Justice – Archive of Smart Chicago Collaborative Work

Surveillance in Chicago: an On The Table Event at the Burger King on South Pulaski Road

adminMay 2, 2016

I have been a member of the On The Table Steering Committee since its inception. I am very proud of my connection to this central community engagement model for The Chicago Community Trust, my employer and the place where Smart Chicago is based.

I believe in the power of bringing regular Chicago residents together to plan our collective future. I also believe it’s easy to have easy conversations— to create a private space among friends to talk about and celebrate our shared work.

But we just can’t afford to do that in Chicago today. We are in the middle of a series of crises around policing, education, the use of public space, and how to pay for the things we need. On The Table is far too important a tool to use for discussions that don’t go to the core.

So we’re hosting a dinner at an important place to talk about important things. Here’s details: Surveillance in Chicago: A Conversation at the Burger King on S. Pulaski Road

The October 20, 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald at 4100 S. Pulaski was a seminal event in this city. The reverberations are still being felt in the publication of recommendations from the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, in the Pattern or Practice Investigation being conducted by the Department of Justice, and in continued protests in the streets and at the doors of power. This conversation will focus on one aspect of power: video surveillance. Our venue will be the Burger King where 86 minutes of recording went missing on the morning after McDonald’s death.

We hope you can join us. If this event fills up, we encourage you to host your own On The Table as well.

On The Table 2015

Meantime, here are some resources to help move the conversation along:

Questions, comments, additions? Write / call / tweet Daniel X. O’Neil danielx@gmail.com (773) 960-6045 @smartchicago @danxoneil.

Meeting 4: Notes from Police Accountability Meeting at Sullivan High School

adminFebruary 25, 2016

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is documenting the four community forums hosted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and held across the city in the month of February.

The purpose of the meetings were to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

We sent a number of people to this fourth meeting, at Sullivan High School, 6631 N. Bosworth Ave.

One text documenter: see the notes here. These notes were later edited and improved by another documenter, working from the video.

Two videographers (Community TV Network, video here)

One photographer (Angel Rodriguez, images here). The meeting was conducted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, and they used a portion of the video we created to prepare and post on their Youtube page as well.

All of this material is posted under Creative Commons 4.0 license. You are free to use it for any purpose, with attribution.

When a public meeting is ended early

Here’s links to other coverage of this meeting from the the Chicago Tribune, DNAinfo, Associated Press, and Black Youth Project 100. Aldertrack compiled a Storify aggregation of Twitter posts.

About 49 minutes into the meeting, some people approached the stage (read a complete account here on our Medium post)

The moderator moved from the lectern to address the crowd.

Some attendees walked onto the stage.

Task force members and protesters then left the stage and were replaced by police officers.

Many protesters brought in signs that were small enough to not be detected upon entering (signs were not allowed in the meeting).

After the meeting broke up, a resident sat by the lectern.

The protesters continued their work outside.

Meeting 3: Notes from Police Accountability Meeting at Benito Juarez Community Academy

adminFebruary 23, 2016

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is documenting the four community forums hosted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and held across the city in the month of February.

The purpose of the meetings were to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

We sent a number of people to this second meeting, at Benito Juarez Community Academy at 1450 W. Cermak Rd., Chicago, IL 60608

One text documenter: see the notes here. These notes were later edited and improved by another documenter, working from the video.

Two videographers (Community TV Network, video here)

One photographer (Daniel X. O’Neil, images here, download them all here in hi res). The meeting was conducted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, and they used the video we created to prepare and post on their Youtube page as well.

All of this material is posted under Creative Commons 4.0 license. You are free to use it for any purpose, with attribution.

Setup for a public meeting

At Smart Chicago, we’re interested in civic engagement. That’s a phrase people toss around quite a bit, often thoughtlessly, or in abstract terms. We seek to expand the practice of civic engagement, making it more common, more civil, and capable of delivering justice.

One way we try to do that is to document with specificity modes and methods of civic engagement. That’s why we published the book, Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech, and it’s why we showed up at these meetings.

Here’s a look at the setup for this particular meeting. Many of the systems (lectern, stage, moderator, etc) were shared by all of the forums.

The basic setup was a series of chairs organized in rows with a center aisle. In this instance, the meeting was held in the central auditorium of the high school.

As usual, the CTVN apprentice was there taping the proceedings.

All participants received a brochure as they walked in:

Plenty of space separated the audience from the stage:

Tensabarriers create an aisle (also pictured is Governor Deval Patrick):

And plenty of staff with yellow-lanyards were on hand to make the process go smoothly:

A moderator at each meeting helped the speakers be heard. Each comment was allotted two minutes. The moderators also read the cards of people who didn’t want to speak in person.

City Bureau was in the house.

One aspect unique to this meeting was the addition of translators. They set up a booth in the back.

Smart Chicago Documenter Work on the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Community Forums

adminFebruary 14, 2016

The Smart Chicago Collaborative has been documenting the four community forums hosted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and held across the city in the month of February.

The purpose of the meetings is to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

We care about justice and we care about accountability, so we have sent text documenters, videographers (Community TV Network), and a photographer (me) to these convenings under our Documenters program, which “an essential tool for us to add new thinkers, generate ideas, and expand the field for civic tech.”

We show up at public meetings and document the proceedings because we’re interested in paying as much attention as we can to what others are saying, what their concerns are, and how they interact with official government structures. These community forums give us a great opportunity for this. We have a number of goals for this series:

Document the actual proceedings, with special attention, in this instance, to the speakers from the public— exactly what questions were asked, what documents were referenced, and what answers were offered by the task force
Research the questions and answers to the greatest degree possible. This includes learning more about the speakers, many of whom have decades of experience in their communities. Research and link to their organizations, their work, and the external documents, cases, and other matters that they reference
Aggregate the information and draw some rudimentary conclusions. This means simple things like counting attendees and speakers as well as some more sophisticated analysis like grouping comment types and themes

Toward that end, here’s our documentation for meeting #1, held at on Tuesday, February 2, 2016 at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church JLM Life Center, 2622 W. Jackson Blvd.

The meeting notes:

The video (as taken by the Task Force and placed on their youtube channel), and this one, taken by Community TV Network, posted on the Smart Chicago youtube channel):

And photographs taken by me (download them all here in hi res) under Creative Commons 4.0 license).

Lastly, we want to document the format of the meetings— the exact mode of engagement. This includes things like location type, timing, room setup, speaker format, microphone placement, comment rules— all the things that make up the meeting so that we can help build an overall typology for public meetings. That’s next.

For now, please consider attending one or both of the last two meetings

Meeting 2: Notes from Police Accountability Forum at South Shore Cultural Center

adminFebruary 11, 2016

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is documenting the four community forums hosted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force and held across the city in the month of February.

The purpose of the meetings were to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

We sent a number of people to this second meeting, hosted by the Chicago Urban League at South Shore Cultural Center at 2622 W. Jackson Blvd.

One text documenters: see the notes here. These meeting notes are incomplete. If you would like to participate in Smart Chicago’s Documenter program and get paid to complete them, contact us.

Two videographers (Community TV Network, video here)

One photographer (Daniel X. O’Neil, images here, download them all here in hi res). The meeting was conducted by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, and they used the video we created to prepare and post on their Youtube page as well.

All of this material is posted under Creative Commons 4.0 license. You are free to use it for any purpose, with attribution.

On location:

One of the joys of attending community meetings in our deeply segregated city is that one gets to all sorts of new places. The South Shore Cultural Center is a brilliant place. It was built as a private club that was later made public for all. Here’s what it looks like when a former country club for the rich is pressed into service as a meeting room for all.

A winter meeting at 6PM means nighttime in Chicago:

The location is on the lakefront. When it was built in 1905, it was a “country setting” of unimproved south lakefront property, often used for fishing and duck hunting. The Nature Sanctuary remains.

We covered the meeting with videographers from CTVN, and news organizations covered it as well.

Here’s a CTVN apprentice taping from the media dais in the back of the room.

The task force members sat on a stage in the front of the ballroom.

The tile floor has been trod by many.

And people stepped to the lectern to speak in two-minute stints about their experiences.

Many were dismissive of the work of the task force.

And everything’s quiet outside.

A Twitter-Based Review Crime & Punishment in Chicago

adminFebruary 1, 2016

Introduction

This is the raw content for a set of tweets we published today about our Crime & Punishment in Chicago project.

Our April 2014 Crime & Punishment in Chicago project is an index of criminal justice data: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/

We partnered with @CJPJustProj and Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew from @freegeekchicago. The code is on Github, but the research is what matters.

This was a classic ecosystem project— we provided revenue, tech, and training for important journalists, researchers, and developers.

The intrepid @CivicWhitaker served as project manager for Crime & Punishment in Chicago: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/

We tracked data sources into 8 stages, from commission of a crime all the way to prison. We aggregate sources & discuss collection of data.

Then we categorize the data as “Open”, “FOIA”, or inaccessible. We cover status in Chicago, and highlight the best practice nationally.

Sections

Victimization: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/ victimization.html. Many crimes go unreported. @TheJusticeDept made the NCVS to estimate the #s: http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=dcdetail&iid=245

Calls for service: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/callforservice.html. The @ChicagoOEMC1 publishes no bulk data about calls for service.

The @CJPJustProj has Chicago calls for service data from 2008-2012: http://chicagojustice.org/foi/data-sets-available-for-download/calls-for-police-service

The @DallasPD releases comprehensive call for service data: http://www.dallaspolice.net/MediaAccess/Default.aspx. Includes units responding, link to map, and status

Incidents: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/incidents.html. The @Chicago_Police crime incident data is exemplary cc/ @chicagocdo @CityChicagoCIO

Arrests: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/arrest.html. No info about arrestees is published in Chicago.

Henrico County @henriconews makes arrest data available online: http://randolph.co.henrico.va.us/public-data-access/searcharrest.aspx

Prosecute: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/prosecute.html. State’s Attorney publishes no data online and we do not know what data they collect.

The State’s Attorney’s Office has been ruled to be exempt from FOIA cc/ @KimFoxxforSA @DonnaMore + @SAAnitaAlvarez: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/prosecute.html

Jail: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/jail.html. Info on the 8,900 inmates in Cook County Jail cc/ @TomDart

Cook County Inmate Locator (http://www2.cookcountysheriff.org/search2/). Some of this data is used by the 26th and California Project (http://26thycalifornia.recoveredfactory.net/)

Raw Cook County Jail API via Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew: https://github.com/sc3/cookcountyjail/wiki/API-guide. Huge, important work.

Courts: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/court.html. The @CJPJustProj obtained 5 years of conviction data: http://www.chicagojustice.org/foi/data-sets-available-for-download/cook-county-court-data

This @CJPJustProj data was used in our Convicted in Cook project: http://convictions.smartchicagoapps.org/, again on concert with @freegeekchicago

Prison: http://crime-punishment.smartchicagoapps.org/prison.html. The IL Dep. of Corrections provides inmate search: http://www.illinois.gov/idoc/offender/pages/inmatesearch.aspx.

No bulk prison data is available in Illinois.

Oregon publishes prison data here: https://data.oregon.gov/browse?q=Prison%20&sortBy=relevance&utf8=%E2%9C%93. Includes forecasts & census of prison populations and admissions.

More work needed

If you are inspired by this project, or have any updates, please contact us.

A Fresh Look at Crime & Punishment in Chicago, our April 2014 website with Chicago Justice Project and FreeGeek Chicago

adminFebruary 1, 2016

Tomorrow is the first public meeting of the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force. According to their website, their primary mission is “to lay the foundation for the rejuvenation of trust between the police and the communities that they serve by facing hard truths and creating a roadmap for real and lasting transparency, respectful engagement, accountability and change.” In light of the launch of the taskforce, we’re bringing attention to our comprehensive website exploring the criminal justice system in Chicago— Crime and Punishment in Chicago, an index of criminal justice data in the region.

In April 2014, the Smart Chicago Collaborative launched Crime & Punishment in Chicago as part of our Civic Works Project, a program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur and support civic innovation in Chicago.

Our essential partners were Chicago Justice Project, a nonprofit research organization, and FreeGeek Chicago‘s Supreme Chi-Town Coding Crew (SC3).

The core belief undergirding this project is that crime incident reports— the ubiquitous dots on many maps we’ve seen in this city going back decades— were not enough to create communion between the police and the people they serve.

We believe that access, skills, and data are key elements in a just society. In light of tomorrow’s meeting, and the three other meetings to be held this month, we are calling new attention to Crime & Punishment in Chicago and we will be tweeting about it here.

First Public Forum of the Police Accountability Task Force at JLM Life Center

adminJanuary 29, 2016

Throughout the month of February, the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force is hosting four community forums across the city to provide residents the opportunity to speak or submit written comments on improving the accountability, oversight and training of Chicago’s police officers.

The first of these forums is this Tuesday, February 2, 2016: @ 5:30 pm – 9:00 pm at JLM Life Center, 2622 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago, IL 60612. More info, from the Task Force website:

5:30 PM Doors open/Registration
6:00 PM Overview of Task Force and Working Groups
7:00 PM Public testimony
9:00 PM Forum concludes

The Task Force looks forward to hearing directly from members of the public regarding the issues of police oversight and accountability.

Details:

People wishing to comment at the forum can sign up in person at the event.
Those who wish to submit written comments may do so at the forum.
In order to accommodate as many speakers as possible, comments will be limited to two minutes.
Signs and other large objects will not be allowed in the meeting room.
Video will be available on this website as soon, etc.
If you are unable to attend the forum, you can submit your comment or question via our online form.

If you need any help submitting comments, you can get help at a nearby Chicago Public Library or other public computer center.

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.

Results of Our PACER Postcard Campaign

adminMay 1, 2015

Today our colleague Elizabeth Bartels collected 31 postcards from law students, lawyers, and interested residents sharing their thoughts about making the PACER federal court document system more accessible and open to all.

One reason we’re so happy with these results is that everyone who completed a postcard is an actual registered user of PACER. It’s one thing to be an open information advocate, writing to a distant federal official about the concept of openness. It’s another thing altogether to be an actual user of the software, someone building their career, someone who will be working directly with Judge Ruben Castillo on important matters of justice.

When we approached this campaign, in which we joined with people in San Francisco and New York, we did so with a focus on building real relationships with people here in Chicago who are passionate about this issue of open law. We hired Oprima-1 to research contact information for law school interest groups.

Some examples: the Muslim Law Students Association of the University Chicago Law School, the Justinian Society of John Marshall Law School, the Student Funded Public Interest Fellowships Program of Northwestern University, the American Civil Liberties Union of Loyola University Chicago, the Journal of Intellectual Property at Chicago-Kent College of Law, and the DePaul Entertainment and Sports Law Society.

The point: there are a lot of people (in 187 student groups and 449 law firms) who care about this topic. Moving beyond our own circles, our own tight spheres of civic tech and open data, our own Slack channels and our own favored blogs, is essential. As we’ve re-learned, in great detail, in our Experimental Modes project, if we want to be of impact, we have to meet people where they are.

That’s hard work. We’re happy we do it, because it’s all that matters. Here’s pictures from our day.

Our first cards

On the agenda at John Marshall Law School

Postcard from Daniel X. O’Neil

Elizabeth Bartels working with students who are completing postcards at John Marshall Law School

Some postcards!

Swartz Law Day 2015

Our final results

We gave away copies of In Re: PACER to all

Many postcards to choose from.

Custom stamps (and buttons!)

Here’s a look at every completed postcard— lots of great comments:

Completed Pacer postcards from May 1, 2015 Law Day Event at John Marshall Law School from Smart Chicago Collaborative

Finally, a very special shout-out to my friend, sister-in-law, and John Marshall Law School valedictorian Elizabeth Bartels for leading the way on this project.

Elizabeth Bartels