Month: May 2016

Transitions at Smart Chicago

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As of today, Friday, May 27, 2016, I am leaving my position as Executive Director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative.

Kyla Williams has been appointed Interim Executive Director. She has been with the organization since December 2011. She is a wellspring of knowledge and has been a key person in nearly every program we run. You can contact Kyla at kwilliams@cct.org.

The founding partners of Smart Chicago— the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the City of Chicago, and The Chicago Community Trust— are devoted to the organization and are working to launch the search for a new Executive Director. Stay tuned to http://www.smartchicagocollaborative.org/ for more on that.

While Kyla is responsible for all finances, programs, and personnel, here’s a handy contact list for many existing Smart Chicago projects:

Sonja Marziano, smarziano@cct.org

Denise Linn dlinn@cct.org

Leslie Durr ldurr@cct.org

And Kyla retains or inherits responsibility for the following projects:

Please contact Kyla Williams at kwilliams@cct.org with any questions, comments and concerns.

On a personal note, I look forward to keeping up with you— find me over here on Twitter and see my writing here. Otherwise, I greatly look forward to seeing the great work of Smart Chicago continue!

Love, Daniel X. O’Neil & the Smart Chicago Collaborative

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Smart Chicago Welcomes Ash Center Summer Fellow Glynis Startz

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linkedin_croppedToday Glynis Startz joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as a summer graduate fellow from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University. Glynis will inform Smart Chicago’s work to make Chicago a smart city that truly works for everyone. She will primarily assist with, provide strategy for, and write about the Array of Things Civic Engagement work.

Glynis is a Master of Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government where she has been transitioning from international development work to focus on helping local governments make the best use of data and technology. Before arriving at the Kennedy School she was a Research Analyst for Innovations for Poverty Action, working on randomized control trial program evaluations for poverty reduction interventions.

Please join us in welcoming Glynis Startz. Follow her @glssea on Twitter!

 

Leslie Durr Joins Smart Chicago as Project Coordinator

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Leslie DurrLeslie Durr  joins the Smart Chicago Collaborative as a Project Coordinator.She will serve as the point person for projects including Chicago Health Atlas, Smart Health Centers, Foodborne, Hive Learning Networks and Youth-Led Tech. She will also be working to add several new projects to our portfolio.

Her experience includes program development and grant management in the non-profit sector, most recently with the Southland Health Care Forum as the Project Director for the State of Illinois Get Covered Campaign.

Leslie has her Master of Science in Human Service Administration from Spertus College and Bachelor of Science in Mass Communications from Jackson State University.

You can follow her work on Twitter.

Please join us in welcoming Leslie Durr.

Smart Chicago Partners with ORS Impact for Organization Evaluation

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Smart Chicago has always relied on small teams to get big things done. Now we're doing an organization-wide evaluation of our work. This photo is from November 2014.

Smart Chicago has always relied on small teams. Now we’re doing an organization-wide evaluation of our work. This photo is from November 2014.

For the last few months, Smart Chicago has been engaged with our partner ORS Impact to “conduct an evaluation of the Smart Chicago Collaborative’s programs and facilitate a robust strategy development process”.

Purpose of Evaluation

Smart Chicago has reached a time in its evolution when it is ready to take a step back and think critically about its path forward. A clear evaluation of what has been accomplished from inception to the present, coupled with a robust strategy development process, will help Smart Chicago make decisions about goals, growth, funding, structure, governance, partnerships, and programmatic strategies aligned with the specific outcomes and impact that Smart Chicago wants to achieve.

This document is focused on the first part of this project, which is the evaluation design phase. The evaluation findings will inform a subsequent strategy development process. ORS Impact has been contracted to help with both the evaluation and the strategy development process.

Key Evaluation Questions

The evaluation is designed to answer the following key questions:

  • What roles has Smart Chicago played within the community over the past four years?
  • What contributions has Smart Chicago made in the space in which it has operated?
  • Toward specific goals
  • On other actors in the community
  • On the ecosystem
  • What work has been most effective and why?
  • What has not been working well and why?
  • How has the Chicago-area landscape in which Smart Chicago operates changed over the past four years, and what are the implications for Smart Chicago?

Together, the answers to these questions will inform the strategy going forward.

In this context, consultants from ORS Impact will be kicking off interviews with dozens of Smart Chicago stakeholders.

We’ve settled on a number of representative projects to frame these discussions:

If you are contacted by our friends at ORS Impact, please consider participating in this important work!

Kyla leading a brainstorming session.

Kyla leading a brainstorming session.

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

Moving Civic Tech from Code to Products: AWS Marketplace is the New Github

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Smart Chicago has been in civic tech since our inception. No other civic tech outfit in the country has done more to support the Chicago ecosystem, (funds, meeting space, contracts, hackathons, office space, server space) influence the field nationally (CUTGroup, support for the Code for America Brigade, a focus on justice and economic development for all) and produce our own tech (Chicago Works For You, Chicago Health Atlas, Foodborne Chicago, and more).

A focus on all, not just the most technical people

As we’ve grown, we’ve moved away from a focus on the highest-capacity tech people in the space. That move was pretty well-covered here in Civicist: The Real Heart of Civic Tech Isn’t Code. We simply think there is more good to be had by focusing on minting new tech workers in programs like Smart Health Centers, Documenters, and Youth-Led Tech.

An unprecedented technical infrastructure program

Yet we continue to quietly serve the needs of developers— in the footer, without fanfare, for free. Again, no other organization— local or national— has anything like this program. Some of the best developers in the city—Chris Gansen and Scott Robbin— have run it for us over the years, and we’ve been helpful to dozens of local developers.

Uturn Data Solutions has been maintaining the Developer Resources program for the last year or so. Amazon introduced us to Uturn because we were the largest customer in their government division— that’s no small measure of impact. Uturn continues to help us grow the program, as the Illinois Sunshine project from the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform is coming on board this month, adding more tech to our infrastructure.

We can’t ignore the lack of impact for civic tech tools

15335045039_c4477de0c0_kBut I have watched with growing concern the lack of impact of pure tech. The tools we’ve made in civic tech have, frankly, not amounted to much. There are no break-out successes with millions of users. There is very slow uptake and re-use of new tools. And yet we still code.

I think there are a number of modes of operation that preclude big impact— holding our events on the high floors of expensive downtown real estate, for instance. This keeps us far away from people in need.

Another reason is the way we propagate our work product.

Civic tech people love code. They love making code, they love talking about code amongst themselves, and they love publishing code on Github. The culture, since the inception of our movement, has been focused on code and tech rather than functionality and need.

This means that in order for a non-technical person to duplicate the functionality they see in a new “fork our code!” website, they have to hire a developer to do so. There’s just too much friction here— we have to fix it.

Amazon’s AWS Marketplace is better than Github for deploying civic tech websites

At Smart Chicago, we think we have a part of the answer: create and deploy Amazon Machine Images (AMIs) of civic tech functionality and sell it in Amazon’s AWS Marketplace. Here’s how Amazon describes an AMI:

An Amazon Machine Image (AMI) contains all the information necessary to boot an Amazon EC2 instance with your software. An AMI is like a template of a computer’s root volume. For example, an AMI might contain the software to act as a web server (Linux, Apache, and your web site) or it might contain the software to act as a Hadoop node (Linux, Hadoop, and a custom application)

From our perspective, an AMI is just a Github bucket that delivers on the promise of the raw code. We can conflate the two separate tasks we’ve been supporting for years (helping developers create code and helping organizations host their sites) into one simple experience.

AWS Marketplace is an online store that helps customers find, buy, and immediately start using the software and services they need. To date, it has been used mainly for pieces of functionality that corporations need to run an IT infrastructure— security, business processes, Sharepoint, whatever.

But when I look at the AWS Marketplace, I see a new way to get the great work we’ve done in civic tech in the hands of the people who need it most. With a software product listed in the AWS Marketplace, anyone can set up their own site by providing a credit card and filling out a form.

This week, Uturn Data Solutions, in partnership with Smart Chicago, will be launching their first civic tech AMI in the AWS marketplace. It will be the first, but hopefully not last, civic tech product of this kind to be packaged and distributed this way. A change for the better, stay tuned for more!”

Surveillance in Chicago: an On The Table Event at the Burger King on South Pulaski Road

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I have been a member of the On The Table Steering Committee since its inception. I am very proud of my connection to this central community engagement model for The Chicago Community Trust, my employer and the place where Smart Chicago is based.

I believe in the power of bringing regular Chicago residents together to plan our collective future. I also believe it’s easy to have easy conversations— to create a private space among friends to talk about and celebrate our shared work.

But we just can’t afford to do that in Chicago today. We are in the middle of a series of crises around policing, education, the use of public space, and how to pay for the things we need. On The Table is far too important a tool to use for discussions that don’t go to the core.

So we’re hosting a dinner at an important place to talk about important things. Here’s details: Surveillance in Chicago: A Conversation at the Burger King on S. Pulaski Road

The October 20, 2014 shooting death of Laquan McDonald at 4100 S. Pulaski was a seminal event in this city. The reverberations are still being felt in the publication of recommendations from the Chicago Police Accountability Task Force, in the Pattern or Practice Investigation being conducted by the Department of Justice, and in continued protests in the streets and at the doors of power. This conversation will focus on one aspect of power: video surveillance. Our venue will be the Burger King where 86 minutes of recording went missing on the morning after McDonald’s death.

We hope you can join us. If this event fills up, we encourage you to host your own On The Table as well.

On The Table 2015

Meantime, here are some resources to help move the conversation along:

Questions, comments, additions? Write / call / tweet Daniel X. O’Neil danielx@gmail.com (773) 960-6045 @smartchicago  @danxoneil.