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Mayor’s Office Press Release on the Launch of Chicago Early Learning

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Mayor Emanuel Unveils Online Early Learning Portal to Help Parents and Families Find Quality Programs for Children in Their Neighborhoods: Mayor’s Office press release on the initial launch. Snip:

“We were happy to collaborate with the City on this interactive map, which will allow parents and families to find information about these programs easily and quickly. We’re interested in hearing from parents and caregivers on what would make the site more useful to them,” said Dan O’Neil, Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative. “We’re also releasing the code for the site as open source, so that it can be used to make similar map-based sites showing resources across the city.”

Help Improve Adopt-A-Sidewalk

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In February of 2011, a massive blizzard hit the City of Chicago effectively shutting the city down for a day and a half. Lake Shore Drive, Metra lines, and business closed down as the city was buried under 20 inches of snow.

In the storm’s aftermath, Chicago cleaned itself up with neighbors helping neighbors shovel out the snow. In that same spirit of being good neighbors, Chicago is joining Race for Reuse to push adoption of the Adopt-A-Sidewalk app.

Adopt-A-Sidewalk is Chicago’s implementation of the Adopt-A-Hydrant application. Users adopt a sidewalk that they agree to shovel after a snow event. Through the site, you can also share resources like snow blowers and salt as well as let people know that your sidewalk has been cleared. More importantly, those that need help clearing their sidewalk can do so through the app. This will let volunteers, who sign up through the city’s Snow Corps app, know which sidewalks also need to be cleared.

Through a partnership between the City of Chicago and Code for America and the Smart Chicago Collaborative, the Adopt-A-Sidewalk app is getting overhauled for the new winter season. The app has been open sourced on GitHub and civic hackers are invited to help improve the app. The app will be hosted on the Smart Chicago Collaborative AWS account in order to make it easier to implement improvements to the Adopt-A-Sidewalk code.

Christopher Whittaker (cwhitaker@codeforamerica.org), the Code for America Brigade leader here in Chicago, is leading this effort. Civic hackers interested in working on Adopt-A-Sidewalk are invited to come to the OpenGov Hacknights Tuesdays at 6:00pm inside 1871. There we’ll discuss needed improvements and enhancements to the app.

Adopt a Sidewalk

The Launch of Connect Chicago

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Today we’re announcing the launch of Connect Chicago,  a loose network of more than 250 places in the city where internet and computer access, digital skills training, and online learning resources are available—for free.

By way of background, Connect Chicago is a part of the Public Computer Centers grant (award No. 17-42-B10553) received by the City of Chicago Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) under the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program. The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has also awarded a grant to support this project. Smart Chicago administers many portions of this grant, including the Connect Chicago portion. We also administer funds for the City’s Sustainable Broadband Adoption grant.

All of our work at Smart Chicago under the BTOP grants is managed by Francesca Rodriquez, the Director of Technology Adoption and Digital Skills at DoIT. Here’s a graphic created by Francesca illustrating the great work across the City’s entire BTOP PCC grant:

Most of the locations in the Connect Chicago system have been serving the community for many, many years. Wi-fi and public computers have been available in the Chicago Public Library for more than a decade. Community technology centers— supported in part with programs like the State of Illinois’ Eliminate the Digital Divide Program (going back to 2001)— have been essential parts of neighborhoods for many years. Home-grown classes on social media and photo sharing have been taught in senior centers since the days of Friendster. This robust, caring, and rich environment is the basis for our work.

The campaign around this launch has a number of components:

  • A website at www.weconnectchicago.org, with a listing of all locations and a listing of training opportunities: http://weconnectchicago.org/learn/
  • A bus, rail, and kiosk advertising campaign announcing the network and directing people to the Web site and 311. This includes ads on all city-owned newsracks and many bus shelters. See the ad campaign here.
  • A new information pack for the city’s 311 service, which continues to be the front line support for residents looking to connect with technology resources. Connect Chicago is replacing the City’s Tech Locator tool, which has served as the main source of information for the 311 call center for the last few years
  • An admin tool based on Google Fusion Tables
  • A series of meetups for you and / or your staff to show you the website and other Connect Chicago resources and train you on how to maintain your own location detail pages
  • Press release, blog posts, and other media to carry the Connect Chicago message

First ILOpenTech Meetup is Set for Governor’s State University

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The first of four community kickoff meetings for the Illinois Open Technology Challenge is set for next Tuesday, November 27, at Governor’s State University. If you are interested in helping the municipalities of the South Suburban Mayors and Managers Association to use data to make lives better in Southland, you should sign up for the Meetup event here. Here’s the agenda:

6 – 6:15 Introductions

We’ll go around the room, introduce ourselves, and say a brief statement about what you’re interested in achieving. Examples: “I have an idea for a app, and I need to meet a developer”, “I’m an expert at land use and I’m interested in talking with community members”, “I’m a government official and I’m looking to connect with developers”—things like that.

6:15 – 6:30 Kickoff

We’ll hear from ILOpenTech Challenge team about the current state of the contest and review the requirements. We’ll talk about timelines, judging, and so on.  Our role is to manage the Challenge and help guide participants as they form teams and brainstorm ideas, so we want to hear from you.

6:30 – 7 Ideas + Matching

This is the time for anyone with an idea to present it to the group in a more complete fashion and make a pitch for people to join them. We will have lots of materials that will help you express yourselves—easels, large postits, markers, etc. You’ll want to talk about what data you’d like to use and what community issues you want to solve. One way to get an early jump on this is to use post to the discussion on the Meetup page: http://www.meetup.com/Illinois-Open-Technology/events/89383552/. We also ask you two questions when signing up for the Meetup—the more thinking you do before the event, the more you will get out of it

— Do you have an idea for an app that you’d like to submit? Let us know!

— Do you have a community issue you’d like to address through data and technology? If so, can you describe?

7 – 8 Team Work

Teams will split off into groups and start planning their work. Since this is just the planning stage, feel free to walk around and hear from lots of people and teams.

8 – 8:30 Reports

We’ll regroup and hear from each of the groups and plan next steps.

This is all about the south suburbs of Chicago. Take a look at the data available at www.data.illinois.gov, www.metrochicagodata.org, and www.ssatlas.org to start thinking of ideas.

Chicago Health Atlas Presentation at AMIA 2012

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This morning Abel Kho and a number of his colleagues presented “The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago” at the AMIA 2012 conference at the Conrad Hilton here in Chicago.

AMIA 2012: The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

Abel Kho

AMIA 2012: The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

Abel N. Kho, and John P. Cashy, Northwestern University; Bala N. Hota, Cook County Health and Hospital Systems; Shannon A. Sims, Rush University; Brad A. Malin, Vanderbilt University; William L. Galanter, MD, University of Illinois

The talk covered a number of topics, including program design, anonymizing records,  Institutional Review Board approvals, and data extractions (diagnoses, medications, and laboratory tests for all patients seen at participating institutions).

Today we also published some new data that came out of their work— diabetes rates by zip code from 2006 – 2010. Stay tuned for more data and an updated user interface on the Chicago Health Atlas in the weeks to come.

AMIA 2012: The Chicago Health Atlas: A Public Resource to Visualize Health Conditions and Resources in Chicago

Abel Kho shows the Chicago Health Atlas

Chicago Health Atlas With Diabetes Info

Smart Chicago + Local Developers + Tweets = Better Public Health

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The Smart Chicago Collaborative provided server space on our Amazon Web Service account so that a local developer to develop an algorithm to classify tweets in the service of public health. Here’s how Joe Olson of Tracklytics describes the work:

Tracklytics partnered with Smart Chicago and DePaul University to enter a the Now Trending: #Health in My Community contest sponsored by the Department of Health and Human Services. The purpose of the contest was to spur innovation in analyzing social media outlets to detect global health trends. Specifically, the contest requirements were to use Twitter to identify trending topics relating to disease, such as West Nile virus and Legionnaire’s disease.

Tracklytics designed and implemented the solution, DePaul helped with testing and algorithm validation, Smart Chicago funded the computer time.

We did not win the contest, but several innovations were developed. We now have the ability to collect over 1,000,000 disease-related tweets per day. A subset of these tweets are run through a machine learning algorithm, and can be filtered down to a much smaller set of tweets where someone is reporting having an instance of a disease, as well as their location. Current accuracy of this is near 85%. We’ve reduced the cost of classifying tweets down to .0000057 cents/tweet, storing them for analysis down to 0.000000235 cents/tweet/month, and archiving them down to 0.000000004 cents/tweet/month.

You can view the site at http://hhs.tracklytics.com

We are currently working on modifying this technology to track food poisoning cases in Chicago. Once legitimate food poisoning cases reported by individuals are identified by Twitter using the machine learning algorithm, we can send to the person reporting the case a tweet containing a URL directing them to a form to collect more specific information (do you suspect the incident occurred at a restaurant, was from tainted food, etc). This information can them be entered into the City’s 311 system via the Open311 interface, and directed to the City’s Health Department for further analysis.

Lots more to come from this work— stay tuned!

Smart Chicago Hosts Flu Shot App for Local Developer Using Civic Data

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Today the Mayor’s Office and the Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) announced the launch of a new interactive web map that pinpoints CDPH’s citywide flu shot clinics based on location and hours of operation. Here’s a snip from the press release:

The Smart Chicago Collaborative hosted project was led by the Tom Kompare, who volunteered his time to develop the app that makes it easy for Chicago residents to stay healthy this flu season by finding their nearest flu shot clinic to get vaccinated. Kompare lives in Rogers Park and also volunteers with Open Government Chicago(-land), a technology meetup group for Chicagoans interested in seeing governments function more efficiently and responsively.

“Helping make City data more accessible and understandable is my way of giving back to Chicago, a sort of e-volunteerism,” said Kompare.  “Chicago has made public a really impressive amount of data and it’s up to developers like us to make this data more useful for everyday Chicagoans.”

Smart Chicago is hosting this app on our Amazon Web Services account. If you are a developer working with civic data, you may be eligible for free space on this account. Go here for more info on this program.

If you’re interested in using civic data to make lives better in Chicago, you should join the Open Government Chicago(-land) meetup group!

City of Chicago -- Get A Flu Shot Map

City of Chicago — Get A Flu Shot Map

"Get a Flu Shot" Sign on the Door of 37th Ward Alderman Emma Mitts' Ward Office

“Get a Flu Shot” Sign on the Door of 37th Ward Alderman Emma Mitts’ Ward Office

A Good Idea, on the Side of a Bus: Get A Flu Shot

A Good Idea, on the Side of a Bus: Get A Flu Shot

Center for Neighborhood Technology Urban Sustainability Hackathon

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CNT Reinventing Chicago Hackathon Judging Rubrick

Recently I helped out in judging for the Urban Sustainability Hakathon hosted by the Center for Neighborhood Technology (CNT). The event focused on a subset of the data available from the City of Chicago data portal under sustainable development, energy, transportation, water, buildings, parks/ open space/ food access, and climate.

It was a really great event. I haven’t been at a hackthon since the Knight-Mozilla-MIT “Story and Algorithm” Hack Day back in June, and it has been even longer since I’ve been to a local hackathon. CNT wrote a comprehensive blog post about the event. They have details on all six entrants, including the winner (Edifice) and the two runner-ups (Jitney Driver and Hidden Value in Abandoned Property).

Here’s some thoughts:

Community matters

CNT Hackathon: Hidden Value in Abandoned Buildings

The great value of this event is the community that results from people meeting and working together. A great example is the Hidden Value in Abandoned Property team of Audrey Henderson and Dan Fehrenbach. Derek Eder made a great tool for viewing reports of vacant and abandoned buildings, but Audrey had a great idea for this data that goes beyond just seeing the data on a map by pairing it with other data that shows its value. She met a great CNT developer in Dan and they executed on a beta of the idea. That kind of connection is worth everything in this world.

Policy is implicit in apps

CNT Hackathon: Jitney Driver

I was impressed by the team and the thinking behind Jitney Driver. Paula Robinson led us through a presentation about the social and economic benefits of jitney drivers. She referenced August Wilson’s play Jitney, play is set in a worn-down gypsy cab station in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in early autumn 1977. Since I actually lived in Pittsburgh in 1977, and well-remember the idea of jitney cabs.

She spoke of how shared rides lead to more connection among neighbors, how jitney driving could lead to local jobs and keeping money in the neighborhood, and how this type of service could fill an existing gap in transportation service. Some in the panel and audience talked about how this plays within the licensing requirements of the City, and even talked about whether we would be customers of such a service.

It was a refreshing example of people coming together to talk about how technology can affect a wide range of areas in society.

Civic Data is Big Business

The winner of the contest was Edifice, created by Cory Mollet and Juan-Pablo Velez. It is a great example of a product that pulls together a series of free things (four types of public data, Open Street Map, Tile Mill, and so on) in a way that creates a whole lot of value. It’s a good reminder that mining public data can lead to great businesses. I have high hopes for Edifice and the entire civic innovation industry here in Chicago.

Edifice Maps

Here’s a complete set of photos I took during the wrap-up of the hackathon. Congratulations to all participants– keep it up, and consider taking part in the Illinois Open Technology Challenge.

The Launch of the Illinois Open Technology Challenge

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Illinois Governor Pat Quinn announced  the Illinois Open Technology Challenge last week. Here’s an excerpt:

The State of Illinois Open Data site, Data.Illinois.Gov, is a searchable clearinghouse of information from state agencies that is helping inform residents about the operation of state government and encouraging the creative use of state information, including the development of applications for mobile devices that can be built around the data. This site, which the governor launched in June 2011, now contains more than 6,500 data sets.

Sponsors of the Illinois Open Technology Challenge include The Chicago Community Trust, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Google, and the Motorola Mobility Foundation. Additional support is being provided by Comcast. Administrative support for the project is provided by the Illinois Science & Technology Coalition and Smart Chicago Collaborative.

This is an important project for Smart Chicago, and it is deeply embedded into our entire program around data. Smart Chicago is housed at the The Chicago Community Trust, which has partnered with the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to create the Civic Innovation in Chicago project, which brings together government, developers, journalists, and nonprofits to better understand data and use it to solve community problems.

The Trust and Knight has jointly pledged $50,000 to support prizes for the Illinois Open Technology Challenge because it brings governments, developers and communities together in a common mission to use public data and create digital tools that will serve today’s civic needs and promote economic development.

If you’re interested in participating,  join our list and let us know.