Hackathon

Join mRelief at Chicago’s #CodeAcross Food Stamp Hackathon

Christopher Whitaker

CodeAcross2015_Postcard

On February 20th, the mRelief team will be hosting a Food Stamp Hackathon as part of Code for America’s Code Across event.

mRelief.com empowers Chicagoans with a tool to access the welfare system in unprecedented ways by determining food stamp eligibility through text messaging and web tools which direct people to their next step in the application.

Sponsored by Microsoft and in partnership with the Harris Food Policy Advocacy Group, Code for America, and Women of Code, mRelief’s hackathon invites thought leaders in policy and computer programming to expand current eligibility screening for food stamps in Illinois. The event will focus on policy rules that impact overall eligibility, accessibility for students and applicants of varying types of citizenship, and documents that people need for food stamp eligibility.

As part of Code for America’s national Code Across event, mRelief has also set up a national repository for food stamp hackers across the country to view code for their web and SMS tools and submit the code for their states so that mRelief can sustain the work beyond the weekend. CodeAcross is a weekend of civic hacking events hosted by nodes of the Code for America network around the world. It is timed to coincide with both the last weekend of the Code for America Fellows residency and International Open Data Day. The goal of CodeAcross is to activate the Code for America network and inspire residents everywhere to get actively involved in their community.

The local event and mRelief’s national challenge on Github was organized by the all-women software development team at mRelief. mRelief’s tools simplifies the social service qualifying process with for food stamps and many other immediate needs. Illinois residents can check to see if they’re eligible for a variety of healthcare, rental assistance, cash assistance, transportation, and child welfare related programs.

Full details of the event can be found here.

Follow, the team on twitter at @mrelief_form

Attend the local event at: bit.ly/chifoodstamps

Sign up for the national event at: bit.ly/foodstampsusa

Smart Chicago and the National Day of Civic Hacking

Smart Chicago

The Smart Chicago Collaborative is proud to be a contributing partner to the National Day of Civic Hacking effort. We’ve been providing content to the national  website, starting with the Civic Hacking 101 video put together by Smart Chicago consultant and Chicago Code for America Brigade Captain Christopher Whitaker. Our goal is to help spread the lessons we’ve learned in Chicago to the rest of the country.

National Day of Civic Hacking at 1871

Additionally, we’ll be hosting a hackathon May 31st – June 1st at the offices of kCura in the Chicago Loop in partnership with Code for America and Random Hacks of Kindness. Each day will be broken down into two sections.

During the first session, we’ll hear from people on the front line of civic work as they talk about their day to day challenges in the fields of education, housing, hunger, disaster response, public safety , and child protective services. In the afternoon, we’ll break out into group and prototype apps that may help address these challenges.

You can register for the event here.

Illinois Public Health Datapalooza Winners

Christopher Whitaker

Today the State of Illinois announced the winners of the Illinois Public Health Datapalooza Challenge – an Illinois Department of Public Health Challenge designed to highlight the availability and benefit of Open Health Data from government agencies. The challenge was part of a two-day Illinois Public Health Datapalooza event focused on developing and sharing innovative ways to work with open health data in an effort to drive innovation and create better health outcomes in Illinois and in cities and states across the country.

Untitled

Continue reading →

Civic Innovation Toolkit: How to run a civic hackathon

Christopher Whitaker 3 Comments

The Smart Chicago Collaborative has helped to run several civic hackathons including last year’s National Day of Civic Hacking events in Chicago. To help with this year’s National Day of Civic Hacking, we wanted to post how we organize and set up these events.  We also wanted to go over tips and hazards to look out for when organizing these events.

Safer Communities Hackathon at Google Chicago

Safer Communities Hackathon at Google Chicago

Continue reading →

PDF Liberation Hackathon Resource Page

Christopher Whitaker

In preparation for the PDF Liberation Hackathon, we’re putting together a short how-to of different PDF Liberation tools starting with Tabula – a tool to extract tables of data from PDFs.

Tabula

Tabula is an open source tool built by Manuel Aristarán with the help of ProPublica, La Nación DATA and Knight-Mozilla OpenNews.

When you first open Tabula, you’re given the option to load PDFs into the system. For this example, we’ve taken the monthly veterans report from the Illinois Department of Employment Security (currently only available in PDF) and loaded it into Tabula.

TabulaDemo1

Once you upload it, Tabula will process the file. This can take a little bit of time depending on the size of the file.

Once it’s loaded, you simply draw rectangulars over the tables in the PDF.

TabulaDemo2

From there, Tabula will show you the data that’s it’s captured. Now, you can copy the data to the clipboard or download to your own local machine as a file. It’s that simple.

TabulaDemo3

You can find more information on how Tablua works on Source.  You can also find a list of other PDF extraction tools on the national PDF Liberation Hackathon homepage.

OpenRefine

Once you get the data into a csv, you may have to clean up the data. A common tool to do this is OpenRefine (formally Google Refine). You can load a CSV file into OpenRefine and dig into the data to find possible data entry errors (somebody writing in Chicgo instead of Chicago),  transform the data (change the format of a cell to show currency instead of text), and easily spot inconsistencies in the data (One set of entries classified as ‘phone’ and another ‘phone number’.

OpenRefine also has  comprehensive documentation on how to use it including videos tutorials. Here’s the video that introduces OpenRefine.

You can find out more information on OpenRefine on their website.

Google Fusion Tables

Once you have the data you’re interested in, you can load it into Google Fusion Tables in order to build apps that use the data.

Google Fusion Tables operates much the same way an Excel spreadsheet does. The difference is that you can use the Google Fusion Table API to load data into your civic app. A good example of this is Derek Eder’s Searchable Map Template.

Do you have PDFs that need liberated? Interested in freeing the data?

If you have PDF’s that you’d like to see data extracted from, you can fill out wufoo form here.  If you’re interested in taking part in the PDF Liberation hackathon, you can RSVP for the event here.

 

 

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

Smart Chicago 1 Comment

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

Continue reading →