Tomorrow is the first of three sessions we’re running with Linda Zabors of Honorary Chicago to help improve the data on her website, which collects and displays “the who, where, and why of Chicago’s brown honorary street signs…. and other commemorative honors”.
We’re helping put together a crew of five people from our Documenters program who will review bound books of the Journal of the Proceedings of City Council at the Chicago Public Library. Linda will guide them through the sections to look for and the documenters will take pics and enter info into a spreadsheet so that it can be ported onto the website.
All of this is a part of digitizing the official records of the streets from City Council data not yet available in digital format to help complete Linda’s research of 30 years of honorary sign designations (more than 2,000 signs!). Most of 1985-present has been collected, there are some gaps, especially in the 2003-2009 timeframe.
We’re going to help her with that. This is a perfect project for our Documenters program, for a number of reasons:
- Focus is on city data and helping people understand a central record of our municipal government
- Gets Chicago residents paid while learning and being civically engaged
- Helps out a great actor in civic tech who has already done an enormous amount of work
- We get to hang out at one of our central shared spaces— the public library!
We are looking to expand our corps of available documenters, so if you are someone you know is interested in joining us, complete this form. If you have further questions, contact Director of Operations Kyla Williams at .
