One of our three main areas of focus at Smart Chicago is digital skills. In the past three years, we’ve learned a lot of things from our experience running events, building projects, conducting user testing, and writing extensively about civic innovation.
As part of our work around National Day of Civic Hacking, this year we’re going to be focusing our efforts around teaching these digital skills both locally and nationally. As usual, this effort will be led by Christopher Whitaker.
Christopher has written a number of tutorials and guides to help volunteer civic technology groups for the national Hack for Change website.
Here in Chicago, he will run a training camp at Blue1647 for new civic technology leaders centered around the theme of community organizing. (Register here!) On June 6th, we’ll be bringing in experts around the city to help train new civic tech leaders on the tools and techniques used to leverage the power of technology to help our neighborhoods. The event is specially set up for people new to civic technology regardless of their technology proficiency. This is a learning event— so bring your questions!
This event will be just one of many National Day of Civic Hacking events happening in Chicago including hackathons happening at the Adler Planetarium, Center for Neighborhood Technologies, the Chicago Public Library’s Maker Lab, and OpenGov Hack Night. We’ll be blogging about these events and more as we get closer to June 6th.
You can register for our event here.
