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.
None of this would be possible without Code for America, the ground-breaking organization founded and led by Jennifer Pahlka. The amount of work achieved under this grant is kind of stunning:
311Labs: A space where your dreams of the possiblities of 311 data can become a reality!
The Daily Brief: Explore and filter 311 service requests by neighborhood, service name, and status
Open311 Status: a site that shows if Open311 APIs are down or have performance issues, and provides Public APIs uptime, comprehensiveness and citizen utilization
Civiz: A polyglot Platform as a Service civic application
Civics Garden: Reflect, record—and be reminded of—your civic deeds and contributions
And all the normal code, design, documentation, and logo contributions you’d expect when you suddenly find yourself in front of smart Web people who can get things done
The Chicago Code for America fellows— Jesse Bounds, Angel Kittiyachavalit, Ben Sheldon, and Rob Brackett deserve a ton of credit for drilling down into a set of tools that make sense for the particularities of Chicago while being broadly useful as reusable code for other municipalities. They moved the 311 movement forward in ways that will be felt for years to come. They are technically top-notch, excellent communicators, and real-deal project managers, all of them. They listened to our needs and were able understand the unique technology setup that lied beneath a simple desire to see the current status of a pending service request.
The technology upgrade will make the process of calling 311 to get a pothole filled, a tree trimmed or a broken streetlight replaced like using FedEx to send a package, under the plan, first disclosed by the Chicago Sun-Times last spring.
The Open311 technology was developed through a partnership between the City’s Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) and Code for America, and was funded in part by the Smart Chicago Collaborative.
Code for America, a non-profit loosely based on Teach for America, recruits the top talent from the technology industry to give a year of service to build innovative web applications for city governments.
Code for America selected the City of Chicago as one of only eight cities to be a part of its 2012 national fellowship program, thanks to Chicago’s demonstration of cutting-edge thinking and its willingness to invest in long-term change through the development of new web-based technology.
“That’s what we’ve built – it’s called Service Tracker,” city Chief Technology Officer John Tolva said on the CBS 2 Morning News Thursday. “So whether you call in, or whether you e-mail, or use an app, you get a number just like a package, and you can track it all along the way, and you’ll get an e-mail saying it’s done.”
Chicago Chief Technology Officer John Tolva said the new service will help make city government more accountable and more transparent, something Mayor Rahm Emanuel promised upon taking office. “You need to be able to see where [a service request] is at every step along the way – not just whether it’s open or closed,” Tolva said. “Our residents and our businesses deserve to know that.”
Chicago residents have a new way to request city services all with the click of a mouse. The city revealed its new open 311 website today which allows people to submit pictures of problems. And soon there will be an improved app.
Lastly: a =n incomplete list of news stories covering the work:
Tom Feltner: Woodstock is moving the last 15 years of data to its portal by the end of the year. Licensing restrictions limit what source data can be made public. What aggregate data would be useful and what would be derivative?
Barbara Iverson: Submit stories about Open Gov work in Chicago to Chicago Talks to help connect regular people on the street, “citizens” with civic projects and Open Gov work. Tell your story, and we’ll help you spread the word.
Tom Tresser: Working to establish Civic Lab – Apps for Activists, Activist Speed Dating Night & The TIF Report projects.
Francesca Rodriquez: Update on the City’s Broadband Technology Opportunities Program
Sharon Burns: The Field Museum, through a generous multi-year grant from the Grainger Foundation is developing new apps, ebooks and other outreach projects to enhance the revenues stream of the Museum. Are open scientific data sets interesting? Ideas welcome!
Tom Kompare: I’d like see if anyone is interested exploring crime and place relationships. An investigation in the 49th Ward shows what may be significant relationships of crime with L stops and package liquor license locations. I need help to explore further.
Derek Eder: Open City would like to announce our latest civic app: Crime in Chicago
Simeon Schnapper: Pilots in CPS today centering around youtopia.com
We’ve got a full boat of announcements– hopefully people will get a chance to review some of this material, which will help us get to the evening’s demos. Also: don’t forget that tonight is Urban Geeks at Villains (thanks, Justin Massa!)– there’s plenty of chit-chat to be had there, if you can make it.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel will soon unveil an app Chicago residents can use to request city services—and then track the city’s response—he said this morning in the keynote address at Chicago’s TechWeek 2012 conference.
“We’ve opened up reams of city data for programmers to have at it and come up with the most innovative apps for their fellow residents to use: an app to find a towed car, snow plows, and street closures, an app for 311 calls, including tracking like a fedex shipping order,” he told the gathering of hundreds of digital businesspeople and techies at the Merchandise Mart.
Since 1999, Chicagoans have been able to call 311 to request city services or information. In recent years the service has offered status updates on the web, but Emanuel hopes to implement real-time tracking of citizen requests via a smartphone app as soon as this fall:
“I actually want the ability by by fall, when you call 311 and say you want to get X done—tree trimming, pot holing—you will actually get a tracking number. And so the next time you call it’s not like Groundhog Day at 311. Did they ignore me? Do I start this again? No.
“You may not like where you are in the queue, but you’ll be able to track it. You’ll be able to get information back.”
Last month the Smart Chicago Collaborative, the Code for America Chicago fellows, and our key City partners met with Mayor Rahm Emanuel to discuss our Open311 project. We got some great feedback from the Mayor and we’re excited about moving forward to the next phase of the project. More to come!
Mayor Rahm Emanuel discusses Chicago’s Code for America (CfA) project with Chief Technology Officer John Tolva, the CfA project team, and the Smart Chicago Collaborative. From the Mayor’s left: Ben Sheldon, Code for America, Rob Brackett, Code for America, Daniel X. O’Neil, Smart Chicago Collaborative, Kathleen Strand, Mayor’s Office, John Tolva, Mayor’s Office, Kyla Williams, Smart Chicago Collaborative, Danielle DuMerer, Department of Innovation and Technology, Angel Kittiyachavalit, Code for America, Jesse Bounds, Code for America.
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.
