Ecosystem

2015 Year in Review

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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.

 

Game of Gigs Gigabit City Summit 2015

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.

Experimental Modes Group photo

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.  

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. Youth-Led Tech Celebration Ceremony

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.

Bud Billiken Parade 2015We 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.

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.

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.

CUTGroup-Twittercard

More in 2016

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

Smart Chicago + Code for America Summit 2015

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Radar screen

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.

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City of Chicago Tech Plan Update

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city-of-chicago-tech-planAt 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.

On Open Data + Mass Joy at the Personal Democracy Forum

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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.
Slide01

Here’s a video:

And here are the notes I used for the talk:

 

Yesterday morning here at PDF, we heard, for the first time I can remember in the world of civic tech, a lot about the workers and the masses. Specifically, the morning sessions around Civic Tech and Powerful Movements:

Reckoning With Power
Eric Liu
Creative Collision: How Business and Social Movements Will Reshape Our Future
Palak Shah
Putting Labor in the Lab: How Workers Are Rebooting Their Future
Carmen Rojas
Labor Codes: The Power of Employee-Led Online Organizing
Jess Kutch
Powerful Platform, Powerful Movements
Dante Barry
The Net as a Public Utility
Harold Feld

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.

Slide02

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.

Slide03

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.

Slide04

The kids were on floats and they got adoration.

Slide05

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.

Slide06

We discovered that a coach from an opposing team from the suburbs of Chicago (the Evergreen Park Athletic Association vice president) had discovered this fact and brought it to the attention of the officials at Little League Baseball.

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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.

Slide08

 

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.

Slide09

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.

Slide10

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.

Slide11

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.

Slide12

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.

Slide13

There’s a rainbow over home plate. Go get it.

Slide14

We have choices every day when we wake up. Let’s make sure we make the right ones.

 

Christopher Whitaker Presents at Japan’s Civic Tech Conference

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header_idOur own Christopher Whitaker will be giving a keynote speech in Tokyo this weekend at the Civic Tech Forum.

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.

 

PHOTOS: CUTGroup #14, Chicago Cityscape, Logan Square Public Library

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Here’s a set of images of Sonja Marziano, Christopher Whitaker, and Josh Kalov conducting CUTGroup #14, which is focused on Chicago Cityscape, a site that tracks building permits, violations, and historic resources in all neighborhoods, community areas, and wards using open data.

Developer Steve Vance conducted a number of the tests, along with guest proctor Daniel Ronan.

Thirteen testers from all over the city showed up on a cold winter night, and we all learned a lot. Sonja is compiling the results— full report soon!

See a complete collection of photos from CUTGroup tests here.

Health Data Ecosystem is Strengthened by Purple Binder’s Adoption of Open Referral

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Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

Joe Flesh of Purple Binder at the Health Data Consortium Event at 1871, November 2013

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.

Yesterday we were happy to see a big step forward in the ecosystem as it relates to health data and software, when Purple Binder announced that they had adopted the OpenReferral standard. The announcement centers around some with whom we’ve toiled with over the years.

  • 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.

Remarks at Gigabit City Summit, Kansas City, MO, January 2015

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Following is a presentation I made to the Gigabit City Summit.

Slide1First of all, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that I’m from Chicago, and Chicago is not a gigabit city. I think it would be fair to characterize us as gigabit-curious.

It was a great day here yesterday.

I see people here like Blair Levin, who is so good at analyzing the raw economics behind the macro-market of broadband provision, and Susan Crawford, who is so good at seeing the market distortions and the raw inequities that those economics lay bare.

So I am here— we are here, as a delegation, from Smart Chicago— me, Kyla Williams, Sonja Marziano, and Christopher Whitaker, because we toil in the same fields as you.

When the tag-team mayors — Sly James of Kansas City, MO and Mark Holland of Kansas City, KS speak so eloquently and with such great precision and knowledge about the digital divide and robber barons, we’re with you.

When Margaret May was up here speaking of the need for paper, for information to be delivered to everyone, in the way they want to receive it, and are prepared to receive it, we are toiling with her.

So we are happy to be here. We are among friends, among fellow workers. Fellow toilers in these fields— the same fields that our President wrote about yesterday in his report on Community-Based Broadband Solutions. That report was subtitled, “The Benefits of Competition and Choice for Community Development and High Speed Internet Access”.

Community Development.

These are our fields. The ones we work together. The older I get, the grayer I get, the more convinced I am that structure and process matter. That it is hard to do something unless you explicitly set out to do it, and create modes and methods to do it. It’s currently fashionable in the world of civic tech to be all about people, but what I’ve come to value is concrete structures for actually doing that. For being all about people.

So that’s what I want to talk to you about briefly— the Smart Chicago model. Our structure and modes.

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology.

Slide2
Pretty much every organization has a set of principles or a mission statement or some other blah blah they put on their website. We actually live by ours. I repeat them at the start of every meeting, and they are a part of every decision we make. Our principles are: Technology, Open, Everyone, Chicago.

We’re all about technology. Everything we do relates to technology. We are of and about the Internet. Most of all, we believe in the transformative power of the Internet to change lives and build the economy for all. It is a simple matter of equity. Of justice.

We are open. In the technology industry, the primary manifestation of that is the use of open source code.But being open means more than using a particular license for our software. It means being truly open to others. Having open processes, so that people know what you’re doing, how you’re doing it, and how they can affect it. Open minds, so that we can actually change our entire way of doing things if we discover another way. This is about allowing others “in”, wherever that may be in any particular situation. This room is one of those “in” places. We all need to be allowed.

I’ve seen that lots of organizations gain strength and efficiency from a laser focus. That can be geographical, or all about age, or a particular activity type. At Smart Chicago, because our work is rooted in technology, our focus is on everyone. We’ve seen that there is great value in the network. The network—the aggregation of human attention— is in fact, the great creator of corporate valuation

And Chicago is one of our values. It is our middle name. All of our work is done here. So we are finding ways to be helpful nationally without distracting us from our work is important to us. That’s why we’re here, in force, today.

Slide3

We have three key focuses: Access, Skills, and Data.

Access. If you’re not connected to the Internet, it is difficult for technology to be of much use to you. I know you all care deeply about that. We’re with you.

But if you can’t use the Internet, being connected isn’t going to be all that meaningful. That’s why we work on skills a lot, going back to the $15 million in BTOP programs that we helped administer.

And Data. We construe data as content. Because there has to be something meaningful to look at once you’re connected and skilled. If you’re connected to the Internet, and you know how to use it, and you’re doing nothing to improve your life, or the life of others, then we really haven’t gotten very far.

Slide4

We were founded and are guided by three organizations: The MacArthur Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, and the City of Chicago. I report to a board that consists of leaders from each of these organizations.

Slide5

We function as a tech development outfit. We are a high-functioning tech firm that delivers on products focused on things like public health, early childhood education, and the justice system.

Slide6

And we run things like the Civic User Testing Group, a set of more than 800 Chicago residents who get paid to test civic apps, and our Developer Resources program, where we host dozens of apps on Amazon Web Services, Heroku, Twilio, Mapbox, and other systems. We allow others to be more effective— to provide clarity and impetus to the civic innovation sector of the technology industry.

Slide7

We see that all of you city delegations here are already workers in these fields. In many cases, you’ve been here before we did. Or you helped till the land to make it fertile. Removed the rocks and the dead tree stumps. We’re here to work with you.

Slide8

Let’s do this.

Smart Chicago, Expunge.io, and Ecosystem

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This is one in a series of posts that help us at Smart Chicago to develop a cohesive product strategy that helps us deliver on the promise of access, skills, and data. As we’ve grown, more and more cities have an interest in how Smart Chicago works and how the model can be used near them. These detailed posts, showing all of the steps we take, are a way to keep us in check locally while be of service nationally. Here’s more information on our model.

Expunge.io is a youth-led project.

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