Month: January 2016

First Public Forum of the Police Accountability Task Force at JLM Life Center

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Throughout the month of February, the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force is hosting four community forums across the city to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

The first of these forums is this Tuesday, February 2, 2016: @ 5:30 pm – 9:00 pm at JLM Life Center, 2622 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60612. More info, from the Task Force website:

5:30 PM Doors open/Registration
6:00 PM Overview of Task Force and Working Groups
7:00 PM Public testimony
9:00 PM Forum concludes

The Task Force looks forward to hearing directly from members of the public regarding the issues of police oversight and accountability.

Details:

People wishing to comment at the forum can sign up in person at the event.
Those who wish to submit written comments may do so at the forum.
In order to accommodate as many speakers as possible, comments will be limited to two minutes.
Signs and other large objects will not be allowed in the meeting room.
Video will be available on this website as soon, etc.
If you are unable to attend the forum, you can submit your comment or question via our online form.

If you need any help submitting comments, you can get help at a nearby Chicago Public Library or other public computer center.

Police Accountability Task Force Screenshot

Two Projects in our Justice Program Covered in U.S. News & World Report

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Today two of our Justice projects, Crime & Punishment in Chicago and Youth-Led Tech, were covered in a Washington Whispers item in U.S. News & World Report: Justice: There’s an App for That. Here’s a snip:

In Chicago, however, there are vivid examples of systemic and cultural challenges to the public’s right to know, even when the information is available.

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Smart Chicago, a tech-based organization in the Windy City, tracks information from Chicago law enforcement – “the entire flow, from the commission of a crime to the person going to jail,” says Dan X. O’Neil, its executive director. “The impetus was that the city of Chicago publishes an enormous amount of crime data” that can be used to examine trends, The organization is also teaching computer coding and website development to kids in “neighborhoods most affected by violence and crime,” he adds. “That, we think, is one solution to mass incarceration and hopelessness and crime.”

U.S. News and World Report-- Justice: There's an App For That

Wired Magazine on OpenGrid and Open 311

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HWired Magazine Logoere’s a great post about OpenGrid in Wired Magazine today: Conquer Chicago’s Mountain of Data With This Powerful Tool. Here’s a snip about the vast amount of data in the City’s 311 system:

Berman explains that most of the data on OpenGrid is administrative data collected from city systems—like 311 City Services—that are already in place. In essence, these systems are pulling double duty as a civic service and a data funnel. Every time someone calls 311 to complain about noise level, that information is passed on to OpenGrid.

Smart Chicago funded and helped run the creation of the Open 311 system back in 2012.

OpenGrid on the Chicago Public Data Blog

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WBEZ LogoChris Hagan of WBEZ wrote a good post today on OpenGrid: Chicago launches OpenGrid, latest step in making open data more accessible. Here’s a snip:

Dan O’Neil, executive director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, which assisted on the project, reminded developers that tools such as OpenGrid are a first step. He pointed out that despite Chicago’s advances in open data, problems such as police misconduct have arguably gotten worse.

“There are no dots on a map that stopped that from happening,” O’Neil said. “There is no set of crime statistics that stopped that from happening. We have to find ways to have communion with people who are not here.”

Maps and tech and data are simply pieces. Communion among humans is what matters.

OpenGrid on the Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions Blog

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data-smart-city-solutionsSean Thornton of Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions wrote up a great piece on the launch of OpenGrid. Here’s a snip:

Yet in order for DoIT’s OpenGrid and UrbanCCD’s Plenario to interact, additional software—also called a service layer—was necessary.  Enter the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a local civic organization that focuses on improving residents’ lives through technology.

Smart Chicago’s work focuses on three main areas for residents – increasing access to the internet, enhancing digital skills, and expanding the use of meaningful city data.  For Smart Chicago Executive Director Dan O’Neil, supporting a program like OpenGrid is a natural fit.

“A collaborative union between developers, residents, and government – that’s what Smart Chicago is about, and that’s what OpenGrid is about too,” O’Neil noted at the application’s launch. “This is why we’re on it.”  To build the service layer, Smart Chicago commissioned UTurn Data Solutions, a local IT consultancy focused data storage and Cloud computing projects.

Smart Chicago is also helping ensure that OpenGrid is effective in its mission to enhance transparency efforts between the city and the public. One of Smart Chicago’s marquee programs is its Civic User Testing Group, or CUTGroup.  CUTGroup participants, which include residents from all corners of the city, are compensated to participate in focus groups that test civic websites and apps.  The program has given developers numerous insights and has led to the improvement of many local apps, including theEveryBlock iPhone App, FoodBorne Chicago, and the Chicago Health Atlas. CUTGroup will be testing OpenGrid to help DoIT refine the tool and learn how residents can most benefit from its work.

 

 

Chicago’s Mayor on the OpenGrid Launch

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Seal_of_Chicago,_IllinoisThe Mayor’s Office of the City of Chicago published a press release about the launch of OpenGrid: Chicago Launches “Open Grid” to Help Residents Explore Their Neighborhoods. Here’s a snip:

Over the past four years, Chicago has led in the publishing of data, leveraging the City of Chicago’s Data Portal to make city data available to all residents. With OpenGrid, the City is making that data even more user-friendly. It allows residents to learn more about their communities, and encourages communities to add their own data and civic developers to enhance the capabilities of the app, all to engage and serve the city’s diverse neighborhoods. For example, a community group can use OpenGrid to determine when and where best to organize an event based on OpenGrid’s ability to show active building permits, street closures, and more.

OpenGrid is hosted by the Smart Chicago Collaborative, an organization housed at the Chicago Community Trust dedicated to making technology available to all Chicago communities. The website and app are available today at opengrid.io

Smart Chicago hosts this application and we also created the code that drives all the data into the system. More here.

City of Chicago Launches OpenGrid

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OpenGrid_Logo_Horizontal_3ColorToday the Smart Chicago Collaborative helped the City of Chicago launch OpenGrid— a free, browser-based, open source mapping platform displaying Chicago’s robust collection of open datasets.

OpenGrid.io was launched this morning at an event at the University of Illinois Chicago Electronic Visualization Labratory. Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman, Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk, and the Smart Chicago Collaborative kicked off the official launch and demo.

OpenGrid is Public

This important work goes back to WindyGrid, the City’s internal tool displaying all past and present city data. Now, through OpenGrid, the ability to see and layer information about Chicago is in the hands of individual residents. Anyone with Internet access can see Chicago’s data come alive in relation to their homes, communities, and workplaces.

Here is the OpenGrid introductory tutorial:

OpenGrid is Open Source

The City first articulated its plans to build a public-facing WindyGrid and open up the application source code in the 18-month Tech Plan Update. The Plan stated OpenGrid would be “the first open source situational awareness system that other municipalities can use and build upon.”

Smart Chicago’s Role in OpenGrid

Through support from the MacArthur Foundation, Smart Chicago supported the OpenGrid project by creating a service layer to plenar.io, a spatio-temporal open data platform. This layer serves as a data feed to OpenGrid— if the data is in plenar.io, it can get into OpenGrid.

We worked with technology partner Uturn Data Solutions to create the code that drives the data. This easy-to-deploy stack can be used by any municipality or organization to display open datasets on a map. This entire project is dependent on our Amazon Web Services account, which is maintained by Uturn. We also serve many Chicago-based technologists via our Developer Resources program,

We’re proud of our continued work with the City to deliver on the Tech Plan, with local developers to encourage their role in the civic tech ecosystem, and with the University of Chicago to support the plenar.io platform for data ingest.

Here’s a set of photos from launch day:

Arts Infusion Evaluation: Research on The Crushing Effects of Poverty

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As I wrote earlier this week, Suzy Connor, former senior program officer for arts and culture at The Chicago Community Trust, has joined Smart Chicago as a consultant working on a series of projects focused on arts, education, and justice.

In this context, we’re also taking on the Arts Infusion program, which Suzy has led for the last six years.The Urban Institute recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of this program: Arts Infusion Initiative, 2010–15: Evaluation Report. We are serializing some of the findings of this report that resonate with our work.

First up is a look at some of the research that is cited in the report to highlight the crushing effects of poverty, especially on neighborhoods in Chicago’s south and west sides. here are a number of the passages from  the report— and links to the underlying research.

The neighborhoods served by Arts Infusion programs each have their own distinct communities and histories, yet they all reflect disturbing national trends that disproportionately affect communities of color, such as high unemployment, a high crime rate, segregation, social disenfranchisement, and poverty (Coates 2014; Moser 2014; Sampson and Wilson 1995).

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More recently, changes in the landscape of public housing have also affected neighborhood dynamics and the lives of youth. In the 1990s, mid- and high-rise public housing complexes concentrated in the south and west sides of Chicago came to be viewed as the epicenter of the city’s problems, and public officials moved to demolish the buildings over the course of several years. The decision to tear down those properties was accompanied by a promise to improve the lives of residents, cut crime, and provide housing vouchers into mixed- income communities (Newman 2015; Eads and Salinas 2014; Crump 2002).

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The recession also had direct and indirect effects on neighborhood stability and housing, as housing values fell across the city and sales prices fell even more steeply (Chicago Rehab Network 2011). The housing crash was felt particularly acutely in Chicago’s south and west sides: for example, by the end of 2010, one in six properties in Back of the Yards was vacant as residents abandoned their homes after falling victim to predatory lending for home equity loans (Gallun and Maidenberg 2013; Rugh and Massey 2010). The growing number of abandoned buildings in those Chicago neighborhoods further weakened their property value and contributed to social disorder (Wallace and Schalliol 2015; Chicago Rehab Network 2011).

The full citations for those links are below, but I want to call out a number of observations:

  • The evidence of systematic racism and deprivation in our city is immense, astounding, and recent. This provides a setting for our work
  • The number and quality of current and former Chicago-based thinkers, developers, writers and researchers in the field is heartening. These are the people with whom we toil. I’m thinking specifically of people cited here like Whet Moser, David Schalliol, David Eads, and the Chicago Rehab Network
  • As we continue with the Arts Infusion project, pulling together the teaching artists who work directly with young people on careers in the arts, we have to see the work in the context of justice

More to come!

David Schalliol shooting an image in his Isolated Building Studies series

David Schalliol shooting an image in his Isolated Building Studies series

Coates, T. (2014). This town needs a better class of racist. The Atlantic. Available at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/05/This-Town-Needs-A-Better-Class-Of-Racist/361443/

Moser, W. (2014). Housing discrimination in America was perfected in Chicago. Chicago Mag. Available at http://www.chicagomag.com/city-life/May-2014/The-Long-Shadow-of-Housing-Discrimination-in-Chicago/

Farmer, S. (2011). Uneven public transportation development in neoliberalizing Chicago, USA. Environment and Planning A, 43, 1154-1172. Available at http://blogs.roosevelt.edu/sfarmer/files/2013/02/Environmnet-and- Planning-final-version.pdf

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Newman, J. (2015, March 13). Dismantling the towers. Chicago Reporter. Available at http://chicagoreporter.com/dismantling-the-towers/

Eads, D., and Salinas, H. (2014). Demolished: The end of Chicago’s public housing. National Public Radio. Available at http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/publichousing/.

Crump, J. (2002), Deconcentration by demolition: public housing, poverty, and urban policy. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20(5): 581 – 596. Available at http://www.envplan.com/abstract.cgi?id=d306.

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Chicago Rehab Network. (2011). Building Our Future Chicago: A Toolkit for Residents and Community Leaders. Chicago Rehab Network: Chicago, IL. Available at http://www.chicagorehab.org/resources/docs/research/buildingchicago/buildingourfuturechicagofulltoolkit. pdf

Gallun, A., and Maidenberg, M. (2013, November 9). Will the foreclosure crisis kill Chicago? Crain’s Chicago Business. Crain’s: Chicago, IL. Available at http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20131109/ISSUE01/311099980/will-the-foreclosure-crisis-kill- chicago

Rugh, J. S., and Massey, D. S. (2010). Racial segregation and the American foreclosure crisis. American Sociological Review, 75(5), 629-651. Abstract available at http://asr.sagepub.com/content/75/5/629.abstract.

Wallace, D., and Schalliol, D. (2015). Testing the temporal nature of social disorder through abandoned buildings and interstitial spaces. Social Science Research, 54, 177-194. Abstract available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0049089X15001258.

News From Our Smart Health Centers Project

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A pillar of our Health work is our long-standing and successful Smart Health Centers project. Here’s a current look at what we’re up to online across the city:

Fantus Clinic

Anne Lin, Katie Reed, Michelle Vu, Bendarius King, Akya Gossitt, Zaundra Boyd, and Daniel Broome do direct support in the main waiting room at Fantus Health General Medicine Clinic. They help approximately 75 patients a week to log on and navigate the patient portal on ipads and laptops, teaching them how to send messages to their doctor and request prescription refills through the MyCookCountyHealth pateint portal.

MyCookCountyHealth Patient Portal

The overall objective will increase meaningful use of the portal, which makes the patient more involved in care and helps the clinic conform with federal meaningful use regulations.

They also consult with nurses and other staff on patient workflow in order to help improve the clinic experience and reduce wait times. They’ve put their findings into a presentation to hospital staff and are helping them learn the back-end of the patient management system so they can track and log accurate patient wait times.

Many of the navigators work with the nutritionist at Fantus, helping Spanish-speaking patients, speaking before groups of people, and helping with document translation.

We’re also helping support the planning and setup of an obesity clinic— sourcing education materials, finding meal plan templates, recipes, and so on.

Jorge Prieto Family Health Center

Daniel Broome is staffed part-time at Prieto. He does all of the patient portal work and he is also developing an introductory video shown about the patient-centered medical home model that plays in the waiting room. This video was created by Farhad Ghamsari, Alicia Phillippou, and Kymon Odukoya.

Lawrence Hall Youth Services

Kymon Odukoya is staffed here at Lawrence Hall, where he works with youth, working on health awareness, nutrition, and healthy cooking demonstrations. He also demonstrates how to research health topics online.

lawrence-hall-fitness

Podcasts

Many of the navigators are also working on a new Smart Health Centers initiative— podcasts. You can hear them all on the Smart Chicago Soundcloud page.

Here’s a look at episodes to date:

https://soundcloud.com/smart-chicago/be-healthy-yall-episode-1-digital-divide-in-health-care

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Suzy Connor Joins Smart Chicago as Consultant Focusing on Arts, Justice, and Education

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Suzanne Connor - 2015[1][2]Yesterday marked the start of Suzy Connor’s work here at Smart Chicago. We’ve worked with Suzy over the last couple years in her work as the senior program officer for arts and culture at The Chicago Community Trust, where she created the Arts Infusion program and was responsible for a host of other grants that enhanced cultural vibrancy, access and diversity.

Most recently, we worked with her to launch Get Drive, a project that compiled resources for court-involved youth to clear their records (expunge.io!), get back in school, get a job, and get other support.

Suzy’s work over the years aligns perfectly with Smart Chicago’s work to improve lives in Chicago through technology mission.  We’re excited about combining her professional expertise, experience, and networks in creative youth development & juvenile justice with our emerging models around civic engagement.

Suzy will strengthen the Smart Chicago justice work area and will help inform or stimulate our Connect Chicago, Chicago School of Data, and Youth-Led Tech programs. Her engagement will employ a number of the experimental modes we’ve investigated and we expect to be able to create new ones together.

Here’s a specific look at the work she’ll be doing:

Arts Infusion

Arts Infusion Evaluation FINAL REPORTOver the last six years at The Chicago Community Trust, Suzy created and led Arts Infusion. The Urban Institute recently completed a comprehensive evaluation of this program: Arts Infusion Initiative, 2010–15: Evaluation Report. The report is fascinating, and we will be sharing findings from report as we move forward.

Suzy will work to continue and expand the Arts Infusion cohort, focusing on teaching artists rather than organizations, with the goal of building a deep, diverse, and resilient community of practitioners. Our expansion efforts will include both arts-focused and technology-focused instructors working with teens and young adults in under-resourced communities, including court-involved youth.

Together, we will develop a coherent co-creation strategy with this cohort with communication at its core. The foundation of this cohort is not grants; it is communication and shared work. A civic engagement model rather than a social services model, based on principles found in Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement. We seek to help guide an expanded network to foster innovative approaches and respond to the needs articulated by practitioners themselves. Integral to this approach is the inclusion of young adult practitioners who are “alumni” of Chicago’s teen programs.

Connecting youth to technology

YouthledTech-logoSuzy will also work to strengthen the links among released juveniles and Arts Infusion grantees, other arts and technology programs, and relevant resources. Smart Chicago is already a partner in this effort through Get Drive and Expunge.io.

We will incorporate recommendations from the Urban Institute evaluation to enhance strategies for using technology and social media to spark & sustain connections between court-involved youth and the people and resources they need to move forward in life.

This work also ties into our Youth-Led Tech program, where we will look to work in the detention center and connect those youth to community opportunities to build their skills. We’re also looking to evaluate how to replicate the Youth-Led Tech mode.

CPS Digital Arts Career Academy

Suzy will also lead Smart Chicago’s efforts to help to guide engagement, design, and advocacy efforts related to the development of a potential CPS Digital Arts Career Academy. Our focus will be on engaging the public and helping foster communication with the community around planning.

Smart Chicago’s commitment to developing a diverse IT workforce and its recent success with Youth-Led Tech makes it a valuable partner to CPS in this first-of-its-kind initiative.

Chicago Track

chicago-trackLastly, and more loosely, Suzy will help the Trust grantee Office of Creative Industries at the City of Chicago to connect to the broader context of workforce development, which brings back the lessons of Investing in people and organizations as the key to civic tech.  

We’re interested in helping build the workforce pipeline in digital media by integrating the Chicago Track project and career-oriented digital media nonprofits with the workforce development and technology sectors that are more adept at tracking trends and job growth. We hope to leverage the combination of our commitment to juvenile justice, the needs of the tech community for diversity, and the opportunity to strengthen a career pipeline for an important constituency in our city.

Join us in welcoming Suzy to Smart Chicago.