Connect Chicago – Archive of Smart Chicago Collaborative Work

Mayor Emanuel Launches Connect Chicago Initiative to Help Close the Digital Divide in Chicago

adminApril 16, 2016

Brenna Berman speaks at the launch of Connect Chicago.

Today we launched Connect Chicago, our initiative to make Chicago the most skilled and connected digital city in America. Following is a roundup of the day.

Here’s the compete text of a press release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

MAYOR EMANUEL LAUNCHES CONNECT CHICAGO INITIATIVE TO HELP CLOSE THE DIGITAL DIVIDE IN CHICAGO

Initiative Will Make Digital Skills Training Available at Nearly All Chicago Public Libraries

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and a coalition of public and private partners today launched Connect Chicago — a civic leadership initiative to make Chicago the most skilled and connected digital city in America. Connect Chicago will expand digital skills training throughout the city, and to nearly all Chicago Public Library locations.

“By teaching digital skills, we give Chicago a stronger and more dynamic economy,” Mayor Emanuel said. “Connect Chicago will allow us to expand digital skills training throughout the city and benefit residents of all ages in every neighborhood.”

Connect Chicago will expand digital access and training resources across the city by expanding evidence-based programs in partnership with trusted institutions with a history of serving low-income Chicagoans. Initial investments announced today include the citywide expansion the Chicago Public Library’s CyberNavigator program, which provides computer tutors who help provide access to information resources for adults and youth. The expansion will take CyberNavigators from 48 public library branches to nearly all of the 80 branches across the city, creating an additional 350-400 new training hours per week across Chicago.

“The Library has made it a priority to provide critical tools and resources for adults to learn digital skills,” said Chicago Public Libraries Commissioner Brian Bannon. “This exciting collaborative approach will allow CPL to serve as an access point to digital skills in every neighborhood, through our 80 locations across the city.”

Connect Chicago will also fund the integration of digital skills training into Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) Chicago Financial Opportunity Centers’ programming. Under this investment, LISC Chicago projects to train 1,000 more residents in digital skills during 2016 – 50 percent more than their current capacity. In 2011, LISC Chicago found that patrons who participated in digital skill training alongside other support services at financial opportunity centers were 50 percent more likely to get a job than those that didn’t.

Connect Chicago is the next chapter in Chicago’s commitment to digital access and skills. It is rooted in two recent citywide plans created under Mayor Emanuel’s leadership: the City of Chicago Tech Plan as well as World Business Chicago’s Plan for Economic Growth & Jobs.
“Through investments in coordination, programs, and innovation, we believe Connect Chicago will expand and sustain a thriving digital ecosystem that unleashes Chicago’s economic potential and improves the lives of its residents,” said Jeff Malehorn, President and CEO of World Business Chicago.

Connect Chicago brings together the public and private sectors to focus on neighborhood economic development. Private sector partners include Cisco, Clarity Partners, Comcast, Get IN Chicago, Gogo, The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Microsoft, Motorola Mobility Foundation, The Otho S.A. Sprague Memorial Institute, and Sprint. Over the next three years, Connect Chicago aims to raise at least $10 million to strengthen Chicago’s digital foundations and expand this network of programming.

“By bringing these partners together, we are able to do something unique for Chicago,” said Dan X. O’Neil, executive director, Smart Chicago Collaborative. “It allows an unprecedented alignment and coordination of the city’s technology assets.”

“Internet access is important, because it helps kids succeed in school and families participate more fully in their communities and in the economy,” said Matthew Summy, Comcast’s regional vice president of External and Government Affairs. “Comcast is deeply committed to closing the digital divide and to that end in 2011 launched the nation’s largest broadband adoption program for low-income families, Internet Essentials. Since then, nearly 35,000 Chicago families – or about 140,000 individuals – have gained access to the Internet at home through the program.”

“Connect Chicago is a shining example of Chicago’s commitment to digital access and skills,” said Shelley Stern Grach, Director of Technology and Civic Engagement at Microsoft. “We’re proud to be a founding supporter of this innovative initiative to expand 21st century resources across our city.”

For more information on Connect Chicago, visit connectchicago.org.

###

The citywide expansion of CyberNavigators through Connect Chicago builds on the support of the Chicago Public Library Foundation, which has supported the CyberNavigator Program since 1998. There is high demand for CyberNavigator assistance across the city. The expansion will take CyberNavigators from 48 public library branches to over 75 branches, creating an additional 350-400 new training hours per week across Chicago.

Here’s a complete set of royalty-free photos to use in relation to the launch.

Here are posters we used to show the top-level goals, our current investments, and other facts about the program:

Here’s some of the new stories written about the launch:

Emanuel touts plan to expand cyber use in city

By Marwa Eltagouri, Chicago Tribune
In 2013, broadband adoption on home computers and devices was lowest in neighborhoods such as West Garfield Park, Burnside and Brighton Park, as well as other African-American and Latino neighborhoods where poverty rates are high, according to the study. While the majority of people without broadband still connect to the Internet with their smartphones or public computers, the research showed they’re limited in their Internet use and are far less likely to use online courses or access online job applications.

City Launches Connect Chicago Initiative To Expand Digital Skills Training

By Mike Krauser
“It’s not dependent on your zip code, it’s not dependent on your neighborhood, it’s not dependent on your race or income,” Emanuel said. “Everybody will have the access to be part of the 21st century in the sense of what technology is and be conversant.”

2015 Year in Review

adminDecember 21, 2015

This was a big year for community technology in Chicago. Here’s a month-by-month look at some of the things Smart Chicago has shared, supported, and accomplished in 2015.

January: Smart Chicago Model Featured at the Gigabit City Summit

Smart Chicago attended the Gigabit City Summit in Kansas City, MO – a three-day learning and networking opportunity exclusively designed for leaders in current and emerging Gigabit Cities. Cities convened to discuss how to facilitate business & startup growth, spark government innovation, and achieve equity of access in the presence of next generation speeds. You can see our presentation here and read our recap of the event here. Denise Linn, who we would later hire as our Program Analyst in June, was also at the Gigabit City Summit. Here is her recap of the Summit on the Living Cities blog and her research on digital equity & gigabit cities.

With the start of 2015 seeing this event and the end seeing Google Fiber’s announced interest in Chicago, the topic of gigabit connectivity has come full circle. Smart Chicago is deep in this work – right at the intersection of city data, access, skills, and infrastructure.

February: Textizen Campaign for Placemaking

Smart Chicago used Textizen to get feedback from residents on the Chicago Complete Streets Program. Chicagoans were asked to give input on utilizing and improving public street spaces. At Smart Chicago, we understand how powerful text message can be to reach new audiences and listen to our community. This was a great collaboration with the City of Chicago’s Department of Transportation. You can read a blog post about the initiative here.

By July, Textizen was purchased by GovDelivery. We see the success of this company— one that started in a Code for America fellowship, became a CfA Accelerator company, as a success for us and our quiet support. We were deeply involved at the product level— sourcing customers, paying for the service, providing brass-tacks product feedback.

March: Expunge.io & Fingerprint Terminal

Expunge.io was launched in January of 2014 as a website that helps start the process of erasing juvenile arrests and/or court records. Smart Chicago has a long history working on Expunge.io starting with the inception of the idea during our #CivicSummer program in 2013. With the support from The Chicago Community Trust, we continue to increase public awareness, support institutions, and document the juvenile expungement application process.

In March, we secured a fingerprint terminal at the Cook County Juvenile Court to help youth get their rap sheet. We know that juvenile expungement is an arduous legal process that prevents many young adults from expunging their records. The fingerprint terminal for the Cook County Juvenile Center helps young adults connect with free legal aid at the Juvenile Expungement Help Desk while also getting their rap sheet — one of the most important pieces to starting the expungement process.

April: Experimental Modes Convening

Our consultant, Laurenellen McCann, invited technology practitioners to The Chicago Community Trust on April 3 & 4, as part of our Knight Deep Dive work. The Community Information Deep Dive initiative (or just “Deep Dive”, for short) is an experiment in synthesizing new & existing community information projects into a cohesive system for engaging with residents from the seat of a community foundation.

The convening was an investigation into what it means to build civic tech with, not for. It answered the question, “what’s the difference between sentiment and action?” through the experiences from the practitioners in the room. Here is a recap of the day including everyone who attended the convening. Laurenellen conducted an enormous amount of research around this topic which can be found on our website and in this book.

May: Foodborne Chicago Recognized as the Top 25 Innovations in Government

In May, our partner Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) was recognized as a Top 25 program in the American Government Awards competition by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation for its Foodborne Chicago program. Smart Chicago launched Foodborne Chicago in March 2013 with the goal of improving food safety in Chicago by connecting people who complain about food poisoning on Twitter to the people who can help them out — the Chicago Department of Public Health.

June: City of Chicago Tech Plan 18-month Update

The City of Chicago released the 18-month Update to its Tech Plan and highlighted a number of Smart Chicago projects: Smart Health Centers, Youth-Led Tech, Connect Chicago, Foodborne Chicago, and CUTGroup. The Plan also discussed WindyGrid and the Array of Things sensors — projects where Smart Chicago is a civic engagement partner.

Here’s @CityChicagoCIO talking with @MikvaChallenge about Chicago’s tech plan pic.twitter.com/tqKoMltzCp

— Smart Chicago (@SmartChicago) July 2, 2015

Read Smart Chicago’s take on the 18-month update here.

July: Youth-Led Tech

We can’t talk about Smart Chicago’s work in 2015 without talking about Youth-Led Tech. Youth-Led Tech was supported by a grant from Get IN Chicago, an organization that supports and evaluated evidence-based programs that lead to a sustainable reductions in violence. For 6 weeks, 140 youth were taught technology curriculum in 5 neighborhoods across the city of Chicago: Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, and Roseland. After completing 170 hours of WordPress training and content creation, the youth earned their own laptops in a graduation ceremony at Microsoft Chicago’s offices.

Smart Chicago documents everything, not only for our sake, but for the sake of others in the digital skills & access ecosystem. We have released the full curriculum online for anyone to use and adapt. We have our catering data, our instructor hiring process, profiles of our learning environments, and screenshots of the youth websites online. Later in 2015, Susan Crawford wrote a piece about the program in Medium, documenting the philosophy of the tech program where the youth, and not the tech, were prioritized:

There were also social-emotional learning elements of the program — peace circles, restorative justice — and talks about power in the city of Chicago. And here’s where Dan O’Neil’s attention to food fits in: O’Neil says the number one message he wanted to get across to the youth in the program was, “”We love you and we’re never going to let you go.’”

To access more links about Youth-Led Tech, visit this section of our website.

August: Bud Billiken Parade

Smart Chicago partnered with Chicago Defender Charities to support their efforts to include more technology tools (such as live-streaming and Textizen voting) in their programs. In August, we provided text voting during the Bud Billiken Parade so spectators could vote for their favorite youth dance teams, music groups, and performers.

Smart Chicago staff, consultants, Smart Health Navigators, and Youth-Led Tech instructors also marched in the parade! We marched with our friends Gray Era Brass, handing out swag, promoting the text voting campaign, and shared information about Smart Chicago programming.

We look forward to continued collaboration with Chicago Defender Charities beyond 2015. For more information on the Bud Billiken Parade, see this blog post.

September: Our Civic Tech Publications & Philosophy

September 2015 saw the launch of publications and thought pieces emphasizing the importance of authentic civic engagement in technology and articulating Smart Chicago’s civic tech framework. We believe that the real heart of civic tech isn’t code, the apps, or the open data. It’s the people. The neighborhood tech youth instructor, for instance, onboards family, friends and neighbors into the digital economy and tech pipeline, but their work is too often hidden or uncelebrated. Executive Director Dan O’Neil penned the Civicist post, “The Real Heart of Civic Tech isn’t Code.” Here’s an excerpt:

Civic tech that doesn’t include people like Akya, Angel, and Farhad leads to a distorted vision of the field. A vision that leads with technical solutions rather than human capacity. A vision that glorifies the power of the developer rather than the collective strengths of a city.

Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech by Laurenellen McCann was also published in September. This book represents the culmination of the Experimental Modes work under Deep Dive and was fueled by a scan of the field and practitioner convenings. It can be ordered on Amazon and read online. Our friend and former consultant Chris Whitaker also documented his civic tech lessons learned in the Civic Whitaker Anthology. These books are a testament to the great work of the authors, but also catalyze conversation for the civic technology and how the movement be innovative, engaging, and inclusive.

October: NNIP & Chicago’s Data Ecosystem

To build on the data ecosystem research and work of the Chicago School of Data, Smart Chicago started engaging with the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP). We attended the Dallas NNIP meeting in October. NNIP is a collaborative community of 35+ cities and the Urban Institute. Partners centralize, analyze, and engage residents with neighborhood-level data. You can read our recap of the NNIP meeting lessons and themes in this blog post.

Our first #NNIP t-shirt exchange. pic.twitter.com/tBnq96MZKR — NNIP HQ (@NNIPHQ) October 23, 2015

Continuing last year’s work with the Chicago School of Data survey and the Chicago School of Data Days, we seek to coordinate and support Chicago’s strong data ecosystem. Who is in that ecosystem? Institutions like DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies, the Woodstock Institute, Chapin Hall, and the Heartland Alliance, just to name a few. Here is a taxonomy of this ecosystem that fuels our thought and collaborative framework in this area.

We look forward to continuing our engagement with NNIP and contributing to that network of cross-city practitioners.

November: Smart Health Centers

Our Smart Health Centers program 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. In 2015, we expanded the program to more locations and hired a few of our Youth-led tech instructors from the summer as navigators. You can read Akya Gossitt’s story about her path leading to becoming a Youth-led Tech instructor and then a Smart Health Center Navigator.

We also began recording and sharing podcasts developed by the Smart Health Center Navigators. The Navigators discuss topics like healthy holiday meals and the digital divide in health care. You can listen to them on the Smart Chicago soundcloud account. We are excited to provide more opportunities like this to our Navigators and amplify their voices.

December: Final Integration of CUTGroup Text Message Solution

In September, we announced that residents can now sign up for CUTGroup via text message. This month, we implemented the last piece of this work where testers can also learn about new testing opportunities and respond to screening questions via text.

29% of 1,000+ people in @CUTGroup cite “public wifi” or “phone with data plan” as primary connection to the internet. pic.twitter.com/kWgDnYvfyL

— Smart Chicago (@SmartChicago) September 25, 2015

We did this work because if you do not have Internet access at home, you are limited by your time commitment on a public computers and might not have a chance to respond toemails in time to participate in a test. Out of our 1,200+ CUTGroup members today, 29% of our testers said their primary form of connecting to the Internet is either via public wifi or their phone with data plan. The impetus behind this project is to serve the large and growing number of residents who do not have regular access to the internet. By adding a text mode, the CUTGroup will be more effective at discovering resident’s voice.

More in 2016

We thank all of our founders, partners and consultants who have been a crucial part of this work.

Madonna Scholars + Smart Chicago

adminOctober 17, 2015

Today Smart Chicago and The Chicago Community Trust hosted a number of Madonna Scholars of the Madonna Foundation. The Madonna Foundation was established in 2001 by the Franciscan Sisters of Chicago, and is a public charity that increases access for young urban women to attend Catholic high schools in the Chicago area.

In addition to financial aid, the Foundation is dedicated to support the academic, psychological, spiritual and social needs of young women. These needs are addressed through a series of unique and innovative programs and service learning opportunities that provides young urban women the opportunity to build a meaningful, productive and successful life for themselves and leaders for future generations.

Today we talked about Smart Chicago, our founding partners, the CUTGroup, Connect Chicago, and Youth-Led Tech. Most of all, we’ll be listening to them and hearing how they use technology to make their lives better.

This is just one of the ways we seek to strengthen ties between their neighborhoods and the robust public technology scene here in Chicago.

Here’s a set of pics from our day together and a group pic, below:

Digital Learning Environments: Christ The King High School in Austin

adminAugust 5, 2015

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

Christ The King Jesuit College Preparatory School at 5088 W. Jackson Blvd Chicago IL 60644 is a Catholic Jesuit secondary school using the Cristo Rey model to serve young men and women from the Austin neighborhood and surrounding communities of Chicago’s West Side.

The building, opened in 2010, is impressive— full of light, well laid-out, and in pristine condition.

Sessions are held in room 105, right at the entrance. It’s named after Steven Biko:

The classroom is equipped with a projector and laptop, great desks, and whiteboards.

Each of the youth has their own laptop, provided by Smart Chicago through funds from Get IN Chicago.

There’s a great enclosed, outdoor space for busting out.

A great cafeteria space and a gymnasium, all on the same floor.

Christ the King was a great location for Youth-Led Tech in Austin. Bonus: here’s a video I made of my recent visit:

Youth Led Tech: Introduction to how the web works

adminJuly 27, 2015

As part of our Youth Led Tech Program, we’re teaching youth digital skills. We’ve open sourced our curriculum in a series of blog posts. This particular lesson plan was adapted by Christopher Whitaker from the “Brief History of The Internet” from the Internet Society.

Introduction to How the Web Works

This module will teach students the basics of how the web works including the concept of ‘The Cloud”, the World Wide Web, DNS/Web Addresses, and how content appears in the browser.

Part One: The History of the Internet

Let’s say you wrote a really cool song on your computer. Without the internet the song would just stay on your laptop. To share it, you’d have to have somebody come over and look at your laptop – or you’d have to download it onto a floppy disk (What they had before USBs) and physically carry it over.

This is how computers used to work. And it was a bit of a problem for scientists trying to work collaboratively. Instead of shipping documents from universities on the east coast to the west coast, it would be a lot easier if one computer could just pick up a phone and call the other.

Which is exactly what they did.

In 1965, a professor at MIT used a phone line to call up a computer at UCLA and send information back and forth. This was the first (very small) network. The government saw value with this and funded an experiment called ARPAnet. Computers from across the country were added to the network becoming a ‘web’ of computers.

But, this network had a problem. It began to grow large enough to where one computer couldn’t find another specific computer. Imagine that you’re wanting to visit a friends house for the first time, but there are no street numbers. You’d get lost pretty easily.

To solve this, Vincent Cerf and Robert Kahn created the TCP/IP protocol. TCP/IP stands for Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. It had four ground rules:

Each distinct network would have to stand on its own and no internal changes could be required to any such network to connect it to the Internet.
Communications would be on a best effort basis. If a packet (information) didn’t make it to the final destination, it would shortly be sent again from the source.
Black boxes would be used to connect the networks; these would later be called gateways and routers. There would be no information retained by the gateways about the individual flows of packets passing through them, thereby keeping them simple and avoiding complicated adaptation and recovery from various failure modes.
There would be no global control at the operations level.

The protocol also had a system for giving each device connected to the network an address called an IP Address.

Activity

Everyone take out their phones or laptop. Google “What’s my IP address”

Now, notice that if you’re not on the wifi your address is different from the one on your computer. Every internet connection has it’s own address. Every website also has an address too.

Now, go into the address bar and enter 173.252.110.27

See, it really works – that’s Facebook’s address on the Internet

DNS

The problem with the IP address is that nobody can remember all the numbers needed to get everywhere on the web.

So, they developed services called “Domain Name Servers” that give addresses like 173.252.110.27 names like “Facebook.com”

DNS servers act like Google Maps for your computer. It works like this:

You tell your browser that you want to go to “mikvachallenge.org”
Your computer calls up a DNS server to ask for directions to mikvachallenge.org
The DNS servers looks through all the addresses in all of the internet and find: 67.202.93.0
The DNS tells your browser where to find the site. Your browser then points itself to 67.202.93.0
www.mikvachallenge.org pops up in your browser!

Web Hosting

The other problem with the early network is that those computers had to be on and connected all the time to work. It also became hard for a lot of people to try to access the same file on a single machine all at the same time.

Could you imagine 500 people trying to call you at once? Doesn’t work that well.

The people who were building the Internet needed a way to serve the information to a lot of people at once. The answer became dedicated computers that would ‘serve’ people information called servers.

YouTube has hundreds of server room that hold thousands of cat videos. When you point your browser to the funny video of your choice, the server ‘serves’ your video to your web browser.

Not everyone has to have a server room to host their websites. Expunge.io uses a service called “Amazon Web Services” to borrow their server. (Yes, you really can order everything from Amazon.”

Conclusion

This should give you a basic idea of how the web works. There’s a lot more complexity to it, but for those interested in learning more should check out these resources.

Digital Learning Environments: Association House in Humboldt Park

adminJuly 27, 2015

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

Association House of Chicago at 1116 N. Kedzie Ave. Chicago IL 60651 is a large connected complex of services in the heart of Humboldt Park.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Association House of Chicago serves a multi-cultural community by providing comprehensive, collaborative and effective programs in English and Spanish. We promote health and wellness and create opportunities for educational and economic advancement.

Service areas include El Cuarto Año High School, a technology center (run by longitme Conenct Chicago member Stephen Pigozzi) with classes in English and Spanish, and a comprehensive Family Literacy Program.

The Smart Chicago Youth-Led Tech program is run from the large cafeteria of Association House. It’s a huge area set off from the rest of the building, which gives us lots of bust-out room for creativity and learning.

There is lots of space to store food, which makes it easier to manage breakfast and lunch five times a week.

The chairs and tables are easy to move. Lots of instruction occurs in presentation and discussion format. We have our own projector.

The Association House partners with Americorps to deliver all sorts of digital skills training.

They run dozens of programs throughout the year:

The enormous park across the street provides lots of bust-out room when it’s time to turn off computers!

Bonus: here’s a video I made of my visit:

Digital Learning Environments: Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros in North Lawndale

adminJuly 19, 2015

Note: this is part of a series of posts in our Connect Chicago program where we describe in detail digital skills learning environments throughout the city.

Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros at 3415 W. 13th Pl. Chicago IL 60623 is a bustling place with meeting rooms, a gym, a stage, a computer center, a community garden, and a world of joy inside and out.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

The mission of Chicago Youth Centers (CYC) is to empower children and teens to recognize and experience their possibility and promise. Chicago Youth Centers (CYC) is proud to be part of this community. Named after one of its largest supporters, the Polk Bros. Foundation, CYC – ABC Polk Bros. Youth Center was one of the original three centers to form CYC in 1956. Well-trained youth-development specialists give individual support to nearly 400 children and teens each year to help them reach their potential, academically, socially and professionally. The center also runs a food pantry on the first Saturday of each month in partnership with New St. John Missionary Baptist Church. CYC gives members the tools, support and guidance they need to reach their full potential through the following age-specific programs: Early Childhood Education, School-Age Child Development, Teen Leadership Development, and Summer Fun.

The Early Childhood program is of special interest to those of us at Smart Chicago, since we created and run the Chicago Early Learning portal.

Here’s their detail page, and an excerpt:

CYC ABC Early Childhood mission is to invest in youth in underserved communities in Chicago to help them discover and realize their full potential. Our program specialty is in the area of science. Children enrolled in our program will participate in a Green Living Recycling Project to protect the environment. Children will utilize their school readiness skills in all areas inclusive of math, science and literacy as they embark on creating and implementing a recycling station in their classroom community. Children will learn about how packaging waste, including glass, aluminum, plastics, metals and paperboard contribute significantly to annual waste totals, along with yard trimmings. Children will learn recycling involves taking materials that would normally be discarded as waste and giving them a new life. Children will use their problem solving skills to create their own toys and inventions through recycling. Family Engagement in the program supports the involvement of parents and community partnerships toward achieving the school readiness outcomes.

The Smart Chicago Youth-Led Tech program is run from a basement office that is cool and inviting when the hot summer sun is shining bright.

The 24 youth in our program gather around three tables and a bench. We have plenty of outlets and room for our daily breakfast and lunch deliveries. Each of the participants have their own brand-new laptop, which are secured each night in a cabinet we had delivered to the site. We try to be as self-sufficient as possible while using as few of the resources at the location as we can. The gym is a huge resource— the kids love it and they’re able to use it after their morning lesson and right before lunch.

There’s also a stage for performances.

Breakfast and lunch is delivered daily and any extra is shared with other programs in this busy facility.

There is a long, lush garden in the lot just to the east of the center, and some of the youth love to roam it over their breaks.

Chicago Youth Centers ABC Polk Bros provides a rich and diverse learning environment for digital skills in Chicago.

Bonus: here’s a video I took of my visit:

Denise Linn Joins Smart Chicago as Program Analyst

adminJune 22, 2015

AshDenise4 copy smaller copy Today Denise Linn joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as the Program Analyst. She will manage citywide ecosystem initiatives like Connect Chicago and the Chicago School of Data.

Denise comes to us from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she completed her Master in Public Policy degree and researched civic innovation and city-level Internet access projects. In 2015, she published “A Data-Driven Digital Inclusion Strategy for Gigabit Cities” and co-wrote the “Next Generation Network Connectivity Handbook.” She previously worked as an Economics Research Assistant in the Auctions & Spectrum Access Division of the Federal Communications Commission and is an alumna of the AmeriCorps VISTA program.

As Program Analyst, Denise will develop, execute, and manage the evaluation of Smart Chicago Programming. She has primary responsibility for the day-to-day activities of Connect Chicago, the Chicago School of Data, and other data engagement projects like the Array of Things and the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership.

You can follow her work on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Slideshare.

Please join me in welcoming Denise Linn.

Connect Chicago Featured in Report on how mapping is used to expand access to education environments

adminJanuary 30, 2015

The Connect Chicago website, a resourced maintained by Smart Chicago showing free computer access and digital skills locations across the city, is featured in Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities. Published at New America, an organization “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age” and authored by Lindsey Tepe, Policy Analyst in their Education Policy Program, here’s how they frame the report:

Rising income inequality has been the subject of heated debate in 2014, and education is often proffered as a remedy. But do all American learners have access to the educational opportunities that lead to success in the 21st century?

In a new report, Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities, author Lindsey Tepe argues for the greater use of community-level mapping to answer this question, exposing at the local level where resources are abundant and where there are disparities. The report spotlights examples of mapping initiatives that span the education spectrum—across early learning, public school, higher education, and informal learning environments such as computing centers and public libraries.

Here’s an extended snip about the Connect Chicago site:

Recognizing that many other public institutions, in addition to community technology centers, provide access to computing technologies and wireless connectivity, the city of Chicago began the project Connect Chicago. The project was designed to help residents throughout the city identify spaces where they could go to access information online. As Chicago’s Office of Innovation and Technology explains, “Connect Chicago brings all these resources to one virtual place, allowing residents and visitors—including those with limited digital skills—to easily find convenient and publicly-accessible technology resources and services.”

To easily find these resources and services, Connect Chicago mapped their locations, along with pertinent information such as operating hours. Residents of the city can search on smartphones by address—or by physical maps posted throughout Chicago’s public transit system—to locate the closest places where they can access computers to go online. The map includes community technology centers along with other informal learning environments that have online access, including public libraries and schools, city college campuses, senior centers, workforce centers, youth career development centers, and even Chicago Housing Authority locations that provide wireless Internet access.

You can download the report directly here.

Thoughts on the Gigabit City Summit

adminJanuary 20, 2015

Last week, I traveled with Kyla Williams, Sonja Marziano, and Christopher Whitaker to Kansas City, MO for the Gigabit City Summit – A three-day learning and networking opportunity exclusively designed for leaders in current and emerging Gigabit Cities.

Gigabit City Summit

The host city of Kansas City was chosen to be the first city with Google Fiber. Gigabit cities have internet download speeds of up to one gigabit of data per second. To compare, Chicago has an average internet download speed of 23 mbs/s. Clearly, this gives Kansas City a significant advantage.

There are many technology solutions that are limited by the bandwidth currently available in most homes and businesses. Gigabit speeds allow developers to use much more data and information to power their apps. It’s not just making Netflix load faster – there are several examples of applications that only work with gigabit speeds. This line of technological development would have huge impact into economic development as gigabit speeds would attract high tech companies.

At the other end of the spectrum, are advocates in cities who see gigabit internet as a way to close the digital divide. Gigabit internet requires substantial investment in infrastructure and the process of adding the necessary fiber lines can be a boon for digital access. This can be used for the delivery of regular Internet connections via wifi and other less speedy but still critical modes.

At Smart Chicago we care about digital access and digital skills, so we care about the city-based networks that are necessary to support people. That’s why we sent a whole delegation to Kansas City— so that we can share our model with others who toil in these fields.

We’ve got a pretty good history of this, including co-hosting a US Ignite conference in June 2013. This long-form attention is critical to our work— we don’t give up.

I was impressed with at the conference was the effort that Kansas City took to ensure they used the project to both connect every neighborhood with fiber and make serious investments into digital literacy.

Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, MO delivering the welcome at the Gigabit City Summit

In 2012, the Mayors’ Bistate Innovation Team published the playbook “Playing to win in America’s Digital Crossroads.” The team, made up of experts from both Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KC, had begun to work on the playbook after the announcement that Kansas City would be the first metro area with Google Fiber.

Right from the beginning the playbook made digital inclusion a priority stating, “high-speed fiber can not reach it’s potential if large segments of society are excluded from it’s benefits.”

One of the ways that Kansas City is working to ensure digital inclusion is the Digital Inclusion Fund. It is housed at the Greater Kansas City Community Foundation and made possible by Google Fiber, the Sprint Foundation, The Illig Family Foundation, Polsinelli, Global Prairie and JE Dunn. In 2013, they spent $311,600 on digital literacy programs in Kansas City.

Kansas City also has programs that provide refurbished computers to low-income residents thanks to the work being done by Connecting for Good.

This one-two punch goes a long way to bridging the digital divide in Kansas City.

The story of how gigabit internet impacts education

The Gigabit City Summit also featured an education track to discuss education’s role in building a smart connected city.

For this track, the conference organizers invited teachers from the area to participate in the Summit. The group discussed STEM education, job skills, and next generation learning.

There are several apps that take advantage of gigabit speeds to help in the classroom. One of our favorite examples is the software lending library that allows Kansas City residents to use their gigabit connections to go onto the library’s servers and use commercial software like Photoshop and Microsoft Office from their home computers.

President Obama’s big push for gigabit internet

One of the big challenges with generating greater speeds and access is lack of competition among internet providers. Communities like Burlington, Vermont decided to tackle this issue by just building their own network. The city provides gigabit broadband in the same way that they provide water to residents.

Larger cable and internet companies have pushed to have laws passed in states to forbid the practice.

Last week, during the conference, the White House released a report about the benefits of community broadband solutions and the President came out in full support of net neutrality, gigabit internet, and community-based broadband solutions. President Obama also announced several federal initiatives help cities get gigabit internet including expanding grants and loans to help expand broadband internet to rural communities.Here’s the President on the issue:

Susan Crawford’s passionate call for equal access to high speed internet

The Summit’s keynote was author Susan Crawford. Crawford spoke about how access to reliable high speed internet is a social justice issue. She linked the current struggle for high speed internet for all with the electrification debates in the 1920’s and how it took federal intervention ensure that all homes were provided with electricity.

Crawford praised the President’s plan to knock down the federal regulations that make it more difficult for cities to build their own gigabit networks. She called the speech “Obama’s FDR moment” and spoke about how there is no better time to be building fiber in America.

It’s hard to capsulize Susan’s Crawford into a single blog post – so we definitely recommend checking out her book Captive Audience.

There’s more work to do

There’s a lot more work do to when it comes to ensuring every resident of Chicago has the access and skills needed to take full advantage of the power of the internet. In 2015, we’re going to be going to be launching additional initiatives to help bridge the digital divide here in Chicago. Join us!