HowTo

Civic Innovation Toolkit: Twilio

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Twilio is a cloud communications platform that allows web apps to make and receive phone calls and SMS text messages. You’ve probably used Twilio at some point even if you’re weren’t aware of it. If you’ve ever received a text message when your cab has arrived, your food gets sent out for delivery, or if you’ve received text messages from campaigns – you probably were interacting using Twilio.  The Smart Chicago Collaborative offers Twilio to developers in Chicago looking to build civic apps to solve civic problems in Chicago as part of our developer resource offerings.

 

The real strength of Twilio is ease of use. With just a little bit of time and code, you can create civic apps that send out SMS messages or make phone calls. Below the fold, Twilio’s representative in Chicago Greg Baugues gives us a demo of the tool.

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Connect Chicago Toolkit: YouCanBookMe

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“Establish a smart community benchmark and toolkit for broadband access and use” is initiative four of the City of Chicago Tech Plan. the Connect Chicago program is an essential component of that initiative. 

At our last Connect Chicago meetup, Rene Paccha demonstrated some of the tools that he works with teaching digital skills to residents at their Pilsen and Southeast Chicago locations. One of these tools is YouCanBookMe, which Rene uses to let residents schedule training sessions. 

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Hardware and Software for CUTGroup and Civic Hacker Events

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camerselfie

Here’s looking at you kid

Here at Smart Chicago Collaborative, we cover a lot of civic innovation events in Chicago with live streaming and live tweeting. We also use a lot of audio and visual equipment to execute our Civic User Testing Group.

This mega-post covers the equipment we use as well as details on how we use it. We seek to propagate the Smart Chicago model for civic innovation work all over the country, so we seek to share as much information about our methods and equipment as we do our source code.

So here’s a deep-dive into our AV/ internet connectivity/ broadcasting stack:

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