Author: admin

Open and Online: Accessing and Using Health Data at the Public Health Informatics Conference

admin

Today I’m participating in the session called, “Open and Online: Accessing and Using Health Data” at the Public Health Informatics Conference in Atlanta. Here’s the description:

This session will present “8 Principles of Open Health Data” to guide management of, access to, and governance of de-identified non-aggregate health data. Presenters will discuss the use of an online interactive Disability and Health Data System that uses Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System disability data and will present a framework for capturing newborn admission data from hospitals.

If you care about these issues, please consider joining the Health Data Liberation meetup group, which is meeting tonight at the Opportunity Hub (“Atlanta Intro to the 8 Principles of Open Health Data“, right next door to the PHIC Conference.

Join us in this fight.

Census Reporter 101 with Joe Germuska

admin

Census Reporter is a tool that helps journalists, innovators, and students explore census data. The Census Reporter is a great way to get detailed information about demographics, income, health insurance coverage, poverty, and even commute times. The apps is powered by the American Community Survey which gathers detailed information about community areas. Joe Germuska sat down with Christopher Whitaker to give a demo of the tool and tell us more about it.

Joe Germuska, Founder of OpenGovChicago

Continue reading →

Developer Resource: Twilio

admin

We love text.

And as big fans of texting, Smart Chicago has had Twilio as part of our offerings for civic developers since the say we started the program.  We’ve recently expanded our partnership with Twilio, and their local developer relations guru, Greg Bagues, to offer Twilio as a separate service through Smart Chicago. Twilio is a great product that makes it easy to create apps that can make and receive both calls and texts.

 

Healthnear.me

We use it in our own products:

We are also a customer of Textizen, which uses Twilio, including around the Creative Chicago Expo. Civic software developers like Chris Gansen use it to power apps like HealthNearMe.

Like we said, we’re big fans of texting. If you’re new to Twilio, we’ve put together a how-to post of how the app works.

If you’re a civic developer and are interested in using Twilio for your app, please fill out the form below.

Smart Chicago and the National Day of Civic Hacking

admin

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to be a contributing partner to the National Day of Civic Hacking effort. We’ve been providing content to the national  website, starting with the Civic Hacking 101 video put together by Smart Chicago consultant and Chicago Code for America Brigade Captain Christopher Whitaker. Our goal is to help spread the lessons we’ve learned in Chicago to the rest of the country.

National Day of Civic Hacking at 1871

Additionally, we’ll be hosting a hackathon May 31st – June 1st at the offices of kCura in the Chicago Loop in partnership with Code for America and Random Hacks of Kindness. Each day will be broken down into two sections.

During the first session, we’ll hear from people on the front line of civic work as they talk about their day to day challenges in the fields of education, housing, hunger, disaster response, public safety , and child protective services. In the afternoon, we’ll break out into group and prototype apps that may help address these challenges.

You can register for the event here.

On the launch of Crime and Punishment in Chicago

admin

Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to launch our latest Civic Works Project: Crime and Punishment in Chicago. This project is a collaborative effort among Smart Chicago, FreeGeekChicago, and the Chicago Justice Project.

Chicago Police Department Memorial at Buckingham Fountain

Photo by Chris Smith / Flikr

The Crime and Punishment in Chicago project provides an index of data sources regarding the criminal justice system in Chicago. We aggregate sources of data, how this data is generated, how to get it, and what data is unavailable. This project is a key way we are using the Civic Works grant to use data journalism to uncover the value of data and cover the stories behind the data.

Continue reading →

Civic Innovation Toolkit: Twilio

admin

Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows web apps to make and receive phone calls and SMS text messages. You’ve probably used Twilio at some point even if you’re weren’t aware of it. If you’ve ever received a text message when your cab has arrived, your food gets sent out for delivery, or if you’ve received text messages from campaigns – you probably were interacting using Twilio.  The Smart Chicago Collaborative offers Twilio to developers in Chicago looking to build civic apps to solve civic problems in Chicago as part of our developer resource offerings.

 

The real strength of Twilio is ease of use. With just a little bit of time and code, you can create civic apps that send out SMS messages or make phone calls. Below the fold, Twilio’s representative in Chicago Greg Baugues gives us a demo of the tool.

Continue reading →

Smart Chicago Collaborative Cited as Influencing Federal Digital Communications

admin 1 Comment

Here at Smart Chicago, we seek to use existing tools to get things done. That’s why we launched our Annotations Program last year to publish rich text-based annotations of dense government documents like municipal code, RFPs, contracts, and other documents of this nature.

Today, the GSA cited us an example in launching their own annotated content: GSA Introduces News Genius to Decode Government Web

The federal government joins the City of Chicago’s Smart Chicago Collaborative, MIT, Harvard and other leading colleges and universities in putting News Genius to practical uses. The Smart Chicago Collaborative opens contracts, municipal code, request for proposals and more. The edX online education initiative, including MIT, Harvard and the Smithsonian Institution, similarly uses the annotation platform to unlock deeper understandings of course materials.

Help us annotate!