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The Next Data Potluck is at the Chicago Community Trust

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At the first DataPotluck of the year, consultant and writer Q Ethan McCallum will explain how to put Hadoop to work for you, and how to use Elastic MapReduce (EMR), the hosted Hadoop solution provided by Amazon Web Services. McCallum will teach how EMR can help you get Hadoop in a hurry and on the cheap, without the costly cluster commitment.

Data Potluck Panoramic

Panoramic shot of the March Data Potluck meetup

You can RSVP for the event on the Data Potluck Meetup page. 

Data Potluck is a meetup group run by Young-Jin Kim, Matt Gee, and Nicholas Mader that helps to connect the nonprofit and data science worlds. You can find more information about the group by checking out their page on Meetup.

This is the first time that Data Potluck will be held at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust, 225 North Michigan, where Smart Chicago is housed. I’m especially excited to  see what kind of food shows up. Let’s do this.

Join us for the PDF Liberation & OSM Hackathon on January 18 and 19

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The Smart Chicago Collaborative will host the Chicago location for the PDF Liberation Hackathon 2014 at the offices of the Chicago Community Trust from Saturday, January 18, 2014 from 9AM – 5PM CST and Sunday, January 19, 2014 from 9AM – 1PM CST.

We’re also hosting the Chicago Winter OpenStreetMap #editathon for all day Saturday. Below the fold, we’ve got the details on both of these nationwide events.

Downtown Chicago crashes, Photo By Steve Vance

Downtown Chicago crashes on OpenStreetMap, Photo By Steve Vance

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Stoked About the New “Squared Away” App from the Metropolitan Tenants Ogranization

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This Wednesday the Metropolitan Tenants Organization (MTO) is launching a new web-based app that helps build better relationships between tenants and  landlords. I served as sort of an informal advisor to this project, and I’m excited about it for a number of reasons:

  • It is a native web application using responsive design. This makes it easy to update & maintain and allows for easy access for people in the flow of the moment of need. No downloading, no updating, just starting the process from a web browser
  • This is not just a public-facing website– it’s the new database used by MTO staff when you call the free Tenants’ Rights Hotline at (773) 292-4988. The same interface is used by all parties– tenants, landlords, staff, everyone. That is an efficient use of software and ensures that everyone is on the same page, so to speak
  • It’s lightweight, friendly, and focused on resolution. Squared Away asks for the minimum amount of information necessary to kick off an email to the landlord and get you an account with MTO

Coupled with all of the great information on the Metropolitan Tenants Organization website at http://www.tenants-rights.org/, the app is a great resource for people trying to get squared away with their abode in Chicago. Squared Away Chicago

Here’s the complete text of the invite:

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OpenGovChicago Meeting: Process and Products Around the Chicago Municipal Code

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Julia Ellis of the Office of the Chicago City Clerk Addressing OpenGovChicago Meetup at the Chicago Cultural Center

Last week, Smart Chicago hosted the OpenGov Chicago-land meetup at the Chicago Cultural Center with a great lineup of authoritative speakers:

Susana Mendoza, City Clerk of the City of Chicago, Julia Ellis, Legislative Counsel at Chicago City Clerk, Carl Malamud, President and Founder of Public.Resource.Org, Waldo Jaquith, an Open Government Technologist who is leading an effort to test the Open Data Institute model for open data standards in the United States, and Seamus Kraft, Executive Director of the OpenGov Foundation talk about the code by which we rule our city.

We’ve compiled all the videos of the presentation below the fold:
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Remarks to the Cook County Finance Committee in Support of the Cook County Bureau of Technology FY2014 Budget

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This morning, along with a couple dozen other people, I spoke during the public comment section of the Cook County Board Finance Committee. The comments are limited to three minutes per person, and I covered my support for the technology portion of the Cook County Finance & Administration budget. I spoke in my capacity as co-chair of President Preckwinkle’s New Media Council, but the cool thing is that anybody can sign up to speak at these sessions. Here’s the full text:

Good morning Mr. Chairman and Commissioners. My name is Daniel X. O’Neil, and I am the Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a civic organization devoted to improved lives in Chicago through technology. Our founding partners are the City of Chicago, the MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust.

We also work very closely with the State of Illinois and the great County of Cook in order to do our work. I’ve interacted with a number of the members of this body in the course of my service at Smart Chicago and in my efforts in the open data movement. I very much appreciate the time I’ve spent with some of you, and I’d like to work with each of you on these matters.

I also serve, along with my friend and colleague Blagica Bottigliero, as co-chair of President Preckwinkle’s New Media Council, where we are charged helping the County develop a digital strategy to better engage, serve, and connect with the public.

In that capacity, I’ve come to greatly value the leadership of Cook County Chief Information Officer Lydia Murray. She is a clear thinker with a practical approach to solving the long-festering technology issues facing County government.

I appreciate the focus on reducing waste to save taxpayers’ money, the spirit of collaboration with the City of Chicago, the sound investments in improving Internet connectivity, and the attention paid in this budget to the baseline applications that make core County functions run.

I’m excited about the public website redesign project. The planned features of responsive design and a focus on the mobile experience can allow the County to make a giant leap in communication with the public.

The investments in core systems like the Criminal Justice Data Sharing System, revenue collection, and case management will lead to better service for the public.

I am especially looking forward to the planned improvements in the transparency, efficiency and accessibility of the County’s property tax system. That is sorely needed and long delayed.

I strongly urge you to support the Fiscal Year 2014 Budget of the Cook County Bureau of Technology. Thank you for your time.

Seal of Cook County, IL

Two Great Illinois-Focused Health Data Events

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U.S. CTO Todd Park at Healthbox Investor Day here in Chicago

U.S. CTO Todd Park at Healthbox Investor Day here in Chicago

There are two great statewide health data events coming up on November 8 and 9 in Chicago.

Putting Health Data to Work in Our States and Communities

First up, on Friday, November 8, is A Health Data Consortium Event: Putting Health Data to Work in Our States and Communities.

The event is organized in partnership with the Health Data Consortium, the State of Illinois, the California HealthCare Foundation, and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It’s a gathering of thought leaders from the private, nonprofit, and government sectors confronting the most pressing health data issues in the U.S. health care system at the state and local level.

The day-long event will be the first of a series of Health Data Consortium forums focusing on state and local health data successes, challenges, and opportunities.  Invited speakers for the event include:

More speakers and panelists to be announced. Register here for the event on November 8.

Illinois Health Datapalooza

The next day,  Smart Chicago will be helping host the  Illinois Health Datapalooza on November 9th at 1871. The datapalooza brings policy makers, health care practitioners, web developers, designers, and data scientists to find ways to make health data a deeper part of the technology scene Illinois.

The event is organized by the Health Data Consortium, the US Department of Health and Human Services, the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), the Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity (DCEO) and the Smart Chicago Collaborative.

Christopher Whitaker, consultant and writer for Smart Chicago, has done lots to prepare for this event and will help guide the activities.

The morning sessions will be skill-sharing roundtables with representatives from Socrata, ESRI, and Healthdata.gov on hand to talk about available tools and resources for working with open health data. Midday activities will include brainstorming sessions on current challenges that healthcare policy makers and practitioners have in the field and an exploration into how civic innovation could help address them. The afternoon will feature unconference sessions (where attendees will can propose sessions on anything, from the new healthcare.gov to using Twitter to idenfity flu trends.)

Register for the event November 9th event here.

A Good Idea, on the Side of a Bus: Get A Flu Shot

Lots of work to be done

We’ve talked a lot about the value of civic partnerships have in creating healthier cities and how Chicago has been producing an impressive number of health related civic apps. However,  given the scope of the health care issue at both the local and national levels there is much more work to be done.

For the past few years, the Health Data Consortium  (A coalition of governments, academics, and health care providers formed to liberate health data) have hosted Datapaloozas to find innovative ways to use health data. To date, these events have always been held in Washington DC. This event will be the first of a series of regional gatherings that will bring the focus of health data to the state and local level.

There is an immense opportunity to harness health data into civic startups, to find ways to improve service delivery, and to use predictive analytics to help prevent disease. What’s needed is collaboration between civic technologists and health care practitioners.

We’ll hope you join us.

Building a Smarter Chicago Chapter in Beyond Transparency, a New Book from Code for America

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Today marks the publication of “Beyond Transparency: Open Data and the Future of Civic Innovation“, an anthology edited by Brett Goldstein with Lauren Dyson and published by Code for America. Here’s a blurb:

Beyond Transparency is a cross-disciplinary survey of the open data landscape, in which practitioners share their own stories of what they’ve accomplished with open civic data. It seeks to move beyond the rhetoric of transparency for transparency’s sake and towards action and problem solving. Through these stories, we examine what is needed to build an ecosystem in which open data can become the raw materials to drive more effective decision-making and efficient service delivery, spur economic activity, and empower citizens to take an active role in improving their own communities.

I wrote a chapter for this anthology titled, “Building a Smarter Chicago“, which I call “an illustrative, incomplete, and idiosyncratic look at the ecosystem in Chicago. It is meant to provide a thumbnail take on how the ecosystem developed here, while sparking fires elsewhere”.

I’m really honored to have taken part in this important publication. We’ll be serializing the chapter over the next few days. Meantime, to download or order a printed copy, visit beyondtransparency.org.