Today marks the publication of The @CivicWhitaker Anthology: Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Here’s my introduction:
Hiring Christopher Whitaker to work as a consultant for Smart Chicago was one of the best decisions I made here.
Together, we created a new job type— part documenter, part organizer, part evangelist, part original writer and thinker about an emerging subsector of the technology industry— civic tech.
Through our work together, he’s helped build one of the strongest civic hacking communities in the country, been an essential part of the growth of the largest network of civic tech volunteers in the world, helped make the first weekend in June a national day of civic hacking, worked with a dozen emerging companies and organizations to grow revenue and impact, and served as a critical thread in the national fabric of this important movement.
This book is a simple anthology of the best of his vast work.
The Code for America Summit, “a roll-up-your-sleeves conference that brings together innovators from hundreds of governments across the U.S. along with civic-minded technologists, designers, community organizers, and entrepreneurs” starts on September 30.
Smart Chicago has a unique relationship with Code for America and performs a singular role in the community of civic-minded people and organizations here in Chicago and across the country.
Here’s a look at some of the presenters and speakers at this year’s conference and they work we’ve done with them over the years. Lots of the support we provide is quiet and under the radar, so we thought we’d make some noise and put some blips on the green screen.
The Knight News Challenge accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information.
There are eight days left to apply for the Knight News Challenge on Data. This current challenge in the innovative series is “an open call for ideas using data to inform & empower people to make decisions about their lives, their communities and democracy”.
The core there— “empower people to make decisions”— is key. We have lots of public data, a rich ecosystem of technologists, and we make lots of apps here in Chicago. This idea that using all of this data and technology to directly give power to regular residents is a thread that runs through lots of our work.
There are currently 92 entries submitted. As always, it’s super-easy to contribute a project idea and there are lots of ways to browse, comment, and search the entries. If you submit (or already have) let us know!
One of the defining characteristics of Chi Hack Night is how many people show up there on a regular basis. Chi Hack Night is now consistently reaching attendance numbers of 80 to 120 people and has featured speakers such as Chicago CIO Brenna Berman, WBEZ’s Linda Lutton, the University of Chicago’s Charlie Catlett and more. Currently there have been 173 hack nights and counting. Smart Chicago has been covering and supporting this growth from the get-go.
In a chapter I wrote for Beyond Transparency called, “Building a Smarter Chicago“, I briefly listed some of the key gatherings and efforts in Chicago that helped make us a center for civic tech. With some research help from Christopher Whitaker, I wanted to expand on that and write down what I knew about the history of such gatherings. Do you know something we’re missing? Hit us up at @smartchicago.
Before we started getting together, there was a group of people who just did stuff. Adrian Holovaty created chicagocrime.org in 2005. He later founded EveryBlock with help from the Knight Foundation. I joined as a co-founder and People Person (ya, I know). The work we did we — uncovering and presenting civic data and conversations in 16 cities— naturally put us at the center of things in the country.
There was lots of other activity. In 2005, I launched CTA Alerts to help riders communicate about issues with the CTA. In 2009, Harper Reed (who would later be the CTO of Obama for America) created an unofficial CTA API that set transit apps on fire in this town. There was even more action in the worlds of MCIC and other institutions and private consulting firms.
But this post aims to codify the history of civic technology and open governments groups in Chicago. It’s big, and incomplete, so bear with me and help me out.
The meeting laid down the 8 Principals of OpenData, which would later help influence open data policies nationwide.
Independent Government Observers Task Force
One of the first open government events happened in Chicago on August 4th, 2008. The IGOTF Non-Conference brought together CEOs, professors, and nonprofit executives involved in placing case law on the Internet for free access. That meeting was productive in introducing players to each other in a series of cooperative efforts. EveryBlock People Person Dan O’Neil hosted the event and Omidyar Network, Sunlight Foundation, Google, and Yahoo! were sponsors.
OpenGov Chicago – April 2009
The OpenGov Chicago(-land) meetup group was founded in April of 2009 by Joe Germuska, who was an attendee of IGOTF. He asked me to help organize meetings. The group has one of the largest continuities google groups about open government in the country. Its first meeting on Meetup was a social event at Clark Street Ale House. The meetup group was created for citizens who are interested in seeing their federal, state, and local government function more efficiently and responsively. The group is inspired by people who are actively building tools and experimenting with solutions along these lines, like the Sunlight Foundation and GovTrack. The group stated right on the home page that it believes that open source software practices and internet culture provide good examples of how people can work cooperatively on complex problems to produce meaningful results, but you don’t have to be a techie to be part of this meetup.
OpenGov Chicago has always stated flat-out that you don’t have to be a techie to be part of the Meetup. I think that helped set the tone that the community here is open— we got so many different people from different walks of life.
Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates
One of the other early incarnations of open government groups was the Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates (IDEA). a voluntary coalition of government agencies and nonprofit organizations working to improve and facilitate public access to public data through web-based XML data transfer. Led by Greg Sanders and Justin Massa, the group met regularly and focused on institutions that worked with data.
At this meeting, Jen Pahlka presented about Code for America – an organization which would grow into a a massive international operation with countless people in its network and a ton of work.
awesome group of people here at #citycamp. @jsb just walked in. Party.
CityCamp itself would also grow into its own brand with dozens of events happening around the world.
On a personal note, former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wrote a letter of welcome to all attendees. That letter constituted my greatest opengov victory of the last mayoral administration— I took the train to get the signed letter from the mayor’s office on the way to UIC.
data.cityofchicago.org, Apps for Metro Chicago and Urban Geek Drinks
With the election of Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago, and the national acceptance of open government data pretty much a settled matter, the pace began to change quickly. One of the Mayor’s first acts was to sign an Open Data Executive Order that set the city on the path to opening up their data. John Tolva was hired as the city’s first Chief Technology Office and Brett Goldstein was hired as the city’s first Chief Data Officer. The Department of Innovation and Technology not only published data to the portal, but they hooked up their business systems directly to the portal so that data sets would update automatically.
Brett Goldstein recruited people from the OpenGov Chicago meetup and other technologists to form the “Nerd Herd” – an informal group of people who would meet regularly to talk about technology issues affecting the city.
At the time, there hadn’t been many civic apps created in part because there was no data to fuel them. (You had to either get the data through a Freedom of Information Act or just create the data yourself.) As part of the city’s strategy, the City partnered with the Metro Chicago Information Center to run the Apps for Metro Chicago Contest to help kickstart projects that used newly opened city, county, and state data.
The other big event that was happening at this time was an informal monthly gathering hosted by Justin Massa called Urban Geek Drinks. The venue provided an enormous networking opportunity where people with an interest in civic issues and technology could meet and talk.
Code for America Fellowship, Connect Chicago, and OpenGov Hack Night
At the same time, Whitaker joined Smart Chicago as a consultant and was paid to attend hack night and document the movement. At that point, Derek Eder had left Webitects to start his own civic tech development shop Datamade with Smart Chicago being their first client working on projects like the Chicago Health Atlas and Chicago Early Learning.
Several apps that used data to tell stories about the city was featured in the Chicago Architecture Foundation exhibit “City of Big Data” which uses interactive displays to display different aspects of city data.
Over the next few years, OpenGov Hack Night would grow and serve as a model for groups around the country. The space would outgrow even 1871 and move to the offices of Braintree where they are now. As part of the move, they changed their name to Chi Hack Night to reflect caring about more than just open government. Chi Hack Night is now run by Derek Eder and Christopher Whitaker along with a volunteer leadership council with members running their own breakout groups within Chi Hack Night.
As the community has grown there have been other groups that have formed to help bring together people around the intersection of technology and civic lift.Smart Chicago has hosted Data Potluck at our offices at the Chicago Community Trust and early on at 1871 due to their membership there. Other great groups are the City Data Users Group, Maptime Chicago, the Chicago Data Visualization Group, and more.
Yesterday the President announced a new “Smart Cities” Initiative that will invest over $160 million in federal research and leverage more than 25 new technology collaborations to help local communities tackle key challenges.
Through a series of grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the administration is seeking to “bring academic researchers and community stakeholders together to unlock transformational progress on important challenges”. One of the NSF grants is for our partner, University of Chicago and their Urban Center for Computation and Data (Urban CCD), which is running the Array of Things project. Here’s how the NSF describes the grant:
$3 million for the University of Chicago to support the creation of the Array of Things in Chicago, the first such network to serve as an infrastructure for researchers to rapidly deploy sensors, embedded systems, computing, and communications systems at scale in an urban environment. Comprised of 500 nodes deployed throughout the city of Chicago, each with power, Internet, and a base set of sensing and embedded information systems capabilities, the Array of Things will continuously measure the physical environment of urban areas at the city block scale and unlock promising new research trajectories.
Last month Smart Chicago began a collaboration with Urban CCD to “further efforts by both organizations to make technology and data more accessible to citizens and to use data to impact policy that betters resident’s lives”. Specifically, we’re going to work together in the design and implementation stages of Array of Things to consider the general public’s use cases for the network and creating applications relevant to everyday life in Chicago. The main thrust of our work will be to design and implement a strategic plan to inform and engage the public in the deployment and utilization of AoT.
Smart Chicago is providing guidance on how best to allocate resources to designate AoT as a platform that improves the lives of Chicago residents as well as propose and design apps for the use of AoT by the residents of Chicago that are informed by the needs and aspirations of those residents. One main role is to work to include the voice of residents in the development of the AoT platform through convenings and other modes of communication & collaboration.
I also serve on the ITA Internet of Things Council, whose mission is to “to drive advancement of IoT technology, policy and industry, establishing Chicago and the Midwest as an epicenter of IoT”.
As always, our focus is on how technology can improve the lives of regular residents of Chicago and the entire region. We are devoted to bringing resident voice into the rooms where technologists create features, where scientists decide specifications, where policy makers set direction. More to come.
Today marks the publication of The @CivicWhitaker Anthology: Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Here’s my introduction:
