Incomplete History of Civic Technology Events in Chicago

One of the defining characteristics of  Chi Hack Night is how many people show up there on a regular basis. Chi Hack Night is now consistently reaching attendance numbers of 80 to 120 people and has featured speakers such as Chicago CIO Brenna Berman, WBEZ’s Linda Lutton, the University of Chicago’s Charlie Catlett and more. Currently there have been 173 hack nights and counting. Smart Chicago has been covering and supporting this growth from the get-go.

In a chapter I wrote for Beyond Transparency called, “Building a Smarter Chicago“, I briefly listed some of the key gatherings and efforts in Chicago that helped make us a center for civic tech. With some research help from Christopher Whitaker,  I wanted to expand on that and write down what I knew about the history of such gatherings. Do you know something we’re missing? Hit us up at @smartchicago.

Before we started getting together, there was a group of people who just did stuff. Adrian Holovaty created chicagocrime.org in 2005. He later founded EveryBlock with help from the Knight Foundation. I joined as a co-founder and People Person (ya, I know). The work we did we — uncovering and presenting civic data and conversations in 16 cities— naturally put us at the center of things in the country.

There was lots of other activity. In 2005, I launched CTA Alerts  to help riders communicate about issues with the CTA. In 2009, Harper Reed (who would later be the CTO of Obama for America) created an unofficial CTA API that set transit apps on fire in this town. There was even more action in the worlds of MCIC and other institutions and private consulting firms.

But this post aims to codify the history of civic technology and open governments groups in Chicago. It’s big, and incomplete, so bear with me and help me out.

The 8 Principals of Open Data

While this meeting didn’t happen in Chicago, one of the most important meetings of this movement occurred on December 7th, 2007 in Sebastopol, California. The meeting was organized by Carl Malamud and Tim O’Reilly with the goal of establishing principals of open data and with attendees including Lawrence Lessig, Tom Steinberg, Bradley Horowitz and more.  The meeting had a significant Chicago presence including Adrian Holovaty, Dan O’Neil,  Karl Fogel, and Aaron Swartz.

The meeting laid down the 8 Principals of OpenData, which would later help influence open data policies nationwide.

Independent Government Observers Task Force

One of the first open government events happened in Chicago on August 4th, 2008. The IGOTF Non-Conference brought together CEOs, professors, and nonprofit executives involved in placing case law on the Internet for free access. That meeting was productive in introducing players to each other in a series of cooperative efforts. EveryBlock People Person Dan O’Neil hosted the event and Omidyar NetworkSunlight FoundationGoogle, and Yahoo! were sponsors.

OpenGov Chicago – April 2009

The OpenGov Chicago(-land) meetup group was founded in April of 2009 by Joe Germuska, who was an attendee of IGOTF. He asked me to help organize meetings. The group has one of the largest continuities google groups about open government in the country. Its first meeting on Meetup was a social event at Clark Street Ale House. The meetup group was created for citizens who are interested in seeing their federal, state, and local government function more efficiently and responsively. The group is inspired by people who are actively building tools and experimenting with solutions along these lines, like the Sunlight Foundation and GovTrack. The group stated right on the home page that it believes that open source software practices and internet culture provide good examples of how people can work cooperatively on complex problems to produce meaningful results, but you don’t have to be a techie to be part of this meetup.

OpenGov Chicago has always stated flat-out that you don’t have to be a techie to be part of the Meetup. I think that helped set the tone that the community here is open— we got so many different people from different walks of life.

Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates

One of the other early incarnations of open government groups was the Illinois Data Exchange Affiliates (IDEA). a voluntary coalition of government agencies and nonprofit organizations working to improve and facilitate public access to public data through web-based XML data transfer. Led by Greg Sanders and Justin Massa, the group met regularly and focused on institutions that worked with data.

CityCamp 2010 – Chicago

Jen Pahlka at City Camp Chicago 2010

The very first CityCamp was held in Chicago in 2010 at the University of Illinois’ Chicago Innovation Center. CityCamp originally emerged from Transparency Camp and the Gov20 Camp. (Here’s a google doc featuring the meeting notes from that Transparency Camp that spawned CityCamp.)

At this meeting, Jen Pahlka presented about Code for America – an organization which would grow into a a massive international operation  with countless people in its network and a ton of work.

CityCamp itself would also grow into its own brand with dozens of events happening around the world.

On a personal note, former Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wrote a letter of welcome to all attendees. That letter constituted my greatest opengov victory of the last mayoral administration— I took the train to get the signed letter from the mayor’s office on the way to UIC.

Daley Letter

data.cityofchicago.org, Apps for Metro Chicago and Urban Geek Drinks

With the election of Rahm Emanuel as Mayor of Chicago, and the national acceptance of open government data pretty much a settled matter, the pace began to change quickly. One of the Mayor’s first acts was to sign an Open Data Executive Order that set the city on the path to opening up their data. John Tolva was hired as the city’s first Chief Technology Office and Brett Goldstein was hired as the city’s first Chief Data Officer.  The Department of Innovation and Technology not only published data to the portal, but they hooked up their business systems directly to the portal so that data sets would update automatically.

Brett Goldstein recruited people from the OpenGov Chicago meetup and other technologists to form the “Nerd Herd” – an informal group of people who would meet regularly to talk about technology issues affecting the city.

At the time, there hadn’t been many civic apps created in part because there was no data to fuel them. (You had to either get the data through a Freedom of Information Act or just create the data yourself.) As part of the city’s strategy, the City partnered with the Metro Chicago Information Center to run the Apps for Metro Chicago Contest to help kickstart projects that used newly opened city, county, and state data.

As part of the year long event, MCIC held several hackathons at Google’s Chicago headquarters. The content would inject a lot of energy into the community and resulted in the creation of 52 civic apps. The winner, SpotHero, has gone on to become a major Chicago startup and recently just completed a $20 million dollar funding round.

The other big event that was happening at this time was an informal monthly gathering hosted by Justin Massa called Urban Geek Drinks. The venue provided an enormous networking opportunity where people with an interest in civic issues and technology could meet and talk.

Code for America Fellowship, Connect Chicago, and OpenGov Hack Night

In 2012, Chicago became a Code for America Fellowship City with the task of creating an Open311 interface for the City of Chicago with Smart Chicago Collaborative providing funding. At the same time, Smart Chicago was helping to administer the city’s Broadband Technology Opportunity Grant and starting to host the Connect Chicago Meetup for people interested in closing the digital divide in Chicago.

Post Apps for Metro Chicago, there continued to be an interest in civic hackathons including two “Idea Hack Chicago” events hosted by Veronica Ludwig, Christopher Whitaker and Josh Kalov in partnership with Code for America as part of their fellowship year.

One of the teams that formed during the very first Google Hackathon for Apps for Metro Chicago contest was Open City – first founded by Paul Baker,  Chad Pry, Nick Rougeux, Ryan Briones and Derek Eder. Their entry, Chicagolobbyists.org, was one of the first civic apps to make use of open data and had a great reception when released. The volunteer group had continued to build apps even after the contest, but found it difficult do complete work outside of their 9-5 jobs without experiencing hackathon fatigue. Derek Eder and Juan Pablo-Valez had an idea to create a weekly hack night event as a space to work on their projects.

On March 22nd, Derek Eder and Juan Pablo-Valez hosted the first OpenGov Hack Night at offices of Webitects. A few months later, Code for America would launch the Brigade Program that would strive to harness volunteer energy around civic technology. Christopher Whitaker applied and was accepted as the Chicago Brigade Captain with a plan to support existing work and try and network resources within the community.

At the same time, Whitaker joined Smart Chicago as a consultant and was paid to attend hack night and document the movement. At that point, Derek Eder had left Webitects to start his own civic tech development shop Datamade with Smart Chicago being their first client working on projects like the Chicago Health Atlas and Chicago Early Learning.

Over the next few weeks, OpenGov Hack Night would continue to grow and quickly outgrew the offices at Webitects. Through Smart Chicago’s founding membership at 1871, OpenGov Hack Night moved to the IMSA classroom where it would say for the next few years. (Smart Chicago would provide a number of keys to civic technologists over the next few years.)

Several apps that used data to tell stories about the city was featured in the Chicago Architecture Foundation exhibit “City of Big Data” which uses interactive displays to display different aspects of city data.

Over the next few years, OpenGov Hack Night would grow and serve as a model for groups around the country. The space would outgrow even 1871 and move to the offices of Braintree where they are now. As part of the move, they changed their name to Chi Hack Night to reflect caring about more than just open government. Chi Hack Night is now run by Derek Eder and Christopher Whitaker along with a volunteer leadership council with members running their own breakout groups within Chi Hack Night.

Fewer, but more focused hackathons

As regular gatherings of civic technologists became the new normal, it had the effect of reducing the number of hackathons. Instead of having one every weekend, there were fewer but more focused hackathons. Smart Chicago helped to run several of these particularly around National Day of Civic Hacking. Chicago’s early success at National Day of Civic Hacking would result in a partnership with organizing organizations like SecondMuse and Code for America to provide training material for newer communities.

Other such events included the Geeks Without Bounds “Everyone Hacks” event at Groupon. The hackathon, co-hosted by Chicago Women in Developers, was specifically targeted towards getting more women into the tech space. After the event, Chi Hack Night saw an increase in the diversity of it’s attendees.

Another event that’s grown over the years is the Center for Neighborhood Technologies Urban Sustainability Apps competition that  connects coders, designers, and developers with community leaders and representatives to solve neighborhood problems.

A flowering of more

As the community has grown there have been other groups that have formed to help bring together people around the intersection of technology and civic lift.Smart Chicago has hosted Data Potluck at our offices at the Chicago Community Trust and early on at 1871 due to their membership there. Other great groups are the City Data Users GroupMaptime Chicago, the Chicago Data Visualization Group, and more.

Again, what are we missing? Hit us up.

The 606 Advisory Council converts to Park Advisory Council

606_mapLast November we hosted an OpenGovChicago event on park district advisory councils. As OpenGovChicago founder Joe Germuska put it, this was part of our ongoing effort to “learn more about existing microdemocratic systems in Chicago”. More:

In dozens of locations, several times a year, citizens get together to make their local parks and schools better, or to better understand the public safety situation in their beat. We’d like to meet the people who are active in these processes, and also people who would like to participate but are not managing to get involved. Maybe there are ways that software can help these groups gather and distribute information, to learn from their peer councils around the city, and to involve citizens who aren’t able to physically attend the meetings.”

Since that meeting, we’ve continued to help gather and maintain info on Advisory Councils. Here’s a mega-spreadsheet. Many people have contributed to this— please add any info you know!

The 606 Trail is the City of Chicago’s newest park. The park district opened last week after almost a decade of work between the community and the city.

Originally, the 606 was originally a 2.7 mile elevated train line called the Bloomingdale Line that was abandoned in 2001. Train traffic on the line had been slowing since the 1990s and the City of Chicago had brought residents of the Logan Square neighborhood together to propose an idea to turn the train line into a greenspace.

That result of that discussion was the formation of the Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail – an all-volunteer organization formed to advocate on behalf of the local community around the Bloomingdale Trail Project. Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail then partnered with The Trust for Public Land, a national nonprofit, to help bring together a coalition of groups to make the 606 a reality.

Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail is now an official Park Advisory Council.

For more information on how you can get involved in Park Advisory Councils, check out the Park District website here.

This week in Chicago Civic Tech Events: Cook County, Court Data and more

opengovchicagoThis week we’ve got three civic tech events happening in Chicago.

Cook County at Chi Hack Night

Tuesday at 6:00pm at Braintree (8th floor of Merchandise Mart)

Cook County employees will be presenting at Chi Hack Night about their progress in opening up county data.

Representatives across several of Cook County’s 65 agencies will give a quick overview of their data, where it lives and who’s in charge of it.

We’ll be hearing from:

Afterwards, they will take your questions and hear your open data wish lists.

The Smart Chicago Collaborative has a partnership with the Cook County Bureau of Technology to assist them in the creation and publication of open data in the context of the County’s Open Government Plan Ordinance and Open Government Plan. Our consultant Josh Kalov has been working with Cook County to open up Cook County data for the past year and a half.

You can RSVP for the event by clicking here.

OpenGov Chicago: Local Court Data

Wednesday at 6:00 PM at the Chicago Community Trust (225 N Michigan, 22nd floor)

At the next meetup, OpenGov Chicago will cover the Chicago Justice Project’s (CJP) ongoing engagement with the Office of the Chief Judge of the Circuit Court of Cook County, Timothy Evans.

CJP’s engagement is seeking to open access to all the data created by the Court since they started collecting the data in the 1980s (the courts have told CJP they started collecting data either in 1980 or 1988). This means that when approved CJP would receive about 30 years of Court data. CJP requested all the data maintained by the Clerk’s Office on each criminal case filed, appropriately de-identified. CJP is seeking an agreement that would require regular updates of court data be released on an ongoing basis moving forward removing all the current barriers to this data.

The evening will also cover the results of Smart Chicago’s recent PACER postcard campaign, where we helped send dozens of postcards to Chief Judge Ruben Castillo of the United States District Court of the Northern District of Illinois, asking him to look into issues with PACER , the system run by the federal judiciary that provides access to court dockets.

You can RSVP for OpenGov Chicago here!

Technology, Government, and the Public Good Panel Discussion

Wednesday at 6:00pm at General Assembly: After World Books (23 E Illinois Street)

Curious what civic tech is all about? General Assembly will be hosting an expert panel on the growth of collaboration between government and technology in Chicago and how these two industries are working together to serve and support the public good. Learn more about the various innovative initiatives happening in the Chicago area, and how you can get involved to support the community, no matter your experience. Whether you’re a techie or not, the panel will discuss how everyone can contribute to civic engagement.

The panel is made up of Chicago Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk Jr, Datamade/Chi Hack Night Founder Derek Eder, Evanston Digital Services Coordinator Luke Stowe, mRelief Founder Rose Afriyie,  and our own consultant Christopher Whitaker.

You can register for the event here.

A discussion about Local School Councils at OpenGov Chicago

opengovchicagoAt OpenGovChicago this year, we’ve been focusing on learning about and helping grassroots groups that interact with official government functions. This time the focus was on Chicago Public Schools and Local School Councils. Local School Councils were first created in 1988 from the Chicago School Reform Act. Local School council members are elected and receive training from Chicago Public Schools. Local School Councils are elected boards that serve at each school. Contract and charter schools do not have Local School Councils. Local School Councils (LSC) are responsible for three main duties:

  • Approving how school funds and resources are allocated
  • Developing and monitoring the annual School Improvement Plan
  • Evaluating and selecting the school’s principal

Local School Councils include the following members:

  • 6 parents
  • 2 community members
  • 2 teachers
  • 1 non-teacher staff
  • school’s principal
  • And in high schools, a student representative

To start off the meeting, we heard from Jill Wohl who is a former Local School Council member. Here’s her introduction:

The meeting then went on to a roundtable discussion regarding a variety of different topics. We started with the Open Meetings Act and how it impacts LSCs. The Open Meetings Act is a law requiring governing bodies to give notice of when meetings are going to occur. It was designed to prevent governing bodies from meeting in secret, but it can impact how LSCs use technology.

Here’s the discussion below:

The next point of discussion was the state of technology at the LSCs, which is poor, by default. It’s difficulty to allow the public access to basic information like who serves on the LSC and how to reach them. Calling the school is often an issue— people answering the phone are not necessarily (and usually are not) associated with the LSC.

Here’s the video of the discussion:    

 

The next point of discussion was on the lack of sharing of best practices, which could be done with adequate technology. There’s nothing to orient LSC members to their roles and no templates or methodologies for carrying out their their responsibilities – they make it up as they go along.

 

This created a good pivot point for Josh Kalov – who spoke about the work that’s been done so far to try and connect Local School Councils together.  Here’s Josh:

 

You can see the Google Drive folder here. Work on connecting Local School Councils will continue in the Education breakout group at Open Gov Hack Night. In addition to the discussion in the room, there was a lot of discussion online. Here is a sampling of tweets:

You can find out more information about local school councils on the Chicago Public Schools website.

Complete Info on Chicago Park District Advisory Councils

The next meeting of Open Gov Chicago(-land), set for Thursday, November 20, 2014, is going to do a deep-dive on Chicago Park District Advisory Councils. Here’s a description:

Our next meetup will be the first in a new series that focuses on learning about and helping grassroots groups that interact with official government functions.

First up is the Park District Advisory Council. There are 194 advisory councils covering the entire city, and they are populated by regular Chicago residents who care about their neighborhoods. We will hear from people who run these councils, find out what kind of data and technology they use, and figure out we can help.

As part of this new series, we’ve done some research on councils. We’ve taken a look at it from a technology view, hoping to kick off some thoughts in the civic tech community on how we might be helpful.

Humboldt Park Formal Garden

Humboldt Park Formal Garden

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Join us at the next OpenGov Chicago Meetup: Chicago Park District Advisory Council

The OpenGovChicago(-land) meetup is back with a return to its roots.

The next meetup will be the first in a new series that focuses on learning about and helping grassroots groups that interact with official government functions.

First up is the Park District Advisory Council. There are 194 advisory councils covering the entire city, and they are populated by regular Chicago residents who care about their neighborhoods. We will hear from people who run these councils, find out what kind of data and technology they use, and figure out we can help.

Niki In The Garden

If you serve on a Council, or know someone who does, let us know in the RSVP— the more, the merrier. More details on speakers and agenda to follow. As always, we’ll be streaming the event on our YouTube Channel.

Livestream: OpenGovChicago > Open Science!

Join us at 6PM Central time for a livestream of the OpenGovChicago meetup on Open Science. The stream will be available right here in this blog post. Also, please help with the meeting minutes— it’s a group effort!

This is a special fun-time summer meetup where we mashup two high-energy Chicago groups: our own OpenGovChicago and the Hive Learning Network. The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a member of the Hive, which is a network of civic and cultural institutions dedicated to transforming the learning landscape by creating opportunities for youth to explore interests through connected learning experiences. We’re a part of two projects this summer, and we seek to cross-pollinate all of the great people we work with. Let’s do this!

More on the meetup:

The Open Science Cooperative is an extension of the Hive Mapping Cooperative, a 2014 Hive Learning Network project.

We will have representatives from The Peggy Notebaert Nature MuseumSweet Water FoundationFreedom Games, and theForest Preserve District of Cook County to talk about their efforts to provide teens the ability to collect, manage, analyze, visualize, and share geo-referenced data through open-source mapping and data-sharing software.

The aim of this meetup is to share work to date and to connect with the larger open data/ open technology community. This is an ambitious project focused on open source tools for mapping and data collection. The OpenGov movement has much to share on these fronts, and we hope for great cross-pollination on this night!

Join us at the next OpenGov Chicago Meetup – For Science!

The next OpenGov Chicago next meetup will focus on Open Science. The Open Science Cooperative is an extension of the Hive Mapping Cooperative, a 2014 Hive Learning Network project.

We will have representatives from The Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, Sweet Water Foundation, Freedom Games, and the Forest Preserve District of Cook County to talk about their efforts to provide teens the ability to collect, manage, analyze, visualize, and share geo-referenced data through open-source mapping and data-sharing software.

OpenGovChicago Logo with the phrase "OpenGovChicago" and the Chicago Star

The aim of this meetup is to share work to date and to connect with the larger open data/ open technology community. This is an ambitious project focused on open source tools for mapping and data collection. The OpenGov movement has much to share on these fronts, and we hope for great cross-pollination on this night!

More about our speakers below. As always we’ll have food and we’ll be live streaming (and live tweeting) the event!

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OpenGovChicago Meetup: Open Data, Chicago, and the Return EveryBlock

Tonight, we will be hosting the OpenGovChicago meetup, Open Data, Chicago, and EveryBlock  at the Chicago Community Trust. If you have questions for the speakers, enter them here in this document and come back to this post at 6PM CST for a Google Live Hangout. Questions? Daniel X. O’Neil, doneil@cct.org.

Here’s info on speakers:

Paul Wright: Director, Local Media Development, Comcast. Paul is the day-to-day leader of EveryBlock and has led the relaunch efforts. He’ll talk about the relaunch and how it got done.

Sheila Willard: SVP Local Media Development, Comcast. Sheila leads the unit under which EveryBlock is being managed. Sheila will talk about the importance of EveryBlock to Comcast.

Matt Summy: Regional Vice President, External & Government Affairs, Comcast Greater Chicago Region. Matt has worked closely with the EveryBlock team to relaunch in its hometown. He’ll talk about his role in bringing EveryBlock back to Chicago.

opengovchicago-logo-meetupThis meetup is filling to capacity very quickly, and we expect the Hangout to be very popular. The livestream will occur right in this blog post on the night of the event.

If you are signed up for the event, please be sure to keep your RSVP status updated– if something changes, please change your status so someone from the waitlist can be automatically added.

If you are interested in this event, it’s very important that you sign up on Meetup and join the OpenGovChicago group, This will ensure that you get communications about this and other topical events.

Meantime,  use this document for your questions for our speakers.

With these tools, and robust communication among us before and after the event, we hope to make remote participation as meaningful as in-person.

Let’s do this.