Midwest Selected for Code for America Brigade Regional Pilot, on the Code for America blog.
Month: June 2014
Free LibreOffice Training
15 free, downloadable courses in word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets over on Connect Chicago.
Incomplete List of Cook County Property Data Tools
As we continue our work on our Cook County Open Data project, we are exploring already existing tools for interacting with Cook County Government data. Josh Kalov created this directory of ones that may be useful. Over the next several months we will do tutorials and write more information about many of these. As we work to add more raw data and update existing data, it’s important to see and use the vastly helpful tools that the County has invested in to allow residents to learn more about property.
Roundtable Discussion with Yoani Sanchez, Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2014 Gus Hart Fellow
This afternoon Smart Chicago hosted a roundtable discussion with Yoani Sanchez, Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2014 Gus Hart Fellow. We talked about her new site, 14ymedio and the importance of jump drives in places with limited access to the Internet.
Livestream: OpenGovChicago > Open Science!
Join us at 6PM Central time for a livestream of the OpenGovChicago meetup on Open Science. The stream will be available right here in this blog post. Also, please help with the meeting minutes— it’s a group effort!
This is a special fun-time summer meetup where we mashup two high-energy Chicago groups: our own OpenGovChicago and the Hive Learning Network. The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a member of the Hive, which is a network of civic and cultural institutions dedicated to transforming the learning landscape by creating opportunities for youth to explore interests through connected learning experiences. We’re a part of two projects this summer, and we seek to cross-pollinate all of the great people we work with. Let’s do this!
More on the meetup:
The Open Science Cooperative is an extension of the Hive Mapping Cooperative, a 2014 Hive Learning Network project.
We will have representatives from The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Sweet Water Foundation, Freedom Games, and theForest Preserve District of Cook County to talk about their efforts to provide teens the ability to collect, manage, analyze, visualize, and share geo-referenced data through open-source mapping and data-sharing software.
The aim of this meetup is to share work to date and to connect with the larger open data/ open technology community. This is an ambitious project focused on open source tools for mapping and data collection. The OpenGov movement has much to share on these fronts, and we hope for great cross-pollination on this night!
Code for America Announces Midwest Brigade to be HQ’d at Smart Chicago, led by Christopher Whitaker
Code for America and the Smart Chicago Collaborative are pleased to announce that the Midwest has been selected for the first Code for America Regional Brigade Program. The Midwest Regional Brigade program will support existing Code for America brigade cities as well as work to expand the number of brigade cities in the region. The program will be led by Smart Chicago consultant and current Chicago Brigade Captain Christopher Whitaker and will be headquartered at the Smart Chicago Collaborative.
Christopher Whitaker will lead the Midwest Regional Brigade program, photo by Angel Kittiyachavalit
Join us at the next OpenGov Chicago Meetup – For Science!
The next OpenGov Chicago next meetup will focus on Open Science. The Open Science Cooperative is an extension of the Hive Mapping Cooperative, a 2014 Hive Learning Network project.
We will have representatives from The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Sweet Water Foundation, Freedom Games, and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to talk about their efforts to provide teens the ability to collect, manage, analyze, visualize, and share geo-referenced data through open-source mapping and data-sharing software.
The aim of this meetup is to share work to date and to connect with the larger open data/ open technology community. This is an ambitious project focused on open source tools for mapping and data collection. The OpenGov movement has much to share on these fronts, and we hope for great cross-pollination on this night!
More about our speakers below. As always we’ll have food and we’ll be live streaming (and live tweeting) the event!
Getting at the Root of Issues with Juvenile Records
Here at Smart Chicago, we are interested in technology that helps improves the lives of regular Chicago residents. Expunge.io, a simple tool for kicking off the expungement process by by Cathy Deng and the Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council, is a good example of that.
We’re also interested in helping bring along smart policies that mitigate the need for tech-based workarounds like Expunge.io. Illinois Senate Bill 0978 is a good example of that. Here’s the relevant portion of that legislation:
the Department of State Police shall automatically expunge, on or before January 1 of each year, a person’s law enforcement records relating to incidents occurring before his or her 18th birthday in the Department’s possession or control which pertain to the person when arrested as a minor if: (1) the minor was arrested for an eligible offense and no petition for delinquency was filed with the clerk of the circuit court; (2) the person attained the age of 18 years during the last calendar year; and (3) since the date of the minor’s most recent arrest, at least 6 months have elapsed without an additional arrest, filing of a petition for delinquency whether related or not to a previous arrest, or filing of changes not initiated by arrest.
Again, this is a great step in changing the law around the complex process of expungement. But this article in the Illinois State Bar Journal, Juvenile Justice, Part I: Automatic expungement of juvenile records, hints at the more difficult data/ technology realities behind juvenile records management.
One young woman completed an Illinois Job Corps program and when she applied for her pharmacy technician license, the licensing agency learned that she had an “aggravated battery” on her record, said Carolyn Frazier, an attorney and clinical law professor with the Children and Family Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law. The girl was involved in a fight with other girls at school and was never charged with a crime, yet in some database, her arrest was listed without any dispositional information. Similarly, young man working as a janitor at a Chicago public school was fired after one of his annual background checks showed two arrests. Neither resulted in delinquency petitions or a finding of guilt.
As Frazier put it, we’re in a “brave new world of data integration” where municipalities small and large are sharing information with one another, the state, and the federal government. State police used to send information to the FBI, but that practice ended three years ago.
And the root of the harm:
Like other juvenile justice advocates, Frazier would like to see a legislative commission established to get to the root of why and how confidential information involving minors is being released.
As long as juvenile records are obtained and trafficked by unethical data purveyors, the eventual expungement of that record can have limited value.
Think of it this way: if someone discovers a lie about you in a database on a Tuesday (like the woman with an “aggravated battery” on her record who was never charged with a crime) and that lie is copied to a new database, owned by an unscrupulous data merchant, and the lie is removed from that database on a Wednesday (a successful expungement), the lie from Tuesday still exists, and can still cause harm.
We’ve got to get at the root.