Great interview of Dr. Bechara Choucair, Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Health.
Audio here:
Month: September 2014
The Launch of the CUTGroup Book
Today we’re launching a website and book, The CUTGroup Book, http://www.cutgroupbook.org/, centered around propagating the components, tools, and methods of our Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup) program.
The CUTGroup is a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps. We started the program in February 2013 and it has grown to include 800 people. We’ve learned a lot and we want to share.
We cover the hardware and software you need, methods for tester and developer recruitment, test design, location scouting, and results analysis. We show detailed budgets, exact website configurations, complete text of recruitment emails, the raw results of every test we’ve conducted, and all the other nuts and bolts it takes to make a CUTGroup in your city.
You can download a PDF of the book for free or order it as a real book on Amazon. Also read about the contributions of dozens of people who made this thing happen.
All hail the people of CUTGroup!
Chicago Region’s Civic Innovation Community at the Code for America Summit!
This week is a great week for civic innovation—the Code for America Summit in San Francisco is here. Smart Chicago will be there in force. I will be there, as well as consultants Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov. (Along with about a dozen other representatives from Chicago’s civic hacking community)
We’ll be live tweeting the event on our @SmartChicago account, but you can also follow along using the #CfAsummit hashtag. Below the fold, we’ve all the details of the Chicago area delegation.
Dan O’Neil on Outside the Loop Radio re: Chicago School of Data
CivicWorks Project Extended
Big update on our CivicWorks Project— it has been extended and we’re getting lots more work done.
The Civic Works Project (formerly known as the Civic Innovation in Chicago project) is program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support civic innovation in Chicago. The program’s original goal was to produce 200 content pieces, 5 apps that solve government problems, and 5 apps that solve community problems. We also ran the Illinois OpenTech Challenge through the grant as well.
6 Months In: Progress on our Cook County Data Project
The Smart Chicago Collaborative has a partnership with the Cook County Bureau of Technology to assist them in the creation and publication of open data in the context of the County’s Open Data Ordinance and Open Government Plan.
It’s been about six months since the start of the project, and so we wanted to check back in at the progress that’s been made.
Daniel X. O’Neil Speech at City Club
I spoke at City Club on Monday, September 8, 2014. Here’s a video:
Daniel X. O’Neil, Executive Director, Smart Chicago Collaborative from City Club of Chicago on Vimeo.
Here’s the slides:
Great Post on the Data-Smart City Solutions Blog on the Meaning of the Chicago School of Data
Sean Thornton has a great post this morning on the Ash Center at Harvard Kennedy School Data-Smart City Solutions Blog: The Chicago School of Data: Building a Framework for Chicago’s Data Ecosystem. Here’s a snip:
There’s the Chicago school of architecture, made famous by Daniel Burnham and Louis Sullivan. The Chicago school of economics, led by Milton Friedman and other economists, has been a highly influential body of thought for decades. The Chicago school of sociology, meanwhile, led by George Herbert Meade and Jane Addams, ushered in modern urban sociological study.
Of course, these disciplines, styles and approaches have little in common other than being developed in Chicago. They were also all largely developed in the 20th century, and are all alive and well today.
The Chicago School of Data is less of an academic discipline and more of a method for cooperative, data-driven progress united by one key principle—that data, as public good, is one that is at the service of all people, not a select few or special interests. Moreover, that cooperative method doesn’t require its players to be major organizations or government bodies; any resident who uses data or works to improve lives is a part of the Chicago School of Data.
This is the best explication of the phrase I’ve heard yet. Bonus: my pic!
Columbia Journalism Review: Moving from “Projects” to Products
Today Smart Chicago was featured in this story in the Columbia Journalism Review: “How civic hackers are helping local journalism“. Here’s a snip:
“We are trying to create and encourage an alignment among all of the amazing players in this movement, so that what they create leads to products and services that people truly need,” says O’Neil, who was also one of the convenors of an early meet-up group, now called Open Government Chicago(-land). “When you move from [working on] ‘projects’ to ‘products,’ you can make an impact. And you can sustain your work.”
This is a core element in how we approach our work. If we don’t start creating popular products that people love, our movement will fade. We’ve been a leader in thinking around this, and we challenge the community to build break-out products.
That’s why we support the workers in the civic innovation sector of the technology industry. Sign up for our Developer Resources today.
Mind the Gap (At the Chicago School of Data Days Conference)
This post is the first in a series that take a deep dive into some of our sessions. These sessions are an opportunity to discuss some of the greatest challenges organizations face in using data. Sessions will focus on what Smart Chicago learned (through interviews, surveys, and informal discussions) from organizations that face the same challenges. The first set of sessions are going to take a look at gaps in infrastructure, affordability, and access.
One of the most talked about items in terms of feedback on challenges organizations are facing is the we’ve gotten during our surveys has been about gaps.