Month: April 2014

Open and Online: Accessing and Using Health Data at the Public Health Informatics Conference

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Today I’m participating in the session called, “Open and Online: Accessing and Using Health Data” at the Public Health Informatics Conference in Atlanta. Here’s the description:

This session will present “8 Principles of Open Health Data” to guide management of, access to, and governance of de-identified non-aggregate health data. Presenters will discuss the use of an online interactive Disability and Health Data System that uses Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System disability data and will present a framework for capturing newborn admission data from hospitals.

If you care about these issues, please consider joining the Health Data Liberation meetup group, which is meeting tonight at the Opportunity Hub (“Atlanta Intro to the 8 Principles of Open Health Data“, right next door to the PHIC Conference.

Join us in this fight.

Census Reporter 101 with Joe Germuska

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Census Reporter is a tool that helps journalists, innovators, and students explore census data. The Census Reporter is a great way to get detailed information about demographics, income, health insurance coverage, poverty, and even commute times. The apps is powered by the American Community Survey which gathers detailed information about community areas. Joe Germuska sat down with Christopher Whitaker to give a demo of the tool and tell us more about it.

Joe Germuska, Founder of OpenGovChicago

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Developer Resource: Twilio

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We love text.

And as big fans of texting, Smart Chicago has had Twilio as part of our offerings for civic developers since the say we started the program.  We’ve recently expanded our partnership with Twilio, and their local developer relations guru, Greg Bagues, to offer Twilio as a separate service through Smart Chicago. Twilio is a great product that makes it easy to create apps that can make and receive both calls and texts.

 

Healthnear.me

We use it in our own products:

We are also a customer of Textizen, which uses Twilio, including around the Creative Chicago Expo. Civic software developers like Chris Gansen use it to power apps like HealthNearMe.

Like we said, we’re big fans of texting. If you’re new to Twilio, we’ve put together a how-to post of how the app works.

If you’re a civic developer and are interested in using Twilio for your app, please fill out the form below.

Smart Chicago and the National Day of Civic Hacking

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The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to be a contributing partner to the National Day of Civic Hacking effort. We’ve been providing content to the national  website, starting with the Civic Hacking 101 video put together by Smart Chicago consultant and Chicago Code for America Brigade Captain Christopher Whitaker. Our goal is to help spread the lessons we’ve learned in Chicago to the rest of the country.

National Day of Civic Hacking at 1871

Additionally, we’ll be hosting a hackathon May 31st – June 1st at the offices of kCura in the Chicago Loop in partnership with Code for America and Random Hacks of Kindness. Each day will be broken down into two sections.

During the first session, we’ll hear from people on the front line of civic work as they talk about their day to day challenges in the fields of education, housing, hunger, disaster response, public safety , and child protective services. In the afternoon, we’ll break out into group and prototype apps that may help address these challenges.

You can register for the event here.

On the launch of Crime and Punishment in Chicago

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Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to launch our latest Civic Works Project: Crime and Punishment in Chicago. This project is a collaborative effort among Smart Chicago, FreeGeekChicago, and the Chicago Justice Project.

Chicago Police Department Memorial at Buckingham Fountain

Photo by Chris Smith / Flikr

The Crime and Punishment in Chicago project provides an index of data sources regarding the criminal justice system in Chicago. We aggregate sources of data, how this data is generated, how to get it, and what data is unavailable. This project is a key way we are using the Civic Works grant to use data journalism to uncover the value of data and cover the stories behind the data.

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