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#CivicSummer is in Full Swing: Recap of our Friday Session Held at 1871

adminJuly 22, 2013

Civic Innovation Summer— the experimental summer jobs program for teens focused on civics, media, and technology— has been rolling all through July. This program, funded by Smart Chicago based on a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, is largely run by the Mikva Challenge, which develops the next generation of civic leaders, activists, and policy-makers and Free Spirit Media, which provides education, access, and opportunity in media production.

But on Fridays, we pull together all of the youth into one room and teach them about technology and the concept of open. We had our first such session last Friday at 1871. Smart Chicago is a founding member of the digital startup center located in the Merchandise Mart, and days like Friday are exactly we why decided to be one of its first tenants.

Here’s the complete set of photos from our day, and a quick look at some illustrative ones:

The raw space inside one of the largest commercial buildings in the world provides a great palette for teaching youth.

Jacqui Cheng put this entire program together, including arranging for a tour of the space and lining up all of the speakers:

It was quite an experience to run 150 youth through a space where hundreds of people are running businesses. We appreciate everyone’s patience!

That’s a lotta people.

Mari Huertas of Mozilla talked about her path to a career in technology

Rayid Ghani showed a video about self-driving cars. Teaching computers how to do things is hard.

Jason Kunesh talked about the importance of designing technology to meet the needs of humans.

Is there anything more important than lunch?

Gene Leynes spoke of his business, Yolobe

We went ahead and got limbered up over lunch

Jeff McCarter of Free Spirit Media got everyone fired up about what we’re doing.

Dirk McCoy talked about Spendbot and his path to starting the company.

Jimmy Odom of WeDeliver talked about starting a business.

I talked about the importance of real Twitter accounts and having an authentic voice all day, every day.

Lastly, here’s the curriculum we used to guide our day:

Next up: our Friday session this week will be at Tribeca Flashpoint Academy and will have lots of special guests!

The Launch of Smart Chicago Annotations

adminJuly 11, 2013 2 Comments

Today we’re launching our Annotations program, where we publish rich text-based annotations of dense government documents like municipal code, RFPs, contracts, and other documents of this nature.

People in the open government / open data world like to poke fun at documents. Often published in PDF format, and containing stilted language and legal provisions, these files are easy targets for those of us who are unfamiliar with what they say and what they can lead to.

But these documents are important. In many cases, they are lifeblood of cashflows in and out of government. They are the sum total of the rules— the code, so to speak— that we use to run things. They are the objects with the signatures & the stamps, the legal descriptions and the scopes of work. They matter; enormously. And we have to understand them.

At Smart Chicago, we spend a lot of time thinking about how to create sustainable infrastructure for civic innovation. Programs like the CUTGroup (resident-centered design that engages hundreds of Chicagoans), Hosted Web Space (free server space and configuration for people working in open data), and our Github account (open source code from myriad web projects that put real money into the hands of civic developers) are deliberately designed to build this infrastructure.

This annotation project is a step toward addressing another infrastructure issue— funding. We believe that government spending on technology could be used to fund civic innovation while reducing overall spending. Small civic developers— the ones we hire to do our projects— should be bidding on any enterprise software system that comes down the pike. Introducing open technologies, agile methods, and new mindsets to government contracting will lead to more efficient spending and economic expansion.

What we’re trying to do is build the civic innovation sector of the technology industry.

We use News Genius as the platform for our Annotations program. It has a number of features that make it great for our purposes:

Rich annotations (links, images, video embeds, etc.) that allow for deeper understanding of specific words and phrases
Direct, sharable hyperlinks to specific annotations to stimulate discussion
Open platform that allows anyone to improve the annotations
There’s a large and growing community of people on the platform, annotating all sorts of text

Join us!

Here are the items we’re annotating upon launch:

City of Chicago – RFP for Municipal Code Printing, Sales, Web Hosting, and Editing Supplementation Services: this covers a specific RFP covering the publication of the municipal code. We thought it was a good example to start with because it has all of the boilerplate language and the project also has a technological component
City of Chicago – Sample Contract with City of Chicago: this is a boilerplate contract attached to all RFPs. This is somewhat less annotated – we definitely could use your help!

News Genius is a project of Rap Genius, which focuses on annotating the lyrics of rap songs. As you can imagine, the content on that side of the site can get somewhat off-color. If you stay focused on the above-reffed items, you should be able to steer clear of any of that. As we like to say here at Smart Chicago, “open means open”.

One side effect of this project is that we’ve started the first “Artist” page for our favorite municipal government: http://rapgenius.com/artists/City-of-chicago as well as the Department of Law (http://rapgenius.com/artists/Department-of-law) and Department of Procurement Services (http://rapgenius.com/artists/Department-of-procurement-services). Those are some great URLs.

Much, much more to come.

Free Spirit Media Documakers Technology Session at Tribeca Flashpoint

adminJuly 9, 2013

Today Jacqui Cheng and I talked with the #CivicSummer youth working as Documakers for Free Spirit Media about open technology as it pertains to the media industry. We talked about the building blocks of the web and some specific technologies and standards that help media makers do their jobs.

Here’s a complete set of photos and some representative images:

Jacqui talked about different social networks and how they can be used to spread messages and find content:

The huge monitors and great equipment at Tribeca provides a great basis for the youth as they make their media pieces:

#CivicSummer Custom Session on Open Technology with the Mikva Aldermanic Fellows

adminJuly 2, 2013

Today Jacqui Cheng and I hosted the Mikva Aldermanic Fellows (“30 youth interning in Chicago aldermanic offices this summer. We are working to bring a larger voice to youth across the city.”) at the Chicago Community Trust.

Here’s a complete set of photos and some highlights of what we covered:

Jacqui reviewed the basics of the Internet, including TCP/IP, as a platform for talking about how open technology and standards can pave the way for innovation:

The Trust board room, with its nearly 100-year history of Chicago leadership, provided a great setting for our session:

The Aldermanic Fellows are staffed all across the city and come together periodically to share experiences:

Vint Cerf looks on as Jacqui enlightens:

I covered lots of examples of civic technology that helps Aldermen serve constituents, including Open311 and the yet-to-be published Chicago Works For You.

Here’s the presentation we used to guide our time together:

Civic Innovation Summer Aldermanic Interns Curriculum from Daniel X. O’Neil

U.S. Ignite Application Summit and the Future of Gigabit Chicago

adminJune 21, 2013

Last year I attended the US Ignite launch event at the White House (see full video here), where a number of Obama administration officials made a series of announcements about programs around broadband policy. It was a wide-ranging and mind-boggling series of speakers, and I wrote up some thoughts about what it all meant for Chicago.

This is an age of conception— we are limited only by our imaginations

Since then, I’ve continued to take interest in US Ignite and their efforts to foster the creation of next-generation Internet applications that provide transformative public benefit. The investments made here in Chicago, including the Gigabit Squared project that includes $2 million of investment from the State of Illinois as well as the Broadband Challenge from the City of Chicago— show that Chicago is very much a part of the Gigabit future.

What has struck me most, as I follow this work, is how far we have to go in terms of conceiving what this next-generation network looks like for regular people.

That’s why we’re a sponsor of the US Ignite Application Summit being held in Chicago June 24th – 26th.

What could you build if you weren’t restricted by the limits of network speed and latency? What if your network could support gigabit download and upload speeds? What if the power of cloud data centers wasn’t located on the east coast, but placed in your own backyard? What would you build? What businesses could you launch if there were no limits?

That’s what we want to find out at this three-day event, running from June 24th to June 26th at the Allegro Hotel and UIC. We’ll be posting regularly from the Summit, so follow along on our Twitter and Facebook accounts.

Chicago Health Atlas Data Feeds

adminJune 19, 2013

Today we’ve added support for querying the data that appears on Chicago Health Atlas by adding JSON endpoints for the major pages. If you want to get access to the underlying data that drives our maps and charts, just add “.json” to the URL of pretty much any page and we’ve got you covered.

Examples:

You can see all community area and zip code boundaries in Chicago by eyeballing our map:

Or you can see the raw data http://www.chicagohealthatlas.org/places.json:

You can see all birth rate data by year or see the data all at once.
Birth rate data for the Loop area with confidence intervals as json.

Thanks to Dan Sinker and Cory Nissen for asking for this feature and Derek Eder for getting it done lickety-split.

@SmartChicago Awesome. I’d love to be able to ping an API and get each location’s data as a JSON chunk.

— dan sinker (@dansinker) June 18, 2013

@SmartChicago Nice, can the raw data be accessed at all, or are we limited to browsing via the map interface?

— cory nissen (@corynissen) June 18, 2013

@corynissen @smartchicago Seems like you may have just built the official one form them!

— dan sinker (@dansinker) June 19, 2013

Have at it!

The Launch of Chicago Health Atlas

adminJune 18, 2013

Today we’re happy to announce the launch of our latest project, the Chicago Health Atlas, where you can view citywide information about health trends and take action near you to improve your own health.

You can read all about the making of the Chicago Health Atlas on our project page. It’s quite a story of collaboration. We pulled sprawling amounts of city-wide health data into a cohesive view of health near you.

It all starts with Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute, the project funder, and Jim Alexander, the Institute’s Executive Director and the conceptual leader behind the project
We worked with Abel Kho and some of the largest providers of health care in Chicago to develop tools which balanced the need for anonymity of patients and providers, while preserving uniqueness of patients. Read more about their work here
Eric Jones and Jamyia Clark of the Chicago Department of Public Health have been instrumental in shepherding the CDPH data into the Atlas— explaining the data, advising on presentation, and generally acting as an intermediary between the Web development and health informatics sides of the project. He also presents the project to the health science community at places like the 2013 Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists Annual Meeting

Read more about data sources on the Chicago Health Atlas About page.

On the Smart Chicago side, Program Officer Kyla Williams oversees all of our health initiatives and has been a great leader. Long-time consultant Derek Eder of Data Made has been essential to the success of this project. His deep experience with mapping Chicago things has been a huge natural resource. Aaron Salmon of Auraworks is the design lead for this project.

Patrice Coleman is our Project Coordinator in charge of outreach. Want to take part? Let’s do it.

Chicago Health Atlas on the Github Blog

adminJune 13, 2013

Github announced a new feature today— the visualization of geographic data— and pointed to the geojson data we store for our Chicago Health Atlas product as an example. This post has led to 240 forks and counting.

Migrahack Projects

adminJune 1, 2013

Chicago Migrahack was held from May 31 – June 2, 2013 as a part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. I helped judge the hacktahon. Following is my take on the projects, including notes, screenshots, and images from the day. Here is a copy of the spreadsheet the organizers used to manage the projects, here’s the project page on the Migrahack website, and here’s a bunch of photos I took at the event.

The projects are listed in the order in which they were presented. The descriptions include any award the entry won and the commendation presented by the judges for any award.

Judges!

Recipes for Change
This was a concept for an app to help women build an underground support network. Domestic violence is a leading source of crime. It is under-reported, especially among those who are undocumented and/or are not native English speakers. They call it “recipes” and make it look like a normal recipe site. Dots on a map of women who can help them within a 5-mile radius.

Finding Care
http://tarbell.recoveredfactory.net/findingcare/
By the Los Almighty Windy City Data Hustlers team of Lucio Villa, David Eads, Maria Ines Zamudio, Yana Kunichoff, and Willberto Morales

“I’m being denied life”, says the homepage of this is explainer of stories surrounding the Affordable Care Act. They looked into PUMS data and pulled out some “By the numbers” stuff. All of this is driven by the Tarbell template as well as javascript and jquery.

Finding Care won “Best storytelling with data visualization”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Coherent, elegant narrative with lots of points of departure. Triggers questions for further research. Polished production in short time frame with simple, effective data visualization. Would love to see calls to action– links to advocacy groups, reporting on pending legislation, and so on.

Chicago MigraHack Web App
http://www.20thirty.com/migra/
By Team DePaul (Paul Duszak, Temuulen Erdenekhuu, and Alex McCarten-Gibbs).

This team created a visualization of persons obtaining permanent resident status in the United States, broken down by region of origin. Mainly uses highcharts and other javascript. Allows the user to export all data.

Chicago MigraHack Web App won “2nd place data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Dead-simple visualization that takes a comprehensive look at a central dataset. Provides an understandable, useful, and portable tool for others to explore, understand, and share. Key insights into immigration.

Draw The Border and Naco or Naco?
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/
http://danhillreports.com/migrahack/naco.html
By Dan Hill

This person made two related entries, both of which play on geographic perception and reality.

Draw the border! presents itself this way: 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico divides border city pictured below. Can you draw the line that splits this city? Start clicking on the map to create the points to construct your border line and click “Done!” to see the real border in green and learn about the cities on each side.

Draw the border won “Best insight team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

Fun, intuitive tool that engages the user and challenges assumptions. Simple presentation that takes an current meme (GeoGuesser) and adds an education element. Extra points for individual creativity, persistence, and execution. Sometimes collaboration is all about just showing up.

Inspired by GeoGuesser, Naco or Naco? is a website that shows a satellite view of a place that contains the border between two cities and prompts the user to draw that border. Naco or Naco? shows Naco, a city that has a country as a border, and presents some basic demographic information as a clue.

Naco or Naco?

Early Childhood Resource Need App
http://migrahackranch.weebly.com/
By Team RANCH (Norbert Winklareth, Carlos McReynolds, Heather Gerberich, Adriana Cardona-Maguigad, and Rebecca Harris)

The Early Childhood Resource Need App is a map that shows neighborhoods in Chicago color-coded by their need for early childhood education seats, as calculated by the Illinois Facilities Fund, representing thousands of children unable to access preschool and child care programs.

Team Maginificent 7
Antonio Garcia III, Adam Pearce, Cindy Agustin, and Irene Tostados

Three Alarm Data Fire
No presentation
Kenneth Watkins, Oz du Soleil, Sachi Shirasaka

Illinois in the ICE age
http://geoff.terrorware.com/projects/migrahack/
By Ice Breakers (Geoffrey Hing, Tara Tidwell Cullen, Ruth Lopez, Jimmie Glover)

The Illinois in the Ice Age website is a snapshot of a two-month period of ICE activity in Illinois and a look at the journey of 7 people.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Illinois detained 966 individuals during November and December of 2012. During those two months, 915 people also left ICE custody. Many of these individuals entered a detention facility earlier and one individual had been held for more than one year. Of those who left, 390 were deported and 38 agreed to their own removal.

ICE Breakers won the “Best data visualization team project”. Here’s the text of the commendation made by the judges on this entry:

A complex analysis in an original presentation. Deep journalism that is ripe for further analysis and exploration. Contains a clear call to action for others to continuing the work; connecting the dots.

Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America
http://migrahack-dandelion.herokuapp.com/
By Dandelion Project (Lauren Pabst, Adriana Diaz, Antonio Oliva, Forrest Blount, Ravishankar Sivasubramaniam, Michael Drouet)

Immigration Recalibration of Suburban America focuses on the demographic changes in Niles and Lisle Townships. Nile, for instance, is attractive to a growing number of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East. Lisle has become increasingly Indian, Chinese and Mexican. The site offers maps, charts, and analyis of these trends.

Team Hello World
http://prominent.mie.uic.edu/Project/index.html
Kevin, Vivek, Gaurav, Ankush, Manju Rupani

Team Hello World created a website that looked for statistical correlations between remittance and immigration. They show a map of remittances and allow the user to explore. They also show some findings.

72-10
http://infogr.am/Ana-Just-Wants-To-Be-Safe/
Edie Rubinowitz, Adriana Gallardo, Brandon Huntz, Christopher Rudd & Fanny Sampson

This is an infographic story told on inogr.am that tells the story of children detained at the border.

Undocumented Immigrant Help Tool
This is a tool for people who are at high risk for deportation.

Gentrification Study
11square.net/migrahack

Seeks to compare gentrification patterns in Pilsen and Bucktown.

Informal User Testing of the Early Childhood Portal

adminMay 28, 2013

Over the last few months I’ve presented the Early Childhood portal to community groups and parent groups focused on Early Childhood. It was always a great experience, and it has really informed how we run the CUTGroup. Tonight in Englewood we’re doing our first user test, so I thought I’d post about these early, formative sessions.

Here’s a look at some of the sessions:

I presented to 37th Ward Alderman Emma Mitts’ regular meeting Block Club leaders on Saturday, Decemeber 2, 2012 (8:30 AM!). People loved the text feature. Out of the 30 people in the room, I had 15 who tested the system at the same time. I learned that people would rather get more information and less results rather than lots of results with limited info.

I made a series of presentations at Zenos Colman Elementary School at 4655 S. Dearborn.

Members of the CPS Head Start Policy Committee gave me great feedback about Spanish language translations, which we then added to the site. I was there for three separate presentations in February 2013.

We also conducted some formal testing of the site. This provided great feedback and real-world experiences, including having your child afoot as you’re searching education options!