Smart Chicago in the Wall Street Journal

Today Smart Chicago was featured, along with many others, in a story in the Wall Street Journal covering the great work of civic hackers in Chicago:

Hackers Called Into Civic Duty
Chicago, Other Cities Work With Programmers to Leverage Data Troves for Public Purpose

Snip:

“People still think hacking is getting people’s credit-card numbers from J.C. Penney,” said Daniel X. O’Neil, executive director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a nonprofit using technology to improve city life. “Now we work pretty closely with the city and the state.”

Smart Chicago consultant Christopher Whitaker reviewed the Open311 project brought to Chicago through a grant to Code for America:

Christopher Whitaker, who heads Chicago’s Code for America team, also showed off 311 Service Tracker Chicago, a program from his group and the city that helps residents track the status of service requests for things such as removing abandoned vehicles or filling potholes.

“Now, when you file a request in Chicago, you get a tracking number like you would from UPS,” Mr. Whitaker said. People can go to the website, enter the tracking number and see which city department is working on the problem and the status of the request.

Full story:

wsj-article

Some Blurbs on the Last Week of January, 2013

Here’s some new Smart Chicago items from the last week or so:

The launch of the Civic User Testing Group

Last Friday we started the CUT Group, where regular Chicago residents get paid to test civic apps. Here’s a pretty good take on the nascent program from Michael Lipkin at WTTW: Civic Hackers Want You. We’ve had a pretty good response— 54 signups from 29 wards.

Screen Shot 2013-02-05 at 5.40.28 PM

Launch of the Illinois Open Technology Challenge

Last Friday we helped launch the Illinois Open Technology Challenge, There are five $15,000 prizes, for a total of $75,000. There will be winners from each of the four pilot communities (Champaign, Rockford, Belleville, and the south suburbs of Chicago) as well as one prize for the use of statewide data.

Mobile Dev Day at U of I

Last week was Mobile Development Day sponsored by the Research Park at the University of Illinois. Great event with lots of interesting speakers and panels. I got a lot out of one panel that helped you think out platform choice (iOS, Android, Web). I wrote a talk on the importance of mobile in urban flow, below.

Cook County New Media Council

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle announced the Cook County New Media Council. Along with Blagica Bottigliero, I am co-chairing the council, whose goal is “to develop a digital strategy to better engage, serve, and connect with the public”. I expect great things here!

“The New Digital Divide”

via Brendan Monroe for the New York TimesSusan Crawford has an important piece in today’s New York Times: The New Digital Divide. Here’s a snip:

Over the last decade, cheap Web access over phone lines brought millions to the Internet. But in recent years the emergence of services like video-on-demand, online medicine and Internet classrooms have redefined the state of the art: they require reliable, truly high-speed connections, the kind available almost exclusively from the nation’s small number of very powerful cable companies. Such access means expensive contracts, which many Americans simply cannot afford.

While we still talk about “the” Internet, we increasingly have two separate access marketplaces: high-speed wired and second-class wireless. High-speed access is a superhighway for those who can afford it, while racial minorities and poorer and rural Americans must make do with a bike path.

Hundreds of people here in Chicago have worked in a sustained way on matters of the Digital Divide here in our city. Much progress has been made, including expanded programs at libraries and increased capacity at other public computer centers. Lots of applications are being built for both high-speed and lower-speed Internet connections.

She outlines good news on the connectivity front:

True, Americans of all stripes are adopting smartphones at breakneck speeds…

These numbers are likely to grow even starker as the 30 percent of Americans without any kind of Internet access come online. When they do, particularly if the next several years deliver subpar growth in personal income, they will probably go for the only option that is at all within their reach: wireless smartphones. A wired high-speed Internet plan might cost $100 a month; a smartphone plan might cost half that, often with a free or heavily discounted phone thrown in.

But highlights an underlying problem:

The problem is that smartphone access is not a substitute for wired. The vast majority of jobs require online applications, but it is hard to type up a résumé on a hand-held device; it is hard to get a college degree from a remote location using wireless. Few people would start a business using only a wireless connection.

As the market progresses, and technology advances, the original way we conceived of the “divide” morphs into something more sophisticated. Smart Chicago is working toward a day when reliable, high-speed access— and the transformative power of the applications that run on those networks— is everywhere.

Smart Chicago Sponsors the City of Chicago’s 2012 Code for America Project

Smart Chicago is proud to help fund the City of Chicago’s Code for America project, which will allow the City to conform with the Open311 standard and help citizens and government officials collaborate to solve problems and make the city better. Here’s a snip from the project page on Code for America:

Chicago was an early adopter of 311 — a system that connects residents directly with the local government for non-emergency needs — and now it is a popular method for citizen requests for government services in the city. Their system, however, is phone-based and so closed to the wide range of digital mediums people use to communicate. There’s tremendous opportunity to leverage web-based technology to redefine and renovate 311 in Chicago.

Here’s what Mayor Rahm Emanuel had to say when the project was announced:

“The City of Chicago is breaking ground every day, increasing efficiency and delivering services in innovative ways,” said Mayor Emanuel. “As I said during my campaign, ‘Open311’ is long overdue and something we should pursue. Through this important project, Code for America will help modernize the way service requests are received, executed and tracked, and better serve Chicagoans.”

The project begins in February 2012– stay tuned for more updates on the fellows and how you can get involved in funding, coding, and app development.