Matt Hampel from LocalData and David McDowell from the Southwest Organizing Project talk about vacant building data.
Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to announce our partnership with the Southwest Organizing Project and LocalData as part of the Civic Works Project — providing tools that empower organizations to make change in their neighborhoods.
Today marks the publication of “Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation“, an anthology edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson and published by Code for America. Here’s a blurb:
Beyond Transparency is a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape, in which practitioners share their own stories of what they’ve accomplished with open civic data. It seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem solving. Through these stories, we examine what is needed to build an ecosystem in which open data can become the raw materials to drive more effective decision-making and efficient service delivery, spur economic activity, and empower citizens to take an active role in improving their own communities.
I wrote a chapter for this anthology titled, “Building a Smarter Chicago“, which I call “an illustrative, incomplete, and idiosyncratic look at the ecosystem in Chicago. It is meant to provide a thumbnail take on how the ecosystem developed here, while sparking fires elsewhere”.
I’m really honored to have taken part in this important publication. We’ll be serializing the chapter over the next few days. Meantime, to download or order a printed copy, visit beyondtransparency.org.
Over there weekend, there were at least three news stories have referenced super-specific figures on speed cameras as released by the City of Chicago, but none of them linked to the source of the data. I read these stories, and marveled and the incredibly specific information they’ve pulled from what seems to be a specific document, but couldn’t for the life of me find the document to which they are referring.
Next week, Smart Chicago will be at the Code for America Summit in San Francisco. We’re big fans, friends, and funders of Code for America and we’re excited to take part in the summit. Here’s a cribsheet:
Going to the Code for America Summit and want to hang out? Hit us up.
Here’s looking at you kid
Here at Smart Chicago Collaborative, we cover a lot of civic innovation events in Chicago with live streaming and live tweeting. We also use a lot of audio and visual equipment to execute our Civic User Testing Group.
This mega-post covers the equipment we use as well as details on how we use it. We seek to propagate the Smart Chicago model for civic innovation work all over the country, so we seek to share as much information about our methods and equipment as we do our source code.
So here’s a deep-dive into our AV/ internet connectivity/ broadcasting stack:
On Tuesday, the Center for Neighborhood Technologies kicked off their Sustainable Apps Challenge at Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night.
