Month: March 2015

Christopher Whitaker Presents at Japan’s Civic Tech Conference

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header_idOur own Christopher Whitaker will be giving a keynote speech in Tokyo this weekend at the Civic Tech Forum.

The Civic Tech Forum is a billed as a place to talk about resolving regional issues through the hands of citizens who take advantage of the technology. It is organized in partnership with Code for Japan and will feature civic innovators from around Japan to talk about the future of civic innovation in Japan.

Christopher will talk about the Chicago experience in helping build a civic innovation ecosystem and how it takes collaboration from both government agencies, non-profit foundations, civic technology startups, and community activists to make it work.

Here’s his slides from his talk:

You can get more information about the event on the Civic Tech Forum website or follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #civictechjp.

 

Center for Technology & Civic Life at 1871 Through Smart Chicago’s Developer Resources Program

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Today we’re launching a new partnership with the Center for Technology & Civic Life, a non-partisan, non-profit that uses technology to improve the way local governments and communities interact. Three of their key team members— have recently moved to Chicago from Washington, DC:

There are three of their team members in Chicago: Tiana Epps-Johnson (Founder and Executive Director), Whitney May (Co-founder and Director of Government Services) and Donny Bridges (Co-founder and Director of Civic Data). Smart Chicago has issued each of them reserved seats in our space at 1871. They are setting up shop there to focus on three main areas:

  • Training local government on how to use technology to enhance the civic livelihood of their communities;
  • Developing free/low-cost tools for government where there are clear needs; and
  • Aggregating civic data sets and developing infrastructure that enables the flow of information and interactions between government and the people they are serving.
Donny Bridges, Whitney May, and Tiana Epps-Johnson in the Garage of The Chicago Community Trust.

Donny Bridges, Whitney May, and Tiana Epps-Johnson in the Garage of The Chicago Community Trust.

This is an important partnership for us through our Developer Resources program. We’re able to be helpful to an important national organization, expand our network of partners that “respect the vital work of public servants”, and help steal smart people from Washington DC, all in one swoop.

Digital Divide Funding and the Power of Public Meetings

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Here’s a story in the Chicago Tribune about the proposed cuts in state funding for the Eliminate the Digital Divide grant program: Proposed Illinois budget threatens digital literacy program. Here’s a snip related to the impact of the proposed cuts in Chicago:

Michael Matos, director of adult education programs for Albany Park Community Center in Chicago, said elimination of the program would hurt people who “do not typically have opportunities to use computers in their everyday lives, for advancing in the workplace, or to progress in their education.” Matos said many are “low-income families and individuals, limited-English immigrants, especially Hispanics, adults with limited education, and unemployed and underemployed individuals,” including military veterans.

“If the Eliminate the Digital Divide program didn’t receive funding for fiscal year 2016, we would have to discontinue eight training classes that run every six weeks and 12 hours weekly of open community access to the computer technology center,” Matos said.

Matos said about 1,800 people use the center, funded mostly by a $75,000 grant that ends in June.

The State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has been an enormously important funder in this space. People and organizations all across the state have relied on these funds to improve skills, get job training, and generally improve their lives.

Here at Smart Chicago, access to technology & the internet and digital skills for all are important areas of focus. The Connect Chicago Challenge,  an effort to make Chicago the most dynamic digital city in the country, aligns citywide digital leadership to coordinate and activate digital access and skills development interventions to enable every Chicagoan to fully participate in digital society.

This is an important issue that affects us all. Here’s a helpful cache of public documents about the work of the committee and grantees of the program, including up-to-date notes about the current status of funding and the results of a recent meeting of the Digital Divide Elimination Advisory Committee.

The reporter who wrote this story attended a public meeting held by this committee last week. She joined dozens of people, in person and on the phone, who work in this nascent field. As chair of the committee, I shared my thoughts on the cuts:

Dan O’Neil, an advisory committee member who also is executive director of Smart Chicago Collaborative, whose mission is to increase Internet access, said at the meeting that he believes funding should be doubled.

The digital divide is most certainly not closed, the work is not even close to done, and the librarians, social workers, and trainers who serve on the front lines deserve our support.

Kennedy-King College Public Computer Centers

Kennedy-King College Public Computer Centers

18F and the Movement to Show Your Stats

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Today, 18F launched an analytics dashboard for government websites and opened sourced both the dashboard  and the app they use to collect the data from Google Analytics.

The data comes from a unified Google Analytics account for U.S. federal government agencies known as the Digital Analytics Program. The dashboard shows how many people are on government websites that are registered with the program (about 300) as well as top 20 data. (Right now, people want to know where their IRS refund is)

Other organizations that show their stats

The federal government isn’t the only one who now shows their stats. Several organizations either publish their stats or have dashboards of their own.

Government Digital Service (United Kingdom)

The GDS set the bar high for government digital services and continues to influence federal policy on this side of the pond with the creation of 18F and the USDS. The GDS operates several different performance dashboards on a wide variety of government functions. Their web traffic performance dashboard can be found here.

Code for America 

Code for America has been experimenting with a website traffic dashboard. It shows what is being searched on the site, active pages, and most popular pages. It also shows the website traffic for the last 24 hours. This website dashboard is open source and can be deployed by anyone. (In fact, this dashboard was fork from the GDS dashboard project.)

Smart Chicago Collaborative 

We are big fans of the show your stats mentality. We use Compte.com to better understand our own metrics. Here’s a sampling our web traffic for our website and the sites we help host.

Our hope is that this trend continues and that more organizations will publish their statistics.

This Morning: Eliminate the Digital Divide Advisory Committee Meeting

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seal-of-the-state-of-illinoisThis morning, Wednesday, March 11, 2015,  at 10AM, I will be chairing a meeting of the Digital Divide Elimination Advisory Committee in the Director’s Conference Room of the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) in Suite 3-400 of the State of Illinois Building at 100 W. Randolph Street, Chicago, IL 60601. If you want to dial in, you can do so at 1-888-494-4032  / Access #: 2828938287.

Here’s the agenda:

Meeting Agenda

  1. Call to Order
  2. Program Update
  3. Other Business/Public Comment
  4. Adjournment

Here’s a helpful cache of public documents about the work of the committee and grantees of the program.

Under the “Other Business/Public Comment” portion of the meeting, I’ll ask for clarification from DCEO about the discontinuation of the Eliminate the Digital Divide Program. Here’s an excerpt from page 58 of the Illinois State Budget, Fiscal Year 2016, July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016:

In order to restructure the state’s limited resources to core priorities and to provide funding for an overall budget that the state can afford, the fiscal year 2016 recommended budget discontinues funding from the fiscal year 2016 maintenance request: the Office of Coal Marketing and Development and its programs ($25 million); the state add-on to the federal LIHEAP ($165 million); the Energy Efficiency Portfolio Standards Program ($100 million); the Renewable Energy Program ($10 million); the Summer Youth Jobs Program ($10 million); and the Eliminate the Digital Divide Program ($5 million).

Since inception, this program has invested circa $30 million in the digital lives of Illinois residents. All the way up and down this state, these funds have led to tens of thousands of people (page 254) getting trained in digital skills at Community Technology Centers.

If you believe in the power of technology to improve lives, if you think we should support the essential work of front-line trainers in this state, if you care about equity in opportunity for all residents of Illinois, this is something that matters to you.

A discussion about Local School Councils at OpenGov Chicago

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opengovchicagoAt OpenGovChicago this year, we’ve been focusing on learning about and helping grassroots groups that interact with official government functions. This time the focus was on Chicago Public Schools and Local School Councils. Local School Councils were first created in 1988 from the Chicago School Reform Act. Local School council members are elected and receive training from Chicago Public Schools. Local School Councils are elected boards that serve at each school. Contract and charter schools do not have Local School Councils. Local School Councils (LSC) are responsible for three main duties:

  • Approving how school funds and resources are allocated
  • Developing and monitoring the annual School Improvement Plan
  • Evaluating and selecting the school’s principal

Local School Councils include the following members:

  • 6 parents
  • 2 community members
  • 2 teachers
  • 1 non-teacher staff
  • school’s principal
  • And in high schools, a student representative

To start off the meeting, we heard from Jill Wohl who is a former Local School Council member. Here’s her introduction:

The meeting then went on to a roundtable discussion regarding a variety of different topics. We started with the Open Meetings Act and how it impacts LSCs. The Open Meetings Act is a law requiring governing bodies to give notice of when meetings are going to occur. It was designed to prevent governing bodies from meeting in secret, but it can impact how LSCs use technology.

Here’s the discussion below:

The next point of discussion was the state of technology at the LSCs, which is poor, by default. It’s difficulty to allow the public access to basic information like who serves on the LSC and how to reach them. Calling the school is often an issue— people answering the phone are not necessarily (and usually are not) associated with the LSC.

Here’s the video of the discussion:    

 

The next point of discussion was on the lack of sharing of best practices, which could be done with adequate technology. There’s nothing to orient LSC members to their roles and no templates or methodologies for carrying out their their responsibilities – they make it up as they go along.

 

This created a good pivot point for Josh Kalov – who spoke about the work that’s been done so far to try and connect Local School Councils together.  Here’s Josh:

 

You can see the Google Drive folder here. Work on connecting Local School Councils will continue in the Education breakout group at Open Gov Hack Night. In addition to the discussion in the room, there was a lot of discussion online. Here is a sampling of tweets:

You can find out more information about local school councils on the Chicago Public Schools website.