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
