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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.

Connect Chicago Featured in Report on how mapping is used to expand access to education environments

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New America LogoThe Connect Chicago website, a resourced maintained by Smart Chicago showing free computer access and digital skills locations across the city, is featured in Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities. Published at New America, an organization “dedicated to the renewal of American politics, prosperity, and purpose in the Digital Age” and authored by Lindsey Tepe, Policy Analyst  in their Education Policy Program, here’s how they frame the report:

Rising income inequality has been the subject of heated debate in 2014, and education is often proffered as a remedy. But do all American learners have access to the educational opportunities that lead to success in the 21st century?

In a new report, Putting Learning on the Map: Visualizing Opportunity in 21st Century Communities, author Lindsey Tepe argues for the greater use of community-level mapping to answer this question, exposing at the local level where resources are abundant and where there are disparities. The report spotlights examples of mapping initiatives that span the education spectrum—across early learning, public school, higher education, and informal learning environments such as computing centers and public libraries.

Here’s an extended snip about the Connect Chicago site:

Recognizing that many other public institutions, in addition to community technology centers, provide access to computing technologies and wireless connectivity, the city of Chicago began the project Connect Chicago. The project was designed to help residents throughout the city identify spaces where they could go to access information online. As Chicago’s Office of Innovation and Technology explains, “Connect Chicago brings all these resources to one virtual place, allowing residents and visitors—including those with limited digital skills—to easily find convenient and publicly-accessible technology resources and services.”

To easily find these resources and services, Connect Chicago mapped their locations, along with pertinent information such as operating hours. Residents of the city can search on smartphones by address—or by physical maps posted throughout Chicago’s public transit system—to locate the closest places where they can access computers to go online. The map includes community technology centers along with other informal learning environments that have online access, including public libraries and schools, city college campuses, senior centers, workforce centers, youth career development centers, and even Chicago Housing Authority locations that provide wireless Internet access.

You can download the report directly here.

Key Takeaways and Raw Responses to Chicago School of Data Census Form

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As part of our post- Chicago School of Data Days work, we are doing lots of analysis of the data we’ve collected and the artifacts we created together.

One key dataset, especially for the consideration of gaps in data provision and skills development, are the answers to the census form we’ve been working on for months. We’ve got 246 responses to date. Here they are, with identifying information and end-matter (re: how they want to be contacted, participation in the project, etc.) removed.

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Takeaways

The census form was a key part of the Chicago School of Data project and the conference.  We took responses from this survey to better understand how data was used by organizations and responded by creating themes that defined the conference sessions and discussions.

Here are the themes that we came to:

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Mind the Gap (At the Chicago School of Data Days Conference)

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This post is the first in a series that take a deep dive into some of our sessions. These sessions are an opportunity to discuss some of the greatest challenges organizations face in using data. Sessions will focus on what Smart Chicago learned (through interviews, surveys, and informal discussions) from organizations that face the same challenges. The first set of sessions are going to take a look at gaps in infrastructure, affordability, and  access. 

mind the gap

One of the most talked about items in terms of feedback on challenges organizations are facing is the we’ve gotten during our surveys has been about gaps.

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Chicago School of Data Interview: Illinois Sentencing Advisory Council

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Next up in our Chicago School of Data interview series is the Illinois Sentencing Advisory Council (ISAC). The ISAC is a government agency created to collect, analyze and present data from all relevant sources to more accurately determine the consequences of sentencing policy decisions and to review the effectiveness and efficiency of current sentencing policies and practices.

Illinois State Capitol

Adam Garcia spoke with Nate Steinfeld who serves as Research Director for the ISAC about what the organization does and how they use data. Andrew Seeder did the transcription and pulled together threads, then Christopher Whitaker put together this post.

If you like what you’re learning here, consider joining us at the Chicago School of Data Days on September 19 and 20, 2014.

Eventbrite - Chicago School of Data Days

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Chicago School of Data Interview with Jane Addams Resource Corporation

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In preparing for the Chicago School of Data Days conference (September 19 and 20), we’ve heard from more than 100 organizations and have detailed discussions with dozens. We need to hear from you to make sure we have as good a take on the field as possible!

Adam Garcia talked with the Jane Addams Resource Corporation. We worked with them to put together these thoughts on what they’re up to.

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Systems Used in Chicago School of Data Communications, Organizing, and Event Planning

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“Open” is one of our principles here at Smart Chicago. Right now, most of the small staff and talented consultants who work here are working on our Chicago School of Data project. As is our wont, based on our software philosophy, (“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”), we are using lots of lightweight tools to get things done. Here’s a look at them:

Eventbrite: We use this leading ticket tool for managing conference attendance. We have an event page and we get individual emails every time someone signs up to come to the conference on September 19 and 20, 2014. We’re going to use the Eventbrite API to pick up all of the information from event signups and write that to our master list.

Mailchimp: We use Mailchimp in all sorts of our work here– we love it. Great API, great analytics, and easy-to-use email templates. We use it in this project to manage our communication to potential and actual attendees. Their segmenting tools are great, so we’re able to send different emails to people who are already signed up for the conference and people who have yet to get started with our initial data census form.

Wufoo: Wufoo is a wonder. It’s probably the most essential outside tool for us, because it helps us gather so much information and it has a great API that allows us to pull that info into other systems we maintain, include Patterns, which is an in-house tool we use to manage our Civic User Testing Group. We’re using it to

WordPress: We use WordPress for all sorts of websites, including our own. We’re making the conference website using WordPress, and we will be using all sorts of plugins and APIs to use data we collected from other tools. Since lots of the info we want to put on this site is being collected via Wufoo forms, we’ll probably be using something like

Dropbox:  We have a Dropbox for Business account where we keep all of our key documents and do lots of sharing with our core stakeholder team. We also use Dropbox integration with Wufoo to allow organizations to upload examples of datasets and reports that they use in their daily work.

Google Docs: We use Google Docs and Sheets mainly for project management and joint composition of things like the agenda and draft emails. All of this content ends up in other systems via simple copy/ paste— no API needed!

Evernote: We used this early on, when doing some initial interviews. We also stored individual complete audio transcripts of interviews, which were later https://dev.evernote.com/doc/

Microsoft Excel: We are working with Oprima-1, a bilingual call center, to do research on and outlook to Chicago organizations that use data to make lives better.They send us daily reports on their work, and we now (after the fact– argghh!) are working to embed that into our own knowledge about these places.

Josh Kalov, who works with Smart Chicago on the Cook County Open Data project and other items, is pulling all of these tools into a cohesive system. More to come!

Meantime, here’s a picture of an awesome Brutalist parking lot in Baltimore, where I was for their Data Day.

Brutalist Parking Lot Entrances!

Brutalist Parking Lot Entrances!

The Launch of the Chicago School of Data Project

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Smart Chicago has started work on the Chicago School of Data Project, which has three main components:

  • Convene a core group of practitioners in Chicago who are using data to improve the lives of regular residents
  • Document and map the landscape of data activity in Chicago— the entities, tasks, companies, enterprises, civil service organizations, and others who make up the field
  • Plan a region-wide event in early autumn where we will share this mapping work with the larger data community. We seek to showcase all of the activity underway through capacity-building workshops and demonstrations

From this project, we hope to develop a collaborative framework and tools for improving connections across the Chicago data ecosystem– the Chicago School of Data.

Matt Gee,  a respected leader in the Chicago data community, has been hired to lead this project.  Here’s a look at the work ahead:

  • Convene small-group discussions with key partners to help us frame the work and make sure that we see the entire discipline
  • Lead larger convenings of 20 – 30 people from a wider group of stakeholders to understand needs, identify opportunities, and plan for events
  • Organize a city-wide data census with volunteer data ambassadors canvassing organizations to understand what’s happening now
  • Define the scope, breadth, time period, venue, and zeitgeist of the event itself, in concert with the stakeholders
  • Review existing documents, including grant agreements to practitioners, blog posts from the field, evaluations of existing market activity,  the Urban Institute assessment, entries from our city-wide data census, and documentation of conversations conducted throughout the project
  • Define the landscape of data work in Chicago and compile a cohesive narrative that gives shape, direction, and clarity to all included
  • Recruit speakers, teachers, and panelists for the event and work with them on their content

This is a lot of work. It will only be of value if it is inclusive and exhaustive. If you think what we’re saying speaks to you— if you have any inkling that you use data to improve lives in Chicago— we want to hear from you. Even if we’re already deep partners, and talk to each other every day, please complete this form.

If you are interested in helping out on the project itself, we need people to conduct interviews and help others complete the form to get their voices heard. If you’re interested in helping on this, please let us know here.