Month: June 2014

CUTGroup #9 – Foodborne Chicago

Sonja Marziano

We conducted our ninth Civic User Testing Group as a part of a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to build communication strategies to engage with targeted communities through Foodborne Chicago, an app that searches Twitter for tweets related to food poisoning and helps report these incidents to the Chicago Department of Public Health.

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Here are the outcomes we will achieve through the Knight grant:

This project will result in improved communications strategies for targeting key cultural groups on social media. The team will conduct research activities to identify the best approaches for communicating with these groups, implement and test new strategies in Food Bourne software and release a report with the findings of the research.

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Hack Night Live: The Array of Things

Christopher Whitaker

At tonight’s Chicago OpenGov Hack Night, Charlie Catlett from The University of Chicago and Doug Pancoast from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago will talk about a new partnership with the City of Chicago to prototype a network of urban sensing and embedded information systems “nodes.”

Chicago Grid, Photo by Alyson Hurt, Creative Commons

Photo by Alyson Hurt, Creative Commons

The network is intended to be a public utility, including sensors for temperature, humidity, light, sound, motion, infrared, and various components related to air quality and the data published in 30 second intervals to enable app development.

The project, part of Chicago’s Tech Plan, aims to provide test nodes in several locations by late summer 2014, and expects to deploy 8-20 nodes in the Loop by October 2014. Contingent upon federal funding requests, the ultimate goal is to develop a network of over 500 nodes.

We’ll start our livestream at 6:15pm CST.

National Day of Civic Hacking Takeaway One: Food Pantry App

Christopher Whitaker

This is the first in a series of posts about takeaways learned from National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago. These posts will highlight problem sets, current efforts, and how to get involved in future efforts.

Of all the topics talked about during National Day of Civic Hacking, none got more attention and conversation going than the idea of building an app to help the needs of food pantries.

National Day of Civic Hacking in Chicago 2014 #hackforchange

Notes taken during the food pantry session during National Day of Civic Hacking

In this takeaway post, we’ll describe the problem set, current data, current projects,  and possible next steps in creating a tool that helps to support the work of the food pantries.

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