Foodborne Chicago – Archive of Smart Chicago Collaborative Work

Leslie Durr Joins Smart Chicago as Project Coordinator

adminMay 15, 2016

Leslie Durr joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as a Project Coordinator.She will serve as the point person for projects including Chicago Health Atlas, Smart Health Centers, Foodborne, Hive Learning Networks and Youth-Led Tech. She will also be working to add several new projects to our portfolio.

Her experience includes program development and grant management in the non-profit sector, most recently with the Southland Health Care Forum as the Project Director for the State of Illinois Get Covered Campaign.

Leslie has her Master of Science in Human Service Administration from Spertus College and Bachelor of Science in Mass Communications from Jackson State University.

You can follow her work on Twitter.

Please join us in welcoming Leslie Durr.

City of Chicago Tech Plan Update

adminJune 25, 2015

At 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.

Foodborne Chicago is a Top 25 Innovation in Government

adminMay 8, 2015

Today our product, Foodborne Chicago, was recognized by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation. Here’s their writeup:

FoodBorne Chicago
City of Chicago, IL

On March 23, 2013, the Chicago Department of Public Health and the SmartChicago Collaborative launched the FoodBorne Chicago web application with the goal of improving food safety in Chicago. FoodBorne Chicago tracks tweets using a supervised machine-learning algorithm that identifies the keywords of “food poison” within the Chicago area. This tool allows residents to report a food poisoning incident through 311 after the program identifies tweets with possible cases of food poisoning. The team then tweets back a link to submit an online web form where residents can identify where they ate, the date and time they frequented the restaurant, their symptoms, and send it through Open311. The information is sent directly to the Department of Public Health and, if warranted, an inspection team visits the restaurant in question and then lets the resident know the status of the investigation via e-mail. The algorithm gets smarter at identifying related tweets as the team replies to residents that are suspected to have a potential case of food poisoning to report. If several complaints occur together, these clusters can be investigated to prevent further illnesses from developing.

And here’s a snip from a press release from Mayor Rahm Emanuel:

The Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) has been recognized as a Top 25 program in this year’s Innovations in American Government Awards competition by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University for its FoodBorne Chicago program.

Two years ago, CDPH and the SmartChicago Collaborative launched the FoodBorne Chicago web application with the goal of improving food safety in Chicago.

“The Department of Public Health and the Department of Innovation and Technology used social media and technology to create a tool that makes food consumption in Chicago safer,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel. “It is innovative thinking like this that enhances and leverages available resources to make the most impact.”

Foodborne Chicago and Flooding the Box

adminNovember 4, 2014

It was interesting to see on Twitter a discussion started when Foodborne Chicago was clumped with the Boston’s Streetbump app. I jumped in a bit, but I’m not much of a Twitter convo person, as I use it more to make art (first tweet!) than anything else. So I thought it write a bit about our conceptual models for creating software.

First off, at Smart Chicago we have a software philosophy:

We believe in making the smallest amount of software to be useful to the largest amount of people in connecting residents to their government, their institutions, and each other.

In the longer explication of that philosophy, we have this:

It also means that we acknowledge and use the immense World Wide Web for what it is, rather than what part we own. An example of this is Foodborne Chicago, where, instead of making a new place for people to post messages about food poisoning, we go to the place where people are already talking about it.

I really wish that more developers published their philosophy of software. It helps guide things, and helps us understand that when we make things, we aren’t just publishing code to be forked, but models to be emulated and improved upon.

Flooding the box

One of my favorite conceptual models for software is “flood the box”. Flooding the box for us means making it easier for regular residents to kick off an official process.

Expunge.io floods the box for the long and complicated juvenile records expungement process. Foodborne Chicago floods the box for the process of investigating possible instances of food poisoning.

In each instance, there are many other routes to the “box”. Our goal is to use the smallest amount of software to connect more people to those processes, to those boxes.

If someone chooses to call 311, which they do hundreds of thousands times per year (take a look at the staffing plans, call volume per shift, efficiency rates, and other stats here), they can do that. If they saw something in the paper and it stimulates a service request through the Open 311 system in Foodborne, that works, too. More routes to the box.

Then the CUTGroup comes in. We watch what happens as people use the software we made. We design tests to elicit feedback on what we see are the current flaws in our system, and we talk with people in public libraries and computer centers all over the city.

Then we look honestly and directly at the results. We use qualitative & quantitative data and we make changes to our software in order to increase our effectiveness at direct connections between people who need help and the people who can help them.

Moar

In the context of our Knight Foundation deep dive project, we are working on new models for working directly with real residents, wherever they are, to find new boxes, and new floods. Always open.

Here’s analysis from our Foodborne Chicago CUTGroup test. It includes 74 pages of raw data and the complete text of every response from all 17 testers. As an aside, 71% of our 840 CUTGroup testers— drawn from every ward in the city— answered “yes” to the question, “have you ever called 311?”.

Sometimes its the simplest things. And always we find value in the process. When coupled with our software philosophy and sound conceptual models, it leads to work with integrity. More to come!

Knight Prototype Fund Grant Awarded to Joe Olson to be Administered by Smart Chicago

adminJanuary 1, 2014

Today the Knight Foundation awarded a Prototype Fund award to Joe Olson, one of the developers of Foodborne Chicago, to “develop strategies to engage with targeted communities currently being missed through Chicago’s Twitter-based food poisoning incident detection system.”

Smart Chicago, through our fiscal agent, The Chicago Community Trust, is going to administer this grant. We are also helping out by using our CUTGroup program.

The Minds Behind Foodborne Chicago

adminAugust 12, 2013

Here’s a story in today’s Chicago Tribune about the Foodborne Chicago project (larger snip below).

On the About page of the Foodborne Chicago website, we have a section called “Genesis”. It lists, in chronological order, the people who had something to do with this project. It was such a unique and long-time-in-coming collaboration, so we all wanted to make sure that we got the whole history down cold.

What that page fails to do (and we’re going to fix that) is highlight the core team that brought this product to market: Joe Olson and Cory Nissen, who did all of the heavy lifting on the Twitter and classification side, and Scott Robbin, who customized the admin tool to meet our needs.

Joe and Cory have been the shepherds of this entire project. They submitted their work to the recent Knight News Challenge for Open Gov Data and have been thought leaders on how to take this technology farther and farther. The idea of using the exhaust fumes of social media to power intelligence in separate systems is near-cliche at this point. But Cory and Joe have built a generic system that depends on humans to train the classification models. All of this means real impact, right now, not just mapping tweets and writing papers. Without these guys, we’d all be refreshing Tweetdeck and mentally pasrsing tweets about Justin Bieber’s tummy.

Here’s copy/paste bios on Joe and Cory:

Joe Olson is a data architect from Chicago, Illinois. He is involved with several Chicago area startups, including Akoya, VGBio, and is a co-founder of Tracklytics, and can usually be found working out of 1871.

Cory Nissen is a statistician at Akoya. Prior to Akoya, he spent time at Allstate Insurance doing market research, including social media text mining and survey analysis.

The other core technology person is Scott Robbin. Here’s him:

Scott Robbin is a web developer from Chicago, Illinois. He is the principal at Robbin & Co., a member of Weightshift, and a recent inductee to the Crain’s Chicago Business 40 Under 40, Class of 2012. Scott is an open government enthusiast, creator of SweepAround.Us and WasMyCarTowed.

I really like my job. I get to hang out with smart people who make real things that help real people.

Here’s a video submitted about their work to the recent Knight News Challenge:

Here’s a snip from today’s story in the Tribune:

Food-poisoning tweets get just desserts: Health authorities seek out sickened Chicagoans, ask them to report restaurants.

Foodborne Chicago, which tweets as @foodbornechi, was developed by Smart Chicago Collaborative, which describes itself as “a civic organization devoted to improving lives in Chicago through technology” and counts the city of Chicago as a founding partner.

The app is billed as part of an ongoing effort by the health department to use technology to make its services more transparent and accessible to citizens. In the past couple of years, officials have placed all health department inspections online, nearly in real time, and posted progress on various health initiatives on a regular basis.

With the expansion of social media, complaints of suspected food poisoning, news of regional outbreaks and general whines about food service establishments have gained audiences well beyond their previous scope.