Smart Chicago is a founding tenant of 1871 and we have been active in helping make it a national center for civic innovation.
On Tuesday November 18th, Jim McGowan with the Red Cross of Greater Chicago gave a presentation at OpenGov Hack Night about their open source project: DCSops.
The Red Cross uses DCSops to manage their situational awareness information and dispatch volunteers to an incident. This is a huge change from January when they were using carbon paper to record information about incidents.
If you missed last week’s mRelief presentation at OpenGov Hack Night – we’ve got the video below:
Twitter was a big fan of the project! Here’s a sampling of the tweets below
On October 29th, Maryam Judar, Executive Director of the Citizen Advocacy Group, spoke at Chicago’s OpenGov Hack Night.
The Citizen Advocacy Center is dedicated to building democracy for the 21st century by strengthening the citizenry’s capacities, resources, and institutions for self-governance.
Jay Van Patten, Information Technology Director at Chicago Public Schools, stopped by OpenGov Hack Night on October 7th to showcase his team’s work in redesigning the Chicago Public Schools website to be mobile – first. Their work provides an example of how governments can build great websites all in-house.
Note: this is a guest post from Jonathan Giuffrida. Jonathan has been working at 1871 in one of the seats we maintain there for innovators in civic technology. Here’s more on that program.
Jonathan Giuffrida
This summer, I’ve been using Smart Chicago’s space in 1871 to help work on a new product that is intended to change the way we use open data.
Plenar.io was conceived as a centralized hub for open datasets from around the country. Funded by the NSF and the MacArthur Foundation, and led by a team of prominent open data scientists, researchers, and developers, it is a collaborative, open-source solution to the problems inherent to the rapid growth in government data portals.
The primary innovations of Plenario focus on making data easier for anybody to find, access, and download, regardless of its original source or format, and to do so in a free and efficient manner. The result is an enormous improvement to the ecosystem that returns us to the core promise of making the data open in the first place – that it can help improve our cities, our governments, and our lives.
On September 9th, Dan Platt and Craig Booth from Narrative Science stopped by OpenGov Hack Night to talk about their Quill platform.
