Today the Knight Foundation awarded a Prototype Fund award to Joe Olson, one of the developers of Foodborne Chicago, to “develop strategies to engage with targeted communities currently being missed through Chicago’s Twitter-based food poisoning incident detection system.”
Smart Chicago, through our fiscal agent, The Chicago Community Trust, is going to administer this grant. We are also helping out by using our CUTGroup program.
The Smart Chicago Collaborative will host the Chicago location for the PDF Liberation Hackathon 2014 at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust from Saturday, January 18, 2014 from 9AM – 5PM CST and Sunday, January 19, 2014 from 9AM – 1PM CST.
We’re also hosting the Chicago Winter OpenStreetMap #editathon for all day Saturday. Below the fold, we’ve got the details on both of these nationwide events.
Smart Chicago Collaborative had a very busy 2013 year. Here’s a look back.
The City of Chicago technology fellowships for this summer are now posted. Take a look!
It’s somewhat taken for granted that Chicago civic hackers have access to a plethora of data. This includes the city code – which is available online for anyone and everyone to see and download. To get the code to this point takes a lot of work.
Julia Ellis, Policy Director of the Office of City Clerk, spoke at the last OpenGov Chicago Meetup to explain the process of getting the city code online and how the process is far more complicated than it sounds.
We work in the civic innovation sector of the technology industry to improve lives in cities, improve relationships between residents and government, and create sustainable business models that support an innovative ecosystem. Having brass-tacks explications of the actual work (not what we perceive the work to be) is critical.
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This Wednesday the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) is launching a new web-based app that helps build better relationships between tenants and landlords. I served as sort of an informal advisor to this project, and I’m excited about it for a number of reasons:
Coupled with all of the great information on the Metropolitan Tenants Organization website at http://www.tenants-rights.org/, the app is a great resource for people trying to get squared away with their abode in Chicago. 
Here’s the complete text of the invite:
Last week, Smart Chicago hosted the OpenGov Chicago-land meetup at the Chicago Cultural Center with a great lineup of authoritative speakers:
Susana Mendoza, City Clerk of the City of Chicago, Julia Ellis, Legislative Counsel at Chicago City Clerk, Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org, Waldo Jaquith, an Open Government Technologist who is leading an effort to test the Open Data Institute model for open data standards in the United States, and Seamus Kraft, Executive Director of the OpenGov Foundation talk about the code by which we rule our city.
We’ve compiled all the videos of the presentation below the fold:
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Tonight’s OpenGovChicago meetup will be livestreamed here (for as long as the wifi at the Cultural Center holds up). See also the live meeting minutes.
This Friday, the Health Data Consortium will be hosting a two-day event that will talk about how to Put Health Data to Work in our Communities. As we move through the day, we’ll post the videos below. Our broadcast will begin at 8:30am CST. If you don’t see the newest stream, please refresh your browser.
Afternoon Panel 3 (at 3:05)
Previous videos below:
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Today in London, Waldo Jaquith, a great colleague and fellow Champion of Change, announced the launch of the U.S. Open Data Institute. The goal is “to encourage governments and businesses to adopt open data standards as a way to promote economic growth, innovation and social change”.
