Today marks the publication of The @CivicWhitaker Anthology: Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Here’s my introduction:
Hiring Christopher Whitaker to work as a consultant for Smart Chicago was one of the best decisions I made here.
Together, we created a new job type— part documenter, part organizer, part evangelist, part original writer and thinker about an emerging subsector of the technology industry— civic tech.
Through our work together, he’s helped build one of the strongest civic hacking communities in the country, been an essential part of the growth of the largest network of civic tech volunteers in the world, helped make the first weekend in June a national day of civic hacking, worked with a dozen emerging companies and organizations to grow revenue and impact, and served as a critical thread in the national fabric of this important movement.
This book is a simple anthology of the best of his vast work.
How do you keep your finger on the pulse of user needs? At mRelief.com, a startup with non-traditional users — beneficiaries of public assistance — this is a question that we constantly ask ourselves. We are helping our users solve for long wait times by providing them an avenue to help them assess their eligibility for public assistance through text messaging conversations and online questionnaires that help them gauge whether it is worth it to complete extensive applications. These forms return response pages and text messages that help them determine their eligibility and local resources through a partnership that we have with Purple Binder.
Our users don’t have a lot of economic power in society. An average online mRelief user is paid $1,321 a month and those who text in to determine their eligibility make $150 less in earned income. When you have decreased purchasing power, technology is seldom built with your needs in mind. But in interviews and surveys, our users have shared that they are humbled by our willingness to learn how we can better serve them and provide relief to the process of asking for government help.
Since we launched in September last year in Chicago, we had to commit to some listening strategies— activities we engaged in to hear our users and meet them where they are. Considering that we had 134 percent online user growth between May and June and that between June and July we almost tripled the number of text messages processed by our system, we think we are on to something. We would love to share one key listening strategy that contributed to getting us to this point: The CUTGroup.
Landing Page Before CUTGroup:
Landing Page After CUTGroup:
Civic User Testing Group (CUTGroup)
Since we launched mRelief, we conduct quarterly user surveys to get a sense of what makes our users tick. In 4th quarter of last year, the revelation was 82 percent of respondents didn’t pay for SMS which gave us the affirmation needed to launch our SMS strategy in November 2014.
But the most in-depth survey by far has been the CUTGroup test we participated in during Q1 of this year, an initiative from Smart Chicago to to help developers listen to the needs of their users. It combines observational analysis with insightful questions through surveys.
CUTGroup insights on our website usability combined with Google Analytics data on form completion and bounce rate were catalysts for redesigning our entire site with key leads on what should be areas of focus. Especially helpful was the notion that our icons on our pre-CUTGroup landing page were not clearly understood by 4 out of 6 of the users who mentioned our icons.
Other features that were the result of usability feedback led to rethinking our calculator by positioning a link to it near income questions and making all popovers/help text pop out as soon as a user enters data into a field. Based on typos, resulting from auto-correct and human error, we also revamped our SMS experience with more notices and additions that left users feeling like they weren’t penalized for mistakes. We helped users who texted in stay on the same text message if they made an error– all made possible through observational analysis in the CUTGroup.
Golden Nuggets for Future Consideration
I live 8 minutes from the Martin Luther King Community Service Center where we launched our first pilot involving case workers who served as navigators for our tools. There are times, on my way to work, that I will stop in and just wait with the folks we serve. I will listen. Observe folks — the phones they use, the questions asked about eligibility and surmise what the growing pain points are. For many startup co-founders, in-person surveys are time-intensive and are an “and” strategy combined with other world wide web magic. So, I also want to share two dope insights that we hope to integrate into listening strategies for the future:
Feedback Questions Integrated Within Your Tool – Cathy Deng at Data Made, a designer and developer we adore, has a listening strategy that integrates instant feedback on the tool itself. One contribution she made to the recently announced chicagosmilliondollarblocks.com was a feedback question seen here:
Analytics, Analytics, Analytics – For those whose technology solution is primarily on web, listening with cutting edge analytics services is also crucial. Keen.io is one analytics as a service tool and Heapanalytics.com automatically captures hovering, scrolling, clicking and more that a user will engage in on your site.
So chime in, folks, tell us how are you listening?
See how we have integrated learnings into our site atwww.mrelief.com
mRelief is also currently looking to pair with folks who have expertise in Angular JS. E-mail us at mrelief.form@gmail.com if you are interested in supporting tools that modernize public benefits for all.
Last week I spoke at the Personal Democracy Forum about the Jackie Robinson West Little League baseball team, open data, and what we should do as practitioners of civic tech and members of society.
In the summer of 2014, in the city of Chicago, Illinois, a youth baseball team called Jackie Robinson West came out of nowhere (well, at least according to the vast millions of Chicagoans who don’t follow such things) to compete for the World Championship in the Little League Baseball World Series.
It was a team of African-American kids from Chicago’s South Side, and they competed and won at the highest levels. They beat some kids from Las Vegas to play for world championship. Their uniforms said, “Great Lakes”, which makes sense when you’re looking at a map of the world for a world series.
They lost, but valiantly. For about a week and a half, a segregated city was united on something completely incontrovertible: that these kids were awesome, and they were ours. Cue the parade, the T-shirt sales, the mass joy. This was a shared experience that politicians and regular people crave— to be in communion. A surprise summer experience. So we had a parade. The route was amazing.
The kids were on floats and they got adoration.
Then, one morning in February we learned in breaking news fashion that Jackie Robinson West’s U.S. title was vacated. They had placed players on their team who did not qualify to play because they lived outside the team’s boundaries.
This matter is based on the stuff that civic tech is made of— boundaries, maps, points, addresses, data, records, municipalities. It felt so “us”. Civic tech methodology.
And I realized this vice-president of a suburban little league baseball association was one of us. Just another person who used public data to answer a question— to achieve his civic goals. And he was right. He was a whistleblower. Based on dots. Based on facts. To be fair— based on true data.
But what should we do— those of us in civic tech— what should we do? what should we work on? Mass joy.
At Smart Chicago, that’s what we focus on. Smart Chicago is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology. We work on increasing access to the Internet, improving skills for using the Internet, and developing meaningful products from data that measurably contribute to the quality of life of residents in our region and beyond. Our three primary areas of focus under which we organize all of our work: Access to the Internet & technology, Skills to use technology once you’ve got access, and Data, which we construe as something meaningful to look at once you have access and skills.
Our Civic Works project, funded in part by the Knight Foundation, a program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support for civic innovation in Chicago. Part of what we do is support an ecosystem of products, people, and services to have more impact. One of the products we support is Textizen, a web platform that sends, receives, and analyzes text messages so you can reach the people you serve. Mass joy through voting on dance competitions.
Another project is Smart Health Centers, a project that places trained health information specialists in clinics to assist patients in connecting to their own medical records and find reliable information about their own conditions. We employ people who have never been a part of the IT industry and give them good jobs helping people with computers. Mass joy through knowledge and jobs.
Another is the Civic User Testing Group, a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps. We tested our product, Expunge.io, with real people. The joy of clearing one’s name and being heard.
I am a father of two boys, both of whom have played youth baseball for years. There’s joy there, I know it. You’re at third base, don’t stay here.
There’s a rainbow over home plate. Go get it.
We have choices every day when we wake up. Let’s make sure we make the right ones.
At Smart Chicago, we work with a lot of partners to encourage the growth and development of the civic innovation sector of the technology industry. There is a nascent ecosystem that thrives on standards and sharing.
Code for America has been a longtime partner of Smart Chicago— we’ve worked with them since our very start. They have been devoted to an OpenReferral standard to help with the sharing of community resource directory data. Code for America is an indispensable national leader in the work that we care about here at Smart Chicago
Purple Binder, a Chicago company that matches people with community services that keep them healthy, has been a partner of Smart Chicago since July 2013, when we hired them to create their first API in order to fuel our Chicago Health Atlas project. They’ve been a shining light here in the civic tech scene— a private company building software that matters while helping others in the ecosystem
We also work with mRelief, an app that helps Chicagoans determine their eligibility for government benefits. We support them through our Developer Resources and CUTGroup programs. to help Chicago residents see what social services they qualify for. Both of these applications use data provided by Smart Chicago’s contract with Purple Binder
Purple Binder’s API is the first to use the Open Referral standard to transmit social services data between two applications. This is a big deal, and a moment worth celebrating, with more work ahead.
Convicted in Cook is an analysis of five years worth of conviction data received through the Office of the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County by Tracy Siska of the Chicago Justice Project. The goal is to shed a light on criminal convictions in Cook County.
Big update on our CivicWorks Project— it has been extended and we’re getting lots more work done.
The Civic Works Project (formerly known as the Civic Innovation in Chicago project) is program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support civic innovation in Chicago. The program’s original goal was to produce 200 content pieces, 5 apps that solve government problems, and 5 apps that solve community problems. We also ran the Illinois OpenTech Challenge through the grant as well.
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.
Governor Pat Quinn has declared April 3rd to be Illinois Innovation Day. Christopher Whitaker, consultant to Smart Chicago, will be representing us in Springfield tomorrow. Here’s a look at the work that Smart Chicago Collaborative has done at the state level.
Earlier this month, Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva unveiled the city’s very first technology plan. The plan was a result of a year-long process of research, brainstorming, and thinking about how to make all of Chicago competitive in the new digital economy.
Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to have a key role in many of these initiatives and is dedicated to implementing this plan. Here’s a look at our role in the plan and the aspects of our existing work in this context.
Today marks the publication of The @CivicWhitaker Anthology: Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative. Here’s my introduction:
