Month: October 2015

Madonna Scholars + Smart Chicago

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madonna-foundation-logoToday Smart Chicago and The Chicago Community Trust hosted a number of Madonna Scholars of the Madonna Foundation. The Madonna Foundation was established in 2001 by the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago, and is a public charity that increases access for young urban women to attend Catholic high schools in the Chicago area.

In addition to financial aid, the Foundation is dedicated to support the academic, psychological, spiritual and social needs of young women. These needs are addressed through a series of unique and innovative programs and service learning opportunities that provides young urban women the opportunity to build a meaningful, productive and successful life for themselves and leaders for future generations.

Today we talked about Smart Chicago, our founding partners, the CUTGroup, Connect Chicago, and Youth-Led Tech. Most of all, we’ll be listening to them and hearing how they use technology to make their lives better. 

This is just one of the ways we seek to strengthen ties between their neighborhoods and the robust public technology scene here in Chicago.

Here’s a set of pics from our day together and a group pic, below:

Madonna Scholars at Smart Chicago

 

Honorary Chicago + Documenters Program

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Public Way!Tomorrow is the first of three sessions we’re running with Linda Zabors of Honorary Chicago to help improve the data on her website, which collects and displays “the who, where, and why of Chicago’s brown honorary street signs…. and other commemorative honors”.

We’re helping put together a crew of five people from our Documenters program who will review bound books of the Journal of the Proceedings of City Council at the Chicago Public Library. Linda will guide them through the sections to look for and the documenters will take pics and enter info into a spreadsheet so that it can be ported onto the website.

All of this is a part of digitizing the official records of the streets from City Council data not yet available in digital format to help complete Linda’s research of 30 years of honorary sign designations (more than 2,000 signs!).  Most of 1985-present has been collected, there are some gaps, especially in the 2003-2009 timeframe.

We’re going to help her with that. This is a perfect project for our Documenters program, for a number of reasons:

  • Focus is on city data and helping people understand a central record of our municipal government
  • Gets Chicago residents paid while learning and being civically engaged
  • Helps out a great actor in civic tech who has already done an enormous amount of work
  • We get to hang out at one of our central shared spaces— the public library!

We are looking to expand our corps of available documenters, so if you are someone you know is interested in joining us, complete this form. If you have further questions, contact Director of Operations Kyla Williams at kwilliams@cct.org.

Launch: Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech: Meeting people where they are.

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experimental-modes-coverToday marks the publication of  a new book by Laurenellen McCann: Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech: Meeting people where they are. Here’s my preface:

Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech is an investigation into what it means to build civic tech with, not for. It answers the question, “What’s the difference between sentiment and action?”

The project was led by Laurenellen McCann, and it deepens her work in needs-responsive, community-driven processes for creating technology with real people and real communities for public good.

This project falls under Smart Chicago’s work on the Knight Community Information Challenge grant awarded under their Engaged Communities strategy to the Chicago Community Trust “as it builds on its successful Smart Chicago Project, which is taking open government resources directly into neighborhoods through a variety of civic-minded apps.”

This book is a compendium of writing by Laurenellen, originally published on the Smart Chicago blog. I’m excited about this project because it supports so many important nodes for Smart Chicago:

  • Keeping the focus on people and communities rather than technology. We are leading creators of civic tech, and we publish a lot of software. It’s people and impact we care about.
  • Driving toward a shared language around the work. There is a lot of enthusiasm for “people” in our space right now. This project sharpens pencils and will put definition to the work.
  • Highlighting the workers: communities are doing this work and doing it right. We seek to lift them up and spread their methods.

Smart Chicago is utterly devoted to being of impact here in Chicago. As our work progresses, we see the opportunity to have influence all over. This project, rooted in the Chicago Community Trust, funded by The Trust and the Knight Foundation, executed by a leading thinker in the field, is one way we’re doing just that.

From sentiment to action. Let’s go. Download the PDF or read it below.