Following is my take on the projects, including notes, screenshots, and images from the day. Here is a copy of the spreadsheet the organizers used to manage the projects, here’s the project page on the Migrahack website, and here’s a bunch of photos I took at the event.
The projects are listed in the order in which they were presented. The descriptions include any award the entry won and the commendation presented by the judges for any award.
Judges!
Recipes for Change
This was a concept for an app to help women build an underground support network. Domestic violence is a leading source of crime. It is under-reported, especially among those who are undocumented and/or are not native English speakers. They call it “recipes” and make it look like a normal recipe site. Dots on a map of women who can help them within a 5-mile radius.
Finding Care
http://tarbell.recoveredfactory.net/findingcare/
By the Los Almighty Windy City Data Hustlers team of Lucio Villa, David Eads, Maria Ines Zamudio, Yana Kunichoff, and Willberto Morales
“I’m being denied life”, says the homepage of this is explainer of stories surrounding the Affordable Care Act. They looked into PUMS data and pulled out some “By the numbers” stuff. All of this is driven by the Tarbell template as well as javascript and jquery.
Finding Care won “Best storytelling with data visualization”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:
Coherent, elegant narrative with lots of points of departure. Triggers questions for further research. Polished production in short time frame with simple, effective data visualization. Would love to see calls to action– links to advocacy groups, reporting on pending legislation, and so on.
Chicago MigraHack Web App
http://www.20thirty.com/migra/
By Team DePaul (Paul Duszak, Temuulen Erdenekhuu, and Alex McCarten-Gibbs).
This team created a visualization of persons obtaining permanent resident status in the United States, broken down by region of origin. Mainly uses highcharts and other javascript. Allows the user to export all data.
Chicago MigraHack Web App won “2nd place data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:
Dead-simple visualization that takes a comprehensive look at a central dataset. Provides an understandable, useful, and portable tool for others to explore, understand, and share. Key insights into immigration.
Draw The Border and Naco or Naco?
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/naco.html
By Dan Hill
This person made two related entries, both of which play on geographic perception and reality.
Draw the border! presents itself this way: 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico divides border city pictured below. Can you draw the line that splits this city? Start clicking on the map to create the points to construct your border line and click “Done!” to see the real border in green and learn about the cities on each side.
Draw the border won “Best insight team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:
Fun, intuitive tool that engages the user and challenges assumptions. Simple presentation that takes an current meme (GeoGuesser) and adds an education element. Extra points for individual creativity, persistence, and execution. Sometimes collaboration is all about just showing up.
Inspired by GeoGuesser, Naco or Naco? is a website that shows a satellite view of a place that contains the border between two cities and prompts the user to draw that border. Naco or Naco? shows Naco, a city that has a country as a border, and presents some basic demographic information as a clue.
Early Childhood Resource Need App
http://migrahackranch.weebly.com/
By Team RANCH (Norbert Winklareth, Carlos McReynolds, Heather Gerberich, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, and Rebecca Harris)
The Early Childhood Resource Need App is a map that shows neighborhoods in Chicago color-coded by their need for early childhood education seats, as calculated by the Illinois Facilities Fund, representing thousands of children unable to access preschool and child care programs.
Team Maginificent 7
Antonio Garcia III, Adam Pearce, Cindy Agustin, and Irene Tostados
Three Alarm Data Fire
No presentation
Kenneth Watkins, Oz du Soleil, Sachi Shirasaka
Illinois in the ICE age
http://geoff.terrorware.com/projects/migrahack/
By Ice Breakers (Geoffrey Hing, Tara Tidwell Cullen, Ruth Lopez, Jimmie Glover)
The Illinois in the Ice Age website is a snapshot of a two-month period of ICE activity in Illinois and a look at the journey of 7 people.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Illinois detained 966 individuals during November and December of 2012. During those two months, 915 people also left ICE custody. Many of these individuals entered a detention facility earlier and one individual had been held for more than one year. Of those who left, 390 were deported and 38 agreed to their own removal.
ICE Breakers won the “Best data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:
A complex analysis in an original presentation. Deep journalism that is ripe for further analysis and exploration. Contains a clear call to action for others to continuing the work; connecting the dots.
Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America
http://migrahack-dandelion.herokuapp.com/
By Dandelion Project (Lauren Pabst, Adriana Diaz, Antonio Oliva, Forrest Blount, Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam, Michael Drouet)
Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America focuses on the demographic changes in Niles and Lisle Townships. Nile, for instance, is attractive to a growing number of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. Lisle has become increasingly Indian, Chinese and Mexican. The site offers maps, charts, and analyis of these trends.
Team Hello World
http://prominent.mie.uic.edu/Project/index.html
Kevin, Vivek, Gaurav, Ankush, Manju Rupani
Team Hello World created a website that looked for statistical correlations between remittance and immigration. They show a map of remittances and allow the user to explore. They also show some findings.
72-10
http://infogr.am/Ana-Just-Wants-To-Be-Safe/
Edie Rubinowitz, Adriana Gallardo, Brandon Huntz, Christopher Rudd & Fanny Sampson
This is an infographic story told on inogr.am that tells the story of children detained at the border.
Undocumented Immigrant Help Tool
This is a tool for people who are at high risk for deportation.
Gentrification Study
11square.net/migrahack
Seeks to compare gentrification patterns in Pilsen and Bucktown.
