The Smart Chicago Collaborative has documented the four community forums hosted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and held across the city in the month of February.
The purpose of the meetings were to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.
We care about justice and we care about accountability, so we have sent text documenters, videographers (Community TV Network), and a photographer (me) to these convenings under our Documenters program, which “an essential tool for us to add new thinkers, generate ideas, and expand the field for civic tech.”
We showed up at public meetings and documented the proceedings because we’re interested in paying as much attention as we can to what others are saying, what their concerns are, and how they interact with official government structures. These community forums give us a great opportunity for this.
By attending and documenting the meetings, we were able to achieve a number of goals:
- Document the format of the meetings. By focusing attention directly on the modes of engagement— who can talk, for how long, under what moderation, and so on— we can stimulate discussion about those modes and help us be more deliberate in our civic engagement
- Document the actual proceedings, with special attention to the speakers from the public— exactly what questions were asked, what documents were referenced, and what answers were offered by the task force. We also research the questions and answers to the greatest degree possible. This includes learning more about the speakers, many of whom have decades of experience in their communities. Research and link to their organizations, their work, and the external documents, cases, and other matters that they reference
- Expand the field of people who attend, analyze, and document these meetings. This is at the core of the Documenters program. We employed a total of eight people (two videographers, 4 writers, and two photographers) who did a total of 26 “shifts” of work (attending meetings, doing post-production on photos and videos, watching videos and summarizing after the fact, researching documentation created by others, and so on)
Documentation
Here’s a detailed look at all of our work:
Kyla Williams Co-Presents Today at Philanthropy Ohio’s Annual Conference
SMART CHICAGO IS MOVING!!!
The Launch of Task Force Tracker
Meeting 4: Notes from Police Accountability Meeting at Sullivan High School
Meeting 3: Notes from Police Accountability Meeting at Benito Juarez Community Academy
Meeting 2: Notes from Police Accountability Forum at South Shore Cultural Center
