Knight Foundation

The Launch of Task Force Tracker

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Today marks the launch of a new project, Task Force Tracker:  “an annotated, updated and independent hub for public use that will measure the ~200 individual recommendations against existing contracts, policies, potential conflicts and public discourse; such as the Fraternal Order of Police contract, local legislation and media reports.”

This is a joint project of Smart Chicago, City Bureau, and Invisible Institute. From the Smart Chicago side, it is done through our Documenters program, which is run by Kyla Williams.

It continues the work in our justice program, where we documented the community forums held by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force. Our basic idea was to come up with a way to number, explain, and track every recommendation from their report. “Recommendations for Reform: Restoring Trust between the Chicago Police and the Communities they Serve“. To provide context around previous attempts at change and index the barriers to implementation. To provide a space where others can contribute and we create a living corpus of knowledge about the work we share as a city.

The result, a little more than a week later, is this independent project by two of the most principled journalism outfits in the country, working to bring community voice to bear on some of the most important issues we face in this city.

One of the first speakers of the first community forums that we documented held by the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force said something that has stuck with me:

“I’m going to put it where the goats can get it — at the heart of this is racism and racist officers and their behavior.”

It stuck with me because it is such a good approach— if you want someone to hear your message, you have to put it where they are and make it easy to consume. It also stuck with me because what this resident said maps the thrust of the actual task force report, which wrote, “We arrived at this point in part because of racism.”

When there is communion— when we are all working from the same foundation, when we’re all talking, with specificity, about the same ideas and approaches— we win, together. This project, in my view, helps bring that communion.

This work was done in the context of our KCIC Deep Dive, where we are part of a Knight Foundation cohort representing a diverse set of approaches to expanding community information and increasing community engagement. 

Crowd at Chicago Police Accountability Task Force Community Meeting #2

Thoughts on the Knight Community Information Challenge: Design Thinking and Learning Together

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Today I was on a panel at the Knight Foundation Media Learning Seminar along with colleagues from three other foundations, along with the Chicago Community Trust, who have formed a cohort doing work around the principles of design thinking. We’ve participated in a number of workshops and we’re sharing our deep dive with others. The hope is that we can move forward the practice of community foundations as they discover and serve the information needs of communities.

Susan Patterson, Program Director at the Knight Foundation, is moderating the panel and she sent along some prompts. This post lays out some thoughts as my primer to the panel.

At Smart Chicago, we’re in a unique position. We’re housed at The Trust, which is the actual partner for the Knight Community Information Challenge (KCIC).  The Trust provides matching funds and has been deeply invested in this work, long before Smart Chicago even existed, centered around the journalism ecosystem in Chicago. You can see the river of work that went into that here. There’s also a complete evaluation of the program: “News that Matters: An Assessment of Chicago’s Information Landscape”.

Smart Chicago has been doing work under the KCIC banner since 2012, starting with our Civic Works program, designed to spur support for civic innovation in Chicago. Christopher Whitaker has led that project for us, and it has been hugely successful, helping projects like Roll With Me (accessible transit directions in Chicago), mRelief, (a text-based way to check your eligibility for benefits in Chicago & Illinois), and. We’ve used it to give seats to innovators at 1871 and support collaboration between local government and emerging companies like Textizen.

Our current project under KCIC is the Deep Dive. There are four components; two to expand existing programs for engagement and two that are brand-new:

  • Support for the 2015 On The Table— a community-wide conversation involving more than 20,00o people in a single day
  • Expansion of the Civic User Testing Group,  a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test out civic apps. This has allowed us to add hundreds of testers, expand the program to all of Cook County, and conduct more tests
  • Our project on Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech,led by Laurenellen McCann, which includes deep research and explication of community-driven processes for creating technology with real people and real communities
  • Lastly, our Un-Summits, which are mass neighborhood convenings around digital skills and data

One of the coolest things about this deep dive cohort is the support and structure that the Knight Foundation has fostered. There are a number of components.

We’ve gotten together, as a group, three times now to learn specific methods for design thinking— formal methods problem-solving. The best thing I’ve learned on this is interview tactics— how to find hyper-users, how to design a questionnaire, and how to conduct interviews that yield actionable information.

It’s the specific skills— not aphorisms, anecdotes, or notions— that I really value.

We’ve also done some online collaboration, which frankly hasn’t worked all that well. I’ve learned that choosing and imposing new software or processes on people never really works. It’s the genuine expressions of an organization that really make an impact. Again, that’s why I value specific modes, specific actions, that are genuine.

Lastly, I really appreciate the work of ORS Impact— the formal evaluators of our program. They’ve created a theory of change that really makes sense and pulls together a set of threads into a coherent narrative.

We look forward to continuing our work in this cohort. In fact, we’re hosting our next meeting here in Chicago in September.

KCIC Inspiration Workshop in San Mateo, CA

KCIC Inspiration Workshop in San Mateo, CA

Here’s the panel in full:

KCIC Deep Dive Presentations; Design Thinking and Learning Together
Moderators: Susan Patterson, co-director, KCIC, Knight Foundation
Panelists: Daniel X. O’Neil, Chicago Community Trust/Smart Chicago Collaborative; Kelly Ryan, CEO, Incourage Community Foundation; Emmett D. Carson, Ph.D., CEO, Silicon Valley Community Foundation; Chris Daggett, president & CEO, Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation

Primer for Experimental Modes Meeting

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Here at Smart Chicago, we’ve always had three areas of focus:

  • Access to technology and the internet
  • Digital skills for all
  • Meaningful products from data

This focus keeps us on the right path— one that requires us to lay practical groundwork before delivering cool apps— to put people first. We’ve done this since day one.

On a personal note, I’ve been a worker in community technology for a long time. I love it. In the early 2000s, I started a side business to help people get an internet life. I learned that nearly no one goes beyond default configurations, or even knows they can.

Internet Life Services

In 2004, I conducted bilingual computer training at my church to teach people how to post to our blog. I learned that everyone has a thirst to express themselves.

Bilingual computer training

In 2006, I taught a 6-week course in websites for small businesses. I learned that people love certificates.

Websites for small businesses

I’ve also been a part of a parallel path, which started taking off right about this time: the open data and civic tech movements. As a co-founder of EveryBlock, one of the earliest examples of a site that sought to use civic data in communities, I helped shape and build things like the 8 Principles of Open Government Data and  Open Gov Chicago, a gathering of technologists in the field started in 2009.

EveryBlock Launch Screenshot

We like to think these worlds— those of community technology, grounded in the needs of the people, and civic technology, driven by the most technical people, are aligned. When we’re at our best, they are. Very often, however, they are worlds apart.

This is why Smart Chicago exists. Our mission, grounded in our areas of focus, situated directly in the community (as we work here at the region’s community foundation), based in community technology research (lead by the MacArthur Foundation), and fully engaged with the governments and institutions that serve the people (including the City of Chicago, one of our founders)—this is us. This is why we’re here today.

We designed this project to fit under a larger area of work that Smart Chicago: the Knight Community Information Challenge grant awarded under their Engaged Communities strategy to the Chicago Community Trust “as it builds on its successful Smart Chicago Project, which is taking open government resources directly into neighborhoods through a variety of civic-minded apps”.

Materials for today:

There is no other organization in the country that is more qualified to lead this thinking. I am proud of where we are, and steeled for the work ahead.

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.

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.

Continue reading →

CivicWorks Project Extended

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Big update on our CivicWorks Project— it has been extended and we’re getting lots more work done.

Free Geek Chicago Launch of Crime and Punishment Website

The Civic Works Project (formerly known as the Civic Innovation in Chicago project) is program funded by the Knight Foundation and the Chicago Community Trust to spur support civic innovation in Chicago. The program’s original goal was to produce 200 content pieces, 5 apps that solve government problems, and 5 apps that solve community problems. We also ran the Illinois OpenTech Challenge through the grant as well.

Continue reading →

Smart Chicago Awarded Community Information Challenge Grant from the Knight Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust

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knight-foundation-logoToday the Knight Foundation announced an award to Smart Chicago, through their longtime partner and our founder & fiscal agent, The Chicago Community Trust, to “continue to design, build and demonstrate the power of digital tools to the community and empower residents to use news and information to improve their quality of life.”

This grant builds off of previous work among The Trust, Knight, and Smart Chicago— the Kick-Starting Civic Innovation grant, which we have used to fund the CivicWorks project.

The Trust and the Knight Foundation have a long relationship in the Community Information Challenge, including the Community Media Matters program funded by both parties.

 

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

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x-knightlogoToday 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.

Join us for the National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago

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On May 31st – June 3rd, Chicago will have three separate events in coordination with the National Day of Civic Hacking.

National Day of Civic Hacking is a nationwide effort being coordinated by Random Hacks of Kindness, Code for America and the White House to help organize civic minded developers, designers, writers, and data scientists help create innovative solutions to civic problems.



This day— the first of its kind in the nation— has been a long time in coming. Back in January, I wrote about what it takes to turn civic hacking into civic innovation. Here’s a snip:

The civic hacking community in Chicago has produced a variety of civic web applications based on open data provided by local government here in Chicago. These apps do things like show economic indicators in fun ways, let you know if your car was towed, and how & where to get a flu shot.

There are lots of reasons why civic hacking works here in Chicago— a rich baseline of data and technology, an engaged developer community, real discussions with government about policy and data, and the support of institutions are all important factors.

But what we’re missing most is sustained engagement with the residents of the city of Chicago. That’s how we can turn mere hacking into real innovation. The magic combination of government, developers, and community members is what we’re after.

So that’s our focus here in Chicago. While cities across the nation participate in the essential baseline tasks of civic hacking, we’ll be tackling this broader work, seeking to expand the movement we’ve built.

It’s time for all Chicagoans to “meet the movement”– to work hand-in-hand with hackers in order to make our communities better. We hope you’ll join us. Here’s a list of events:

ChicagoMigrahack at Cibola (May 31st – June 2nd)

The purpose of Chicago Migrahack is to foster the use of technology and open data to innovate information around immigration. In Spanish, the word “migra” refers to immigration.

We want to bring together our communities to create innovative platforms around one of the most debated topics today: Immigration

This event will kick off Friday, May 31st with a day of training around civic hacking and data. There will be $7,000 in cash prizes given away for the best projects.

Civic Hack Day for Youth at Adler Planetarium

Image courtesy of Greg Briggs – Creative Commons License

The Adler Planetarium is holding a youth-focussed Civic Hack Day on June 1/2 where Chicago youth, mentors, and highly skilled STEM professionals will work together in teams towards solutions to Chicago Issues. Youth team members will bring problems with them that they, or members of their communities, face on a daily basis, as well as a vision for a technological solution. This unique, youth-focused event is being run in collaboration with the Hive Chicago, Mikva Challenge, the Chicago Architecture Foundation and Free Spirit Media Working. Young people, their mentors and STEM professionals will shape and build working prototypes of their solutions over an awe-inspiring 28-hour period.

Hack for Chicago at 1871 (June 1st)

We’ll be having several different events at 1871 during the weekend. You can register for these events here.

App Design Workshop with the Knight Lab

Miranda Mulligan from the Knight Lab will give a workshop on designing apps that meet the needs of users.

National Civic Hacking 101 Workshop with Code for America

Christopher Whitaker will give a short primer on civic hacking to help orient people who are new to hackathons and civic innovation. This class will be broadcast nationwide in cooperation with other cities.

OpenStreetMap Edit-a-thon with Ian Dees

OpenStreetMap is an open source map that anyone can edit. Users can add data to the map including information about their favorite restaurants, cultural venues, and more. We’ll be adding more data to the map all weekend long. You can register for the event at the Chicago OpenStreetMap Meetup Page here.

General Hack Session with OpenCity Apps

We’ll also be having a general hack session if you’re already working on a civic app.

We’ll be sending more information about the event as time gets closer. Look forward to seeing you at one of the events!

PRESS

Here’s some coverage of the event.

Chicagoan’s prep for massive civic hacakthon
WBEZ Datum blog

Chicago: City of Big Data and National Day of Civic Hacking
Code for America Blog

Kick-Starting Civic Innovation Award to The Chicago Community Trust

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Today the Knight Foundation made an award to The Chicago Community Trust to “create apps and other tools to help increase the utility of local government data to benefit community organizations and the broader public.”

The Trust is matching this grant and will provide the combined funds to Smart Chicago so that we can work with the civic tech community in Chicago to deliver on this project.