I serve as the chair of the Eliminate the Digital Divide Advisory Committee of the State of Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Development. Recently I worked with fellow committee member Norm Peterson of Argonne National Laboratory to submit an application under the University of Illinois at Chicago Department of Public Administration MPA Capstone program, “which provides MPA students with a practical, team-based experience in problem-solving within public or nonprofit organizations”.
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Knight Community Information Challenge Project in Full Swing
This month I spent some time with Terry Mazany, Daniel Ash, and some of our colleagues from other community foundations in a series of design thinking sessions with the Knight Foundation in the context of their Community Information Challenge.
Here’s a blog post from Knight summarizing all of the great work in this program, Foundations take on projects to improve local news and information, and here’s a snip:
Chicago, meanwhile, has plenty of news media that are city-focused, but they are also feeling the pinch of shrinking revenues. The Chicago Community Trust, then, takes a different approach to local information by keying in on what’s deficient: boosting citizen engagement and building technology for Chicago-area residents to use in gathering and analyzing information and public data themselves. It’s information self-empowerment driven by technology. This approach channels what journalism professor and media provocateur Jeff Jarvis advocates when he writes: “The internet has proven to be good at helping communities inform themselves.”
A core component of the Trust’s information strategy is the Smart Chicago Collaborative, headed by technologist and EveryBlock co-founder Daniel X. O’Neil. Smart Chicago works to lessen the “digital divide” by helping more Chicagoans gain access to the Internet, then takes the next step by creating data-oriented Web applications designed for use by the public. Getting people to use the applications is accomplished in various ways, including “Civic User Testing” groups, a set of Chicago residents who get paid (modest amounts) to test civic apps. (And watch for an “Unsummit” in 2015 that will bring out the community around neighborhoods data collected and analyzed by Chicagoans using these apps.)
Meantime, here’s a picture I took of the house that was used in the movie, “A Christmas Story”, including the leg lamp!
A Christmas Story House, Cleveland, at Night
Cook County Burial Locations Featured on WBEZ
The data set lists the final disposition sites of the indigents buried by the Cook County Medical Examiner’s Office. Currently, there are two places where this happens. Homewood Memorial Gardens Cemetery (which provides Latitude and Longitude coordinates for burials) and Mount Olivet (which provides Grave, Lot, and Block locations.)
The data set provides the name, age, sex, race, date of death, and case number for each person buried by Cook County.
Our consultant, Josh Kalov worked with the Cook County Medical Examiner’s office to help set up the tables for the data set. He then educated the Medical Examiner’s office on how to upload data to the portal and made the first initial upload.
Continuing the Work of Expunge.io
Smart Chicago was recently awarded a grant from The Chicago Community Trust to support Expunge.io. This grant, referred to as “Expunge.io Plus,” supports the great work already happening with Mikva Challenge Juvenile Justice Council, LAF, Illinois Legal Aid Online, Cabrini Green Legal Aid, and others, by increasing public awareness, supporting the work of institutions, and documenting the juvenile expungement application process.
There are five main goals of this work:
- Increase public awareness regarding juvenile expungements
- Drive more young adults to the Cook County Juvenile Expungement Help Desk
- Secure a fingerprint terminal to obtain a copy of arrest records at the Cook County Juvenile Expungement Help Desk
- Provide project management services to ensure project completion
- Research data management services to document baseline information in how young people’s records are used once they are disseminated. See a blog post on this topic: “Getting at the Root of Issues with Juvenile Records“)
Background
We know that juvenile expungement is an arduous legal process that prevents many young adults from applying to have their records expunged. The impact of having misdemeanors and/or other lesser forms of criminal activity easily accessible to college admission departments and employers may hinder high school graduates from obtaining advanced degrees or securing career opportunities.
While many records can be erased, people who are eligible for expungement often do not initiate or complete the process because it is complicated, understaffed, and fragmented.
Expunge.io is an on-ramp for the expungement process that helps start the process of erasing juvenile arrests/court records by sending people to the Juvenile Expungement Help Desk. The Juvenile Expungement Help Desk is a place where individuals can meet with an attorney who will review juvenile arrest record, assist with the necessary paperwork and provide additional legal assistance. Lawyers are all available to help eligible people file fee waivers to expunge their records free of charge.
On June 9, 2014, the Juvenile Court Automatic Expungement SB 0978 passed allowing automatic expungements for offenses occurring on or after January 1, 2015 and for those records kept with the Illinois Police Department. It does not remove records maintained at the local law enforcement agency, court clerk, or with the FBI agency nor is it retroactive. Here is a look at the Juvenile Court Automatic Expungement SB 0978:
Replaces everything after the enacting clause. Amends the Juvenile Court Act of 1987. Provides that the Department of State Police shall automatically expunge, on an annual basis, law enforcement records pertaining to a minor who has been arrested if: (1) the minor had been arrested and no delinquency petition was filed with the clerk of the circuit court; (2) the minor has attained the age of 18 years; and (3) since the date of the minor’s most recent arrest, at least 6 months have elapsed without an additional arrest. Provides that a petition for expungement may include multiple offenses on the same petition, if the petitioner is 18 years of age or older and when a minor was arrested and no delinquency petition filed or if filed was found not delinquent of the offense or supervision successfully completed, or the offense would be a Class B misdemeanor or lesser offense if committed by an adult. Provides that the Department of State Police shall expunge all law enforcement records described in this provision on an annual basis. Provides that the Department of State Police shall establish a process for an individual to confirm that all law enforcement records described in this provision have been expunged on an annual basis.
Flooding the box
Through this grant, Smart Chicago wants to drive more people to the Juvenile Expungement Help Desk. We call this “flooding the box”. Expunge.io is one step in doing that. Here is a look at the strategies and work outlined in the grant proposal:
Strategy I: Increase awareness about the relevance of juvenile expungements and the purpose and limitations of the SB 0978 – Juvenile Court Automatic Expungements through community involvement
Activity I: Develop public awareness through direct community outreach. Smart Chicago will fund events to
- Drive young adults to the Cook County Juvenile Court Help Desk to obtain their arrest record and receive free legal help
- Host community level expungement sessions whereby juveniles can also begin the expungement application process
- Develop a texting campaign with Illinois Legal Aid Online. In addition, Smart Chicago will coordinate efforts with several partners to develop a marketing campaign to educate people about the expungement process using Expunge.io as the jumping off point. These partners include Mikva Challenge, Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup), Illinois legal Aid Online, among others
Strategy II: Structure an enhanced service-oriented and efficient application process
Activity I: Secure fingerprint terminal to be stationed at the Cook County Juvenile Court
Activity II: Develop communication strategy to target young adults to apply for juvenile expungements and informing them regarding their application status
Activity III: Expand the Expunge.io website to provide additional information, better filtering system between juveniles and adult expungements, and improve the technology connection between applicant and free legal services
Strategy III: Provide project and data management to understand the expungement process
Activity I: Document the application process for general public and website distribution
Activity II: Manage the initiative and its network of partners
Activity III: Identify and document how expungement records are disseminated and what happens to data after a record is expunged
Foodborne Chicago, Humans, and Big Data on the Data Mine Blog
Foodborne Chicago, Humans, and Big Data on the Data Mine Blog
Here’s a post on the U.S. News & World Report Data Mine blog covering our Foodborne Chicago project: How Twitter and Your Lunch Can Solve Problems. Here’s a snip:
Daniel O’Neil, the executive director of Smart Chicago, who worked with the government on the algorithm, said the project is an example of how big data can be used by health professionals to help people.
“I think the field of big data often removes human beings from consideration,” he says. “Big data, as I see it being practiced, there’s very little direct engagement with people. All the data related to health care is generated from human beings and is crucial to the health and wellness of human beings. I think this project shows one way for big data to always be driven down to the human being and helping people. We need to always take it from big to small and always find out how technology can be of big use to people.”
Foodborne Chicago on MarketWatch: Twitter bot helps Chicago find dirty restaurants
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.