Today marks an important milestone in our work on Cook County Open Data project.
Josh Kalov, a longtime member of the opengov and civic innovation communities here in Chicago, has started Kalov Strategies and is working with Smart Chicago as the lead consultant for this work. Here’s a snip from Josh’s blog post on the subject:
Over the last several years I’ve become more involved in the open government/open data/civic technology world (and of course the Chicago Public Schools community) and have worked on various open government and civicprojects in my “free time.”
While I have loved working at NAVTEQ/HERE, it is clear from my Twitter feed that my passion is in the civic/government/non-profit/education world. With a full time job (mostly) outside of that space it has been difficult to devote as much time as I would like to learning both the technical and personal/community sides of it and to contributing to as many projects as I would like. So now I am starting my own company Kalov Strategies LLC where I hope to be able to work more with community organizations and civic data/development.
This is a key role of Smart Chicago— to help foster the maturity of the civic innovation industry here in Chicago and across the country. Helping a talented person move from civic hacking to starting a business focused on civic innovation is one of the best possible things I can imagine.
So we’re doing this work together. As always at Smart Chicago, we seek to document our work so that others can replicate it. We are part of a movement, part of the creation of a brand-new sector in the technology industry. There is enormous potential, and we want to share as much as we can so we can quicken the cycles of learning. We see these main unique areas for this particular project:
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Structure: the basis of this project is an agreement between a community foundation and a unit of government to spend jointly on civic innovation
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Operations: we are helping incubate a new civic innovation company to execute on this work
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Community: we are pulling together a large amount of actors (including you?) who care about open data into a cohesive program
Let’s do this.
