Today I spoke at Baltimore Data Days. Here’s the presentation:
Bonus: here’s a personal account of my time in Baltimore.
Author: admin
Eliminate the Digital Divide Advisory Committee Working Meeting
I chair the Eliminate the Digital Divide Advisory Committee , which advises the Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity in establishing criteria and procedures for identifying recipients of grants under the Digital Divide Elimination Act.
Here’s meeting notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CF6J9L_uG0xCR5AgbC3_IMMfK76lUlo2lxGQOLqQcXA/edit
Kyla Williams on WBEZ Tech Shift, Talking Chicago Health Atlas
Here’s Kyla WIlliams of Smart Chicago talking about our Chicago Health Atlas project.
For the past year Chicago Health Atlas has tracked the growing amount of health data available to Chicago residents. The hope is that bringing all the information together in one place can help Chicagoans start to improve their own health. Smart Chicago Collaborative Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees the project and joins us in studio to talk about it.
Livestream: Doing Business with Cook County’s Land Banks Training on July 24
Smart Chicago is working with the Cook County Land Bank and other organizations to conduct free training on how to do business with the land bank.
We’ll have a live stream below starting at 10:00am:
Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov will conduct a session on how to locate information about properties using myriad public data and online tools. Here’s more info on the training, which is set for July 24, 2014, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.
The Cook County Land Bank Authority and South Suburban Land Bank and Development Authority are open for business, ready and able to work with residents, organizations and businesses to put more than 55,000 vacant and abandoned homes, buildings and parcels back into productive use. The land banks and the Metropolitan Planning Council (MPC), in partnership with Chicago Rehab Network, Community Investment Corporation, Neighborhood Housing Services and Smart Chicago Collaborative, invite you to learn about opportunities to partner with the land banks by attending this free workshop.
This interactive workshop will outline the land banks’ policies, powers and limitations and explain how community development corporations, neighborhood organizations, developers and investors can tap the land banks as resources. Through case studies and best practices, as well as a resource guide, the workshop will cover topics including researching vacant properties, identifying financing options and determining the feasibility of projects.
Chicago School of Data: Interview with Chatham Business Association
As we continuing our work with the Chicago School of Data, we wanted to publish another one of our interviews to give people a sense of the information we’re getting. Here’s a partial transcript from our interview with the Chatham Business Association.
First CfA Regional Brigade Housed at Smart Chicago
Midwest Selected for Code for America Brigade Regional Pilot, on the Code for America blog.
Free LibreOffice Training
15 free, downloadable courses in word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets over on Connect Chicago.
Incomplete List of Cook County Property Data Tools
As we continue our work on our Cook County Open Data project, we are exploring already existing tools for interacting with Cook County Government data. Josh Kalov created this directory of ones that may be useful. Over the next several months we will do tutorials and write more information about many of these. As we work to add more raw data and update existing data, it’s important to see and use the vastly helpful tools that the County has invested in to allow residents to learn more about property.
Roundtable Discussion with Yoani Sanchez, Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2014 Gus Hart Fellow
This afternoon Smart Chicago hosted a roundtable discussion with Yoani Sanchez, Chicago Council on Global Affairs 2014 Gus Hart Fellow. We talked about her new site, 14ymedio and the importance of jump drives in places with limited access to the Internet.
Livestream: OpenGovChicago > Open Science!
Join us at 6PM Central time for a livestream of the OpenGovChicago meetup on Open Science. The stream will be available right here in this blog post. Also, please help with the meeting minutes— it’s a group effort!
This is a special fun-time summer meetup where we mashup two high-energy Chicago groups: our own OpenGovChicago and the Hive Learning Network. The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a member of the Hive, which is a network of civic and cultural institutions dedicated to transforming the learning landscape by creating opportunities for youth to explore interests through connected learning experiences. We’re a part of two projects this summer, and we seek to cross-pollinate all of the great people we work with. Let’s do this!
More on the meetup:
The Open Science Cooperative is an extension of the Hive Mapping Cooperative, a 2014 Hive Learning Network project.
We will have representatives from The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Sweet Water Foundation, Freedom Games, and theForest Preserve District of Cook County to talk about their efforts to provide teens the ability to collect, manage, analyze, visualize, and share geo-referenced data through open-source mapping and data-sharing software.
The aim of this meetup is to share work to date and to connect with the larger open data/ open technology community. This is an ambitious project focused on open source tools for mapping and data collection. The OpenGov movement has much to share on these fronts, and we hope for great cross-pollination on this night!