The Code for America Summit, “a roll-up-your-sleeves conference that brings together innovators from hundreds of governments across the U.S. along with civic-minded technologists, designers, community organizers, and entrepreneurs” starts on September 30.
Smart Chicago has a unique relationship with Code for America and performs a singular role in the community of civic-minded people and organizations here in Chicago and across the country.
Here’s a look at some of the presenters and speakers at this year’s conference and they work we’ve done with them over the years. Lots of the support we provide is quiet and under the radar, so we thought we’d make some noise and put some blips on the green screen.
One of the defining characteristics of Chi Hack Night is how many people show up there on a regular basis. Chi Hack Night is now consistently reaching attendance numbers of 80 to 120 people and has featured speakers such as Chicago CIO Brenna Berman, WBEZ’s Linda Lutton, the University of Chicago’s Charlie Catlett and more. Currently there have been 173 hack nights and counting. Smart Chicago has been covering and supporting this growth from the get-go.
In a chapter I wrote for Beyond Transparency called, “Building a Smarter Chicago“, I briefly listed some of the key gatherings and efforts in Chicago that helped make us a center for civic tech. With some research help from Christopher Whitaker, I wanted to expand on that and write down what I knew about the history of such gatherings. Do you know something we’re missing? Hit us up at @smartchicago.
Before we started getting together, there was a group of people who just did stuff. Adrian Holovaty created chicagocrime.org in 2005. He later founded EveryBlock with help from the Knight Foundation. I joined as a co-founder and People Person (ya, I know). The work we did we — uncovering and presenting civic data and conversations in 16 cities— naturally put us at the center of things in the country.
There was lots of other activity. In 2005, I launched CTA Alerts to help riders communicate about issues with the CTA. In 2009, Harper Reed (who would later be the CTO of Obama for America) created an unofficial CTA API that set transit apps on fire in this town. There was even more action in the worlds of MCIC and other institutions and private consulting firms.
But this post aims to codify the history of civic technology and open governments groups in Chicago. It’s big, and incomplete, so bear with me and help me out.
The meeting laid down the 8 Principals of OpenData, which would later help influence open data policies nationwide.
Independent Government Observers Task Force
One of the first open government events happened in Chicago on August 4th, 2008. The IGOTF Non-Conference brought together CEOs, professors, and nonprofit executives involved in placing case law on the Internet for free access. That meeting was productive in introducing players to each other in a series of cooperative efforts. EveryBlock People Person Dan O’Neil hosted the event and Omidyar Network, Sunlight Foundation, Google, and Yahoo! were sponsors.
OpenGov Chicago – April 2009
The OpenGov Chicago(-land) meetup group was founded in April of 2009 by Joe Germuska, who was an attendee of IGOTF. He asked me to help organize meetings. The group has one of the largest continuities google groups about open government in the country. Its first meeting on Meetup was a social event at Clark Street Ale House. The meetup group was created for citizens who are interested in seeing their federal, state, and local government function more efficiently and responsively. The group is inspired by people who are actively building tools and experimenting with solutions along these lines, like the Sunlight Foundation and GovTrack. The group stated right on the home page that it believes that open source software practices and internet culture provide good examples of how people can work cooperatively on complex problems to produce meaningful results, but you don’t have to be a techie to be part of this meetup.
OpenGov Chicago has always stated flat-out that you don’t have to be a techie to be part of the Meetup. I think that helped set the tone that the community here is open— we got so many different people from different walks of life.
Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates
One of the other early incarnations of open government groups was the Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates (IDEA). a voluntary coalition of government agencies and nonprofit organizations working to improve and facilitate public access to public data through web-based XML data transfer. Led by Greg Sanders and Justin Massa, the group met regularly and focused on institutions that worked with data.
At this meeting, Jen Pahlka presented about Code for America – an organization which would grow into a a massive international operation with countless people in its network and a ton of work.
awesome group of people here at #citycamp. @jsb just walked in. Party.
CityCamp itself would also grow into its own brand with dozens of events happening around the world.
On a personal note, former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wrote a letter of welcome to all attendees. That letter constituted my greatest opengov victory of the last mayoral administration— I took the train to get the signed letter from the mayor’s office on the way to UIC.
data.cityofchicago.org, Apps for Metro Chicago and Urban Geek Drinks
With the election of Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago, and the national acceptance of open government data pretty much a settled matter, the pace began to change quickly. One of the Mayor’s first acts was to sign an Open Data Executive Order that set the city on the path to opening up their data. John Tolva was hired as the city’s first Chief Technology Office and Brett Goldstein was hired as the city’s first Chief Data Officer. The Department of Innovation and Technology not only published data to the portal, but they hooked up their business systems directly to the portal so that data sets would update automatically.
Brett Goldstein recruited people from the OpenGov Chicago meetup and other technologists to form the “Nerd Herd” – an informal group of people who would meet regularly to talk about technology issues affecting the city.
At the time, there hadn’t been many civic apps created in part because there was no data to fuel them. (You had to either get the data through a Freedom of Information Act or just create the data yourself.) As part of the city’s strategy, the City partnered with the Metro Chicago Information Center to run the Apps for Metro Chicago Contest to help kickstart projects that used newly opened city, county, and state data.
The other big event that was happening at this time was an informal monthly gathering hosted by Justin Massa called Urban Geek Drinks. The venue provided an enormous networking opportunity where people with an interest in civic issues and technology could meet and talk.
Code for America Fellowship, Connect Chicago, and OpenGov Hack Night
At the same time, Whitaker joined Smart Chicago as a consultant and was paid to attend hack night and document the movement. At that point, Derek Eder had left Webitects to start his own civic tech development shop Datamade with Smart Chicago being their first client working on projects like the Chicago Health Atlas and Chicago Early Learning.
Several apps that used data to tell stories about the city was featured in the Chicago Architecture Foundation exhibit “City of Big Data” which uses interactive displays to display different aspects of city data.
Over the next few years, OpenGov Hack Night would grow and serve as a model for groups around the country. The space would outgrow even 1871 and move to the offices of Braintree where they are now. As part of the move, they changed their name to Chi Hack Night to reflect caring about more than just open government. Chi Hack Night is now run by Derek Eder and Christopher Whitaker along with a volunteer leadership council with members running their own breakout groups within Chi Hack Night.
As the community has grown there have been other groups that have formed to help bring together people around the intersection of technology and civic lift.Smart Chicago has hosted Data Potluck at our offices at the Chicago Community Trust and early on at 1871 due to their membership there. Other great groups are the City Data Users Group, Maptime Chicago, the Chicago Data Visualization Group, and more.
The Civic Tech Forum is a billed as a place to talk about resolving regional issues through the hands of citizens who take advantage of the technology. It is organized in partnership with Code for Japan and will feature civic innovators from around Japan to talk about the future of civic innovation in Japan.
Christopher will talk about the Chicago experience in helping build a civic innovation ecosystem and how it takes collaboration from both government agencies, non-profit foundations, civic technology startups, and community activists to make it work.
Here’s his slides from his talk:
You can get more information about the event on the Civic Tech Forum website or follow along on Twitter using the hashtag #civictechjp.
This week is a great week for civic innovation—the Code for America Summit in San Francisco is here. Smart Chicago will be there in force. I will be there, as well as consultants Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov. (Along with about a dozen other representatives from Chicago’s civic hacking community)
We’ll be live tweeting the event on our @SmartChicago account, but you can also follow along using the #CfAsummit hashtag. Below the fold, we’ve all the details of the Chicago area delegation.
OpenTwin Cities pitching during National Day of Civic Hacking, Photo by OpenTwin Cities
Christopher Whitaker will be running his usual live stream of the events on our livestream page. We’ve listed the schedule and more detailed information about the events below the fold.
Code for America and the Smart Chicago Collaborative are pleased to announce that the Midwest has been selected for the first Code for America Regional Brigade Program. The Midwest Regional Brigade program will support existing Code for America brigade cities as well as work to expand the number of brigade cities in the region. The program will be led by Smart Chicago consultant and current Chicago Brigade Captain Christopher Whitaker and will be headquartered at the Smart Chicago Collaborative.
Christopher Whitaker will lead the Midwest Regional Brigade program, photo by Angel Kittiyachavalit
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.
Next week, Smart Chicago will be at the Code for America Summit in San Francisco. We’re big fans, friends, and funders of Code for America and we’re excited to take part in the summit. Here’s a cribsheet:
Brett Goldstein, editor of the open data anthology Beyond Transparency, will be delivering the keynote on day two (I wrote a chapter in there and so did Friend of Smart Chicago John Bracken).
Tom Schenk Jr, Head of Analytics at the City of Chicago, will also be at the summit talking about Chicago’s data portal. Stay tuned here for more info on that!
Going to the Code for America Summit and want to hang out? Hit us up.
As we noted in the launch post about Adopt-A-Sidewalk, tonight marks the first storm here in Chicago this winter. That means it is the first time this season that snowplows have been deployed by the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation. Here’s a list of all the 669 employees in that department with the word “driver” in their job title:
The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud be a part of Chicago Shovels, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s initiative to help connect the public with City winter resources and empower neighbors to come together to help Chicago navigate winter. We worked with the City of Chicago and the Chicago Code for America Brigade to re-launch of Adopt-A-Sidewalk.
The Race for Reuse is a nationwide effort to help redeploy civic apps all across the country with 28 cities helping to deploy 31 civic apps. Adopt-A-Sidewalk was originally built as the Boston-focused Adopt-a-Hydrant app that lets citizens adopt hydrants that they agree to take care of in the event of snow.
Chicago has modified this code and added map files of every sidewalk in the city. Residents can claim sidewalks during snow events (like tonight!)– pledging to shovel their own walks or take care of a neighbor’s 25 feet of love. If you can’t shovel your walk and need help, The app will also let people indicate that they need help with their sidewalk. Volunteers can then go into the app and adopt that particular sidewalk.
Lots of people worked on this app. Chief among them is Ryan Briones. He is an IT Director for Software Architecture and Design at the City’s Department of Innovation and Technology, but he worked to configure the server and document the code on his evenings, civic hacker-style. He is longtime member of OpenGovChicago and just flat-out cares about this stuff.
Chicago is no stranger to community technology for the wintry mix. In 2011, a great group of people emanating from the Chicago Tribune news apps team that created and worked the ChicagoSnow Crowdmap (Ask for help, lend a hand: Blizzard 2011). We spent a couple nights managing and mapping 984 snow help reports for the blizzard of February 1, 2011. Here’s a super-detailed writeup. It was a great test case in community building around a weather event.
People interested in civic hacking are encouraged to meet to talk policy, data, and technology at the OpenGovChicago meetup group. You can also head over to the Open Gov Hack Nights at 1871 located inside the Merchandise Mart. These growing gatherings, hosted and supported in part by Smart Chicago, are a great way to get a mitt and get in the game on civic hacking.
Our own 
