Our consultant, Christopher Whitaker, will be on WBEZ with Demond Drummer and Cathy Deng to talk about the Code for America Summit. The segment should air around 3:40pm this afternoon. You can listen live here.
WBEZ
Smart Chicago’s Sonja Marziano on Tech Shift talking School of Data
On Monday, Smart Chicago Collaborative’s Sonja Marziano appeared on WBEZ’s OpenTech Shift to talk about the this weekend’s Chicago School of Data event.
You can listen to the whole interview here:
CivicWorks Project Extended
Big update on our CivicWorks Project— it has been extended and we’re getting lots more work done.
The Civic Works Project (formerly known as the Civic Innovation in Chicago project) is program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support civic innovation in Chicago. The program’s original goal was to produce 200 content pieces, 5 apps that solve government problems, and 5 apps that solve community problems. We also ran the Illinois OpenTech Challenge through the grant as well.
Kyla Williams on WBEZ Tech Shift, Talking Chicago Health Atlas
Here’s Kyla WIlliams of Smart Chicago talking about our Chicago Health Atlas project.
For the past year Chicago Health Atlas has tracked the growing amount of health data available to Chicago residents. The hope is that bringing all the information together in one place can help Chicagoans start to improve their own health. Smart Chicago Collaborative Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees the project and joins us in studio to talk about it.
Foodborne Chicago on WBEZ Chicago
Yesterday morning I talked with Tony Sarabia of the WBEZ Morning Shift about Foodborne Chicago. Here’s the sound. Listen all the way to the end for a pretty wacky bumper tune.
Key points covered:
- This site is not about making a cool app. It’s about making teeny tiny connections between the people who matter: residents of the City of Chicago and the municipal government that serves them
- Chicago’s Open 311 system (funded and supported by Smart Chicago) provides the technological and conceptual basis for this site. Without the ability to write directly to the City’s 311 system, and thereby get into the Chicago Department of Public Health’s normal workflow for dealing with food safety, Foodborne Chicago wouldn’t exist
- Twitter and other social media is fast becoming important in all sorts of human domains, including health. There are one million health tweets per day and users tweet symptoms 4 days before seeing a doctor. See more here in this presentation out of Johns Hopkins University: Social Media: New Data Source for Public Health
OpenGov Chicago Meeting: The Knight News Challenge, Mayors Challenge, and WBEZ
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.
