June – 2013 – Archive of Smart Chicago Collaborative Work

Last year I attended the US Ignite launch event at the White House (see full video here), where a number of Obama administration officials made a series of announcements about programs around broadband policy. It was a wide-ranging and mind-boggling series of speakers, and I wrote up some thoughts about what it all meant for Chicago.

This is an age of conception— we are limited only by our imaginations

Since then, I’ve continued to take interest in US Ignite and their efforts to foster the creation of next-generation Internet applications that provide transformative public benefit. The investments made here in Chicago, including the Gigabit Squared project that includes $2 million of investment from the State of Illinois as well as the Broadband Challenge from the City of Chicago— show that Chicago is very much a part of the Gigabit future.

What has struck me most, as I follow this work, is how far we have to go in terms of conceiving what this next-generation network looks like for regular people.

That’s why we’re a sponsor of the US Ignite Application Summit being held in Chicago June 24th – 26th.

What could you build if you weren’t restricted by the limits of network speed and latency? What if your network could support gigabit download and upload speeds? What if the power of cloud data centers wasn’t located on the east coast, but placed in your own backyard? What would you build? What businesses could you launch if there were no limits?

That’s what we want to find out at this three-day event, running from June 24th to June 26th at the Allegro Hotel and UIC. We’ll be posting regularly from the Summit, so follow along on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Today we’ve added support for querying the data that appears on Chicago Health Atlas by adding JSON endpoints for the major pages. If you want to get access to the underlying data that drives our maps and charts, just add “.json” to the URL of pretty much any page and we’ve got you covered.

Examples:

You can see all community area and zip code boundaries in Chicago by eyeballing our map:

Or you can see the raw data http://www.chicagohealthatlas.org/places.json:

You can see all birth rate data by year or see the data all at once.
Birth rate data for the Loop area with confidence intervals as json.

Thanks to Dan Sinker and Cory Nissen for asking for this feature and Derek Eder for getting it done lickety-split.

@SmartChicago Awesome. I’d love to be able to ping an API and get each location’s data as a JSON chunk.

— dan sinker (@dansinker) June 18, 2013

@SmartChicago Nice, can the raw data be accessed at all, or are we limited to browsing via the map interface?

— cory nissen (@corynissen) June 18, 2013

@corynissen @smartchicago Seems like you may have just built the official one form them!

— dan sinker (@dansinker) June 19, 2013

Have at it!

Today we’re happy to announce the launch of our latest project, the Chicago Health Atlas, where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

You can read all about the making of the Chicago Health Atlas on our project page. It’s quite a story of collaboration. We pulled sprawling amounts of city-wide health data into a cohesive view of health near you.

It all starts with Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute, the project funder, and Jim Alexander, the Institute’s Executive Director and the conceptual leader behind the project
We worked with Abel Kho and some of the largest providers of health care in Chicago to develop tools which balanced the need for anonymity of patients and providers, while preserving uniqueness of patients. Read more about their work here
Eric Jones and Jamyia Clark of the Chicago Department of Public Health have been instrumental in shepherding the CDPH data into the Atlas— explaining the data, advising on presentation, and generally acting as an intermediary between the Web development and health informatics sides of the project. He also presents the project to the health science community at places like the 2013 Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Annual Meeting

Read more about data sources on the Chicago Health Atlas About page.

On the Smart Chicago side, Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees all of our health initiatives and has been a great leader. Long-time consultant Derek Eder of Data Made has been essential to the success of this project. His deep experience with mapping Chicago things has been a huge natural resource. Aaron Salmon of Auraworks is the design lead for this project.

Patrice Coleman is our Project Coordinator in charge of outreach. Want to take part? Let’s do it.

Github announced a new feature today— the visualization of geographic data— and pointed to the geojson data we store for our Chicago Health Atlas product as an example. This post has led to 240 forks and counting.

Chicago Migrahack was held from May 31 – June 2, 2013 as a part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. I helped judge the hacktahon. Following is my take on the projects, including notes, screenshots, and images from the day. Here is a copy of the spreadsheet the organizers used to manage the projects, here’s the project page on the Migrahack website, and here’s a bunch of photos I took at the event.

The projects are listed in the order in which they were presented. The descriptions include any award the entry won and the commendation presented by the judges for any award.

Judges!

Recipes for Change
This was a concept for an app to help women build an underground support network. Domestic violence is a leading source of crime. It is under-reported, especially among those who are undocumented and/or are not native English speakers. They call it “recipes” and make it look like a normal recipe site. Dots on a map of women who can help them within a 5-mile radius.

Finding Care
http://tarbell.recoveredfactory.net/findingcare/
By the Los Almighty Windy City Data Hustlers team of Lucio Villa, David Eads, Maria Ines Zamudio, Yana Kunichoff, and Willberto Morales

“I’m being denied life”, says the homepage of this is explainer of stories surrounding the Affordable Care Act. They looked into PUMS data and pulled out some “By the numbers” stuff. All of this is driven by the Tarbell template as well as javascript and jquery.

Finding Care won “Best storytelling with data visualization”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Coherent, elegant narrative with lots of points of departure. Triggers questions for further research. Polished production in short time frame with simple, effective data visualization. Would love to see calls to action– links to advocacy groups, reporting on pending legislation, and so on.

Chicago MigraHack Web App
http://www.20thirty.com/migra/
By Team DePaul (Paul Duszak, Temuulen Erdenekhuu, and Alex McCarten-Gibbs).

This team created a visualization of persons obtaining permanent resident status in the United States, broken down by region of origin. Mainly uses highcharts and other javascript. Allows the user to export all data.

Chicago MigraHack Web App won “2nd place data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Dead-simple visualization that takes a comprehensive look at a central dataset. Provides an understandable, useful, and portable tool for others to explore, understand, and share. Key insights into immigration.

Draw The Border and Naco or Naco?
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/naco.html
By Dan Hill

This person made two related entries, both of which play on geographic perception and reality.

Draw the border! presents itself this way: 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico divides border city pictured below. Can you draw the line that splits this city? Start clicking on the map to create the points to construct your border line and click “Done!” to see the real border in green and learn about the cities on each side.

Draw the border won “Best insight team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Fun, intuitive tool that engages the user and challenges assumptions. Simple presentation that takes an current meme (GeoGuesser) and adds an education element. Extra points for individual creativity, persistence, and execution. Sometimes collaboration is all about just showing up.

Inspired by GeoGuesser, Naco or Naco? is a website that shows a satellite view of a place that contains the border between two cities and prompts the user to draw that border. Naco or Naco? shows Naco, a city that has a country as a border, and presents some basic demographic information as a clue.

Naco or Naco?

Early Childhood Resource Need App
http://migrahackranch.weebly.com/
By Team RANCH (Norbert Winklareth, Carlos McReynolds, Heather Gerberich, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, and Rebecca Harris)

The Early Childhood Resource Need App is a map that shows neighborhoods in Chicago color-coded by their need for early childhood education seats, as calculated by the Illinois Facilities Fund, representing thousands of children unable to access preschool and child care programs.

Team Maginificent 7
Antonio Garcia III, Adam Pearce, Cindy Agustin, and Irene Tostados

Three Alarm Data Fire
No presentation
Kenneth Watkins, Oz du Soleil, Sachi Shirasaka

Illinois in the ICE age
http://geoff.terrorware.com/projects/migrahack/
By Ice Breakers (Geoffrey Hing, Tara Tidwell Cullen, Ruth Lopez, Jimmie Glover)

The Illinois in the Ice Age website is a snapshot of a two-month period of ICE activity in Illinois and a look at the journey of 7 people.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Illinois detained 966 individuals during November and December of 2012. During those two months, 915 people also left ICE custody. Many of these individuals entered a detention facility earlier and one individual had been held for more than one year. Of those who left, 390 were deported and 38 agreed to their own removal.

ICE Breakers won the “Best data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

A complex analysis in an original presentation. Deep journalism that is ripe for further analysis and exploration. Contains a clear call to action for others to continuing the work; connecting the dots.

Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America
http://migrahack-dandelion.herokuapp.com/
By Dandelion Project (Lauren Pabst, Adriana Diaz, Antonio Oliva, Forrest Blount, Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam, Michael Drouet)

Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America focuses on the demographic changes in Niles and Lisle Townships. Nile, for instance, is attractive to a growing number of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. Lisle has become increasingly Indian, Chinese and Mexican. The site offers maps, charts, and analyis of these trends.

Team Hello World
http://prominent.mie.uic.edu/Project/index.html
Kevin, Vivek, Gaurav, Ankush, Manju Rupani

Team Hello World created a website that looked for statistical correlations between remittance and immigration. They show a map of remittances and allow the user to explore. They also show some findings.