City of Chicago – Archive of Smart Chicago Collaborative Work

The 606 Advisory Council converts to Park Advisory Council

adminJuly 29, 2015

Last November we hosted an OpenGovChicago event on park district advisory councils. As OpenGovChicago founder Joe Germuska put it, this was part of our ongoing effort to “learn more about existing microdemocratic systems in Chicago”. More:

In dozens of locations, several times a year, citizens get together to make their local parks and schools better, or to better understand the public safety situation in their beat. We’d like to meet the people who are active in these processes, and also people who would like to participate but are not managing to get involved. Maybe there are ways that software can help these groups gather and distribute information, to learn from their peer councils around the city, and to involve citizens who aren’t able to physically attend the meetings.”

Since that meeting, we’ve continued to help gather and maintain info on Advisory Councils. Here’s a mega-spreadsheet. Many people have contributed to this— please add any info you know!

The 606 Trail is the City of Chicago’s newest park. The park district opened last week after almost a decade of work between the community and the city.

Originally, the 606 was originally a 2.7 mile elevated train line called the Bloomingdale Line that was abandoned in 2001. Train traffic on the line had been slowing since the 1990s and the City of Chicago had brought residents of the Logan Square neighborhood together to propose an idea to turn the train line into a greenspace.

That result of that discussion was the formation of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail – an all-volunteer organization formed to advocate on behalf of the local community around the Bloomingdale Trail Project. Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail then partnered with The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, to help bring together a coalition of groups to make the 606 a reality.

Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail is now an official Park Advisory Council.

For more information on how you can get involved in Park Advisory Councils, check out the Park District website here.

City of Chicago Tech Plan Update

adminJune 25, 2015

At Techweek, City of Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman announced an 18-month update to Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Chicago’s first Tech Plan was first launched in 2013 and laid out a strategy to establish Chicago as a national and global center of technological innovation.

Since it’s launch, Chicago’s civic technology community has made significant progress towards the goals of the tech plan.

As a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology, Smart Chicago is proud to be heavily involved in the implementation of Chicago’s Tech Plan.

Here are some highlights from the update.

Next Generation Infrastructure

Chicago is working with internal and external partners to improve the speed, availability, and affordability of broadband across the city. The City is preparing to create a Request for Proposal for companies to design, construct, implement, and manage a gigabit-speed broadband network.

In addition to broadband infrastructure, the city is also working to digitally connect it’s infrastructure. Part of this includes the launch of The Array of Things project which will place network of interactive, modular sensor boxes around Chicago collecting real-time data on the city’s environment, infrastructure, and activity for research and public use. (You can listen to their presentation at Chi Hack Night here.) You can already get up to the hour updates on beach conditions thanks to sensors maintained by the Chicago Park District. The Department of Innovation and Technology has loaded the information onto their data portal.

Make Every Community a Smart Community

One of the major efforts of the civic technology community in Chicago is closing the digital divide in every neighborhood.

Much of the work in the coming months will focus on Connect Chicago. This citywide effort, led by Smart Chicago in partnership with LISC Chicago, Chicago Public Library, World Business Chicago, and the City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology aligns citywide efforts to make Chicago the most skilled, most connected, most dynamic digital city in America.

Here’s more from the Tech Plan about the program:

As part of this initiative, program partners are creating a profile of a fully connected digital community that can be used as a benchmark and will provide best-practice toolkits and other resources to help all Chicago communities reach this benchmark.

If you’re interested in getting involved in – you should reach out or join the Connect Chicago Meetup!

Another big part of the City’s strategy to close the digital divide in Chicago involves the Chicago Public Library. Libraries around the city already function as public computing centers and now they provide Internet to Go – a program where residents can check out laptops and 4G modems so that they can access the internet at home.

The City of Chicago and the civic tech community is also heavily focused not only access, but on digital skills. The Chicago Public Library’s Cybernavigator Program is set to be expanded and Chicago Public School is working on implementing computer science curriculum at all schools.

On our end, Smart Chicago is working with Get In Chicago to run a youth-led tech program this summer. The conceptual model for this program is “youth-led tech”, which means teaching technology in the context of the needs & priorities of young people. Youth will learn how to use free and inexpensive Web tools to make websites and use social media to build skills, generate revenue, and get jobs in the growing technology industry. They will also learn about all sorts of other jobs in tech— strategy, project management, design, and so on.

Effective Government

The City of Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology is also making great progress in using data to help city government be more efficient and effective. One of their first projects, WindyGrid, is a geospatial Web application designed by the City’s Department of Innovation and Technology that strategically consolidates Chicago’s big data into one easily accessible location. WindyGrid presents a unified view of City operations—past and present—across a map of Chicago, giving City personnel access to the city’s spatial data, historically and in real time, to better coordinate resources and respond to incidents.

The City of Chicago will be open sourcing the project later this year on their Github page.

That’s not the only open source project that the city has on the books. Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr recently spoke at Chi Hack Night to talk about their new system to predict the riskiest restaurants in order to prioritize food inspections. The system has found a way to find critical food safety violations seven days faster. Aside from the important aspect of less people getting sick from foodborne illness in the City of Chicago, there is another very important aspect of this work that has national impact. The entire project is open source and reproducible from end to end.

Since the release of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago has been working with the Chicago Department of Public Health on the Foodborne Chicago project. Foodborne listens to Twitter for tweets about food poisoning and converts them into city service requests. The Tech Plan update has some results from the project.

A study of the system, published by the Centers for Disease Control, found that during March 2013 – January 2014, FoodBorne Chicago identified 2,241 “food poisoning” tweets originating from Chicago and neighboring suburbs. The complaints identified 179 Chicago restaurant locations; at 133 (74.3%) locations, CDPH inspectors conducted unannounced health inspections. A total of 21 (15.8%) of the 133 restaurants reported through FoodBorne Chicago failed inspection and were closed; an additional 33 restaurants (24.8%) passed with conditions, indicating that serious or critical violations were identified and corrected during inspection or within a specified timeframe.

Chicago’s open data portal is also getting expanded as part of the updated Tech Plan having grown by more than 200 data sets over the last two years. Chicago was the first City to accept edits to select data sets through the City’s GitHub account.

Open311 is also getting an upgrade with the city undergoing a procurement processes to build a new 311 system. As part of the process for upgrading 311, the new system will go through user testing through the Civic User Testing Group.

Civic Innovation

A big part of the city’s strategy around civic innovation is supporting the work of civic technologists here in Chicago. As part of the Tech Plan, Smart Chicago will continue to provide resources to civic technologists like developer resources, user testing, and financial support to civic technology projects.

The Tech Plan also calls out our work with the Chicago School of Data. The two day experience was wholly based on the feedback we received from dozens of surveys, months of interviews, and a huge amount of research into the work being done with data in the service of people. If you missed the conference, here are some of the key takeaways.

The Civic User Testing Group also plays a part in the Tech Plan and has recently been expanded to include all of Cook County.

Chicago Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman stated that Chicago has the strongest civic innovation community in the country. A large part of that community has been the Chi Hack Night, now in it’s fourth year with attendance now reaching over 100 people regularly.

Technology Sector Growth

One of the most thorny issues for civic technologist is the issue of government procurement. One of the things that the city has been doing is meeting with different groups to talk about ways the city can make it easier to buy products and services from smaller business and startups. (You can see Brenna Berman’s talk at the OpenGov Chicago Meetup here.)

As part of the Tech Plan, the City of Chicago is taking this on directly. Here’s the quote from the Tech Plan:

This summer, DoIT will release a Request for Qualifications for start-up and small-sized companies to join a new pool of pre-qualified vendors eligible for future City procurement opportunities. Companies who are deemed qualified will be placed into a pool and receive access to City contract opportunities in the areas of software application development and data analytics.

To further decrease the barriers facing smaller-sized companies in competing for City business, the City has modernized its insurance requirements to allow for pooled insurance plans. Start-ups that are members of an incubator, such as 1871, or smaller companies that come together for a group insurance plan, may now meet the City’s insurance requirements as a group. Insurance requirements were identified as a barrier to conducting business with the City in a series of listening sessions conducted over the past year with these companies.

This is a huge opportunity not only for civic tech companies, but it will enable the city to take advantage of the innovation coming out of these companies.

You can read the full tech plan here.

New Dataset from the City Clerk’s Office: Residential Parking Zones

adminDecember 18, 2014 2 Comments

This morning, Susana Mendoza, the City Clerk of Chicago, is set to release a new dataset to the City’s data portal: residential parking zone data. Here’s a link: https://data.cityofchicago.org/Transportation/Parking-Permit-Zones/u9xt-hiju. The data provides the starting and end points of all street segments that the City Council has designated as parking for residents.

This data set is already going to have several organizations (including us) using the data. We’ll outline the efforts below the fold:

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Use 311? Want to make it better? – Comment here!

adminNovember 7, 2014

The City of Chicago is currently in the process of revamping the 311 system. The 311 system is what the city uses to coordinate and dispatch city services. Every year, this system takes millions of calls regarding potholes, graffiti, food poisoning, street lights being out, rat sightings, and more. The 311 system currently in use is pretty old for software – almost fourteen years. The City recently put out an request for proposal to build a new 311 system that will focus on improving the interaction between residents and city government.

As part of this process, the city created ChIdeas. They want your feedback. What do you think of the current system and what ideas do you have to improve it?

To do this, the City is using an app called MindMixer. Mindmixer allows you to submit ideas as well as vote up ideas that you also like. For example, Steve Vance has suggested increasing the number of service request types.

The feedback period closes in two weeks – so visit the site today and give your feedback!

Honorary Chicago at OpenGov Hack Night

adminAugust 6, 2014

On Tuesday, August 5, 2014, Linda Zabors of Honorary Chicago talked about her experience mapping out Chicago’s brown honorary street signs with Honorary Chicago. Smart Chicago’s Christopher Whitaker captured the entire presentation– see it after the jump or on our YouTube channel.

Honorary Street Sign for The Cool Gent, Photo by Flickr user Jessi

The ubiquitous brown street signs are placed to honor Chicago residents and require passage by the Chicago City Council.

Below the fold, Zabors talks about the work she’s done mapping out the streets signs and researching their biographies of who these honorees are.

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The Glories of User Testing: Chicago Early Learning

adminMarch 4, 2014

In late 2012, after a short development process, we launched an initial version of our project called Chicago Early Learning.

The first manifestation of a search results page for ChicagoEarly Learning.

An active regime of testing

Then, in the ensuing months, we actively listened to regular Chicago residents, dutifully noted their feedback, and directly changed the site so that it worked better for our target audience of Chicago parents and guardians looking for early childhood education. Here’s a review of the process and the results.

We showed the site on a typical computer set up inside a Chicago Public School location.

We demonstrated the site at a CPS Head Start Policy Committee Meeting At Zenos Colman Elementary School, 4650 S. Dearborn.

Presenting the Early Childhood Portal as 37th Ward Alderman Emma Mitts Looks On

We presented the site to block club leaders inside the ward office of as 37th Ward Alderman Emma Mitts.

We also tested the site in formal environments inside Action for Children locations in Chicago.

Changes to the site based on user feedback

Softer, less map-y design

We completely overhauled the look & feel of the site, making it softer and more rounded. Lots of users we talked to had childcare needs in different areas of the city or related to different parts of their lives (home, work, and relatives, for instance). For this reason, we also moved away from a stark search box and toward explanations of how to approach the site. We added explanatory text that short-circuited the most common question. We also moved from book imagery to a crayon/ marker in the logo to better reflect the programs that parents were looking for.

More prominent text feature

The text feature, which allows residents to text a zip code to a special number and receive a set of nearby location, was very popular in testing. We did notice that texting was hidden in the navigation, so we added a paragraph highlighting the feature. We also made the text phone number easier to see and share by giving it a separate page with a separate URL.

Improved search that helped you along

We saw that many people started off their search with a location in mind, whether it was a school or a neighborhood. We moved away from a pure address search and now pre-populate the search box as the user types. This short-circuits the search process and makes people immediately feel like this is a place that has what they’re looking for. The “Browse by community” function provides another way for people to dive in without putting in an exact address.

Improved filtering for more user control

We found in testing that people did not know how to easily drill down into search results and they very rarely used the filtering feature. We made the filtering more prominent and took up much more screen real estate with details of the search results. Previously, the user had to click on a particular item on the map to reveal details. An overall insight we observed from testing was that the map is not the thing—the details of early learning centers was the thing. We changed the interface to reflect this.

Better comparisons– more locations, easier to share

One thing we heard loud and clear from parents was that they wanted to be able to compare more than two locations. In response, we completely changed the comparison system—changing it to a more recognizable star / favorite system, displaying starred items in a grid, and giving the user the flexibility to easily add and remove locations.

Admin tool for management beyond the spreadsheet

An important milestone in this reporting period is the creation of an easy-to-use admin tool to manage all of the locations. Previously, the site was run by a “magic spreadsheet” that was difficult to manage. The Django admin interface to the rescue!

The admin search tool allows you to drill down quickly

And location detail pages are managed through a simple web form

Conclusion

The process of engaging Chicago residents with this tool has been very rewarding. Since we started this project– and in part based on what we learned here– we started the CUTGroup, a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps. This kind of back-and-forth helps developers, government, and residents communicate with each other and make our lives better.

Benchmark: Chicago Public Library Cyber Navigator Program

adminFebruary 25, 2014 1 Comment

“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is Initiative Four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. The Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative. As part of this, we’re highlighting programs that are quintessential programs that we consider crucial to having a connected city for all.

One of the first comprehensive technology training programs in the city, the CyberNavigators program at Chicago Public Libraries has led the way in bridging the digital divide in Chicago.

About the CyberNavigator Program

CyberNavigators are computer tutors that work in 44 libraries across Chicago, where they served almost 90,000 library patrons in 2011. Through technology training and mentoring, one-on-one assistance and public classes, CyberNavigators work with library patrons to teach computer basics, resume writing, word processing, internet searching and more.

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What It Takes to get the Municipal Code of Chicago Online

adminNovember 21, 2013

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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OpenGovChicago Meeting: Process and Products Around the Chicago Municipal Code

adminNovember 18, 2013

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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City of Chicago Launches the First Comprehensive, Public Data Dictionary

adminOctober 15, 2013

Today the City of Chicago launched the City of Chicago Data Dictionary, a single, comprehensive database catalog for the City of Chicago and City of Chicago sister agencies. The data dictionary contains detailed information on every data set held by City agencies and departments, how and if it may be accessed, and in which formats it may be accessed.

The City of Chicago Data Dictionary marks an important advance in open government data because it provides vast insight into how local government works. In concert with the City’s data portal, which is one of the largest raw data stores for a municipality anywhere, residents can now download available data, as well as examine the structure of all the data the City uses to make things work around here.

Tom Schenk Jr, Director of Analytics and Performance for the City of Chicago, announced the launch at the Code for America Summit in San Francisco. The City also published the underlying code for their data dictionary (titled “metalicious”). This code allows governments, businesses, and nonprofits– any organization that maintains multiple databases– a great resource for publishing their own data dictionaries.

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