OpenGrid

The Launch of OpenGrid for Smart Cities

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open-grid-for-smart-cities-logoToday our partner, Uturn Data Solutions, launched Open Grid for Smart Cities, with support from Smart Chicago.

Here’s a snip from Uturn’s press release:

Today, Uturn Data Solutions, a Chicago-based Amazon Web Services (AWS) Consulting Partner in the AWS Partner Network (APN), in partnership with Smart Chicago Collaborative, launched a new civic tech product in AWS Marketplace: OpenGrid for Smart Cities. Based on an open source project by the City of Chicago, Uturn has optimized and packaged OpenGrid as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) making it easy for any city to adopt the platform for its own use and quickly deploy it on the AWS Cloud.

OpenGrid AMI on the AWS Marketplace is an interactive, map-based platform to explore publicly-available open data sets in an easy-to-use-interface. OpenGrid enables municipalities to offer residents, businesses and communities a better way to interact with public data. Users can perform advanced queries to filter data and search within custom boundaries or based on the user’s location.

For a monthly subscription fee of $750.00, and by following these setup instructions, you can have a fully-functional map-best website in your city.

Here’s Uturn’s description of this product offering and more information on Open Grid for Smart Cities:

OpenGrid enables municipalities to offer residents, businesses, and communities a better way to explore and interact with publicly-available data about their city or region. It was originally developed for internal use by the City of Chicago as a way to gain situational awareness by viewing information from different city agencies on a single map.

In January 2016, Uturn and Smart Chicago created opengrid.io, the first publicly-accessible version of OpenGrid with data from Chicago’s Open Data Portal. “We wanted to create a new model for open data and civic technology that can be replicated in other cities and organizations,” said Dan O’Neil, Executive Director at Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to improving residents’ lives in Chicago through technology. “Now, instead of forking code and paying developers for custom implementations, people can just complete a form and put existing software to work immediately.” Funding for the development of opengrid.io was provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and through Smart Chicago’s Developer Resources Program, with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

“The code for OpenGrid is available online but adopting open-source solutions still requires in-house expertise and infrastructure to host the application,” said Tom Schenk, Chief Data Officer for the City of Chicago. “The OpenGrid AMI enables any city to start using the platform with a click from AWS Marketplace so they can quickly deploy on a low-cost infrastructure. We hope to move the needle from producing open source software to thinking about how it can be easier to adopt and reuse.”

Increasingly, governments, public institutions, and commercial organizations are looking for ways to be more agile as well as save money. “The AWS Marketplace 1-Click® deployment model gives both commercial and public sector customers the ability to use software running on the cloud, without having to make large capital acquisitions”, said Adam Dillman, Founder and Managing Partner at Uturn Data Solutions. “Uturn Data Solutions will provide technical support including the latest updates and releases to OpenGrid customers as part of their paid subscription. Uturn also offers consulting services to help organizations get the most out of OpenGrid and further expand their data capabilities.”

Opengrid-AMI-page

Wired Magazine on OpenGrid and Open 311

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HWired Magazine Logoere’s a great post about OpenGrid in Wired Magazine today: Conquer Chicago’s Mountain of Data With This Powerful Tool. Here’s a snip about the vast amount of data in the City’s 311 system:

Berman explains that most of the data on OpenGrid is administrative data collected from city systems—like 311 City Services—that are already in place. In essence, these systems are pulling double duty as a civic service and a data funnel. Every time someone calls 311 to complain about noise level, that information is passed on to OpenGrid.

Smart Chicago funded and helped run the creation of the Open 311 system back in 2012.

OpenGrid on the Chicago Public Data Blog

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WBEZ LogoChris Hagan of WBEZ wrote a good post today on OpenGrid: Chicago launches OpenGrid, latest step in making open data more accessible. Here’s a snip:

Dan O’Neil, executive director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, which assisted on the project, reminded developers that tools such as OpenGrid are a first step. He pointed out that despite Chicago’s advances in open data, problems such as police misconduct have arguably gotten worse.

“There are no dots on a map that stopped that from happening,” O’Neil said. “There is no set of crime statistics that stopped that from happening. We have to find ways to have communion with people who are not here.”

Maps and tech and data are simply pieces. Communion among humans is what matters.

OpenGrid on the Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions Blog

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data-smart-city-solutionsSean Thornton of Harvard Data-Smart City Solutions wrote up a great piece on the launch of OpenGrid. Here’s a snip:

Yet in order for DoIT’s OpenGrid and UrbanCCD’s Plenario to interact, additional software—also called a service layer—was necessary.  Enter the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a local civic organization that focuses on improving residents’ lives through technology.

Smart Chicago’s work focuses on three main areas for residents – increasing access to the internet, enhancing digital skills, and expanding the use of meaningful city data.  For Smart Chicago Executive Director Dan O’Neil, supporting a program like OpenGrid is a natural fit.

“A collaborative union between developers, residents, and government – that’s what Smart Chicago is about, and that’s what OpenGrid is about too,” O’Neil noted at the application’s launch. “This is why we’re on it.”  To build the service layer, Smart Chicago commissioned UTurn Data Solutions, a local IT consultancy focused data storage and Cloud computing projects.

Smart Chicago is also helping ensure that OpenGrid is effective in its mission to enhance transparency efforts between the city and the public. One of Smart Chicago’s marquee programs is its Civic User Testing Group, or CUTGroup.  CUTGroup participants, which include residents from all corners of the city, are compensated to participate in focus groups that test civic websites and apps.  The program has given developers numerous insights and has led to the improvement of many local apps, including theEveryBlock iPhone App, FoodBorne Chicago, and the Chicago Health Atlas. CUTGroup will be testing OpenGrid to help DoIT refine the tool and learn how residents can most benefit from its work.

 

 

Chicago’s Mayor on the OpenGrid Launch

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Seal_of_Chicago,_IllinoisThe Mayor’s Office of the City of Chicago published a press release about the launch of OpenGrid: Chicago Launches “Open Grid” to Help Residents Explore Their Neighborhoods. Here’s a snip:

Over the past four years, Chicago has led in the publishing of data, leveraging the City of Chicago’s Data Portal to make city data available to all residents. With OpenGrid, the City is making that data even more user-friendly. It allows residents to learn more about their communities, and encourages communities to add their own data and civic developers to enhance the capabilities of the app, all to engage and serve the city’s diverse neighborhoods. For example, a community group can use OpenGrid to determine when and where best to organize an event based on OpenGrid’s ability to show active building permits, street closures, and more.

OpenGrid is hosted by the Smart Chicago Collaborative, an organization housed at the Chicago Community Trust dedicated to making technology available to all Chicago communities. The website and app are available today at opengrid.io

Smart Chicago hosts this application and we also created the code that drives all the data into the system. More here.

City of Chicago Launches OpenGrid

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OpenGrid_Logo_Horizontal_3ColorToday the Smart Chicago Collaborative helped the City of Chicago launch OpenGrid— a free, browser-based, open source mapping platform displaying Chicago’s robust collection of open datasets.

OpenGrid.io was launched this morning at an event at the University of Illinois Chicago Electronic Visualization Labratory. Chief Information Officer Brenna Berman, Chief Data Officer Tom Schenk, and the Smart Chicago Collaborative kicked off the official launch and demo.

OpenGrid is Public

This important work goes back to WindyGrid, the City’s internal tool displaying all past and present city data. Now, through OpenGrid, the ability to see and layer information about Chicago is in the hands of individual residents. Anyone with Internet access can see Chicago’s data come alive in relation to their homes, communities, and workplaces.

Here is the OpenGrid introductory tutorial:

OpenGrid is Open Source

The City first articulated its plans to build a public-facing WindyGrid and open up the application source code in the 18-month Tech Plan Update. The Plan stated OpenGrid would be “the first open source situational awareness system that other municipalities can use and build upon.”

Smart Chicago’s Role in OpenGrid

Through support from the MacArthur Foundation, Smart Chicago supported the OpenGrid project by creating a service layer to plenar.io, a spatio-temporal open data platform. This layer serves as a data feed to OpenGrid— if the data is in plenar.io, it can get into OpenGrid.

We worked with technology partner Uturn Data Solutions to create the code that drives the data. This easy-to-deploy stack can be used by any municipality or organization to display open datasets on a map. This entire project is dependent on our Amazon Web Services account, which is maintained by Uturn. We also serve many Chicago-based technologists via our Developer Resources program,

We’re proud of our continued work with the City to deliver on the Tech Plan, with local developers to encourage their role in the civic tech ecosystem, and with the University of Chicago to support the plenar.io platform for data ingest.

Here’s a set of photos from launch day: