2015 Year in Review

This was a big year for community technology in Chicago. Here’s a month-by-month look at some of the things Smart Chicago has shared, supported, and accomplished in 2015.

January: Smart Chicago Model Featured at the Gigabit City Summit

Smart Chicago attended the Gigabit City Summit in Kansas City, MO – a three-day learning and networking opportunity exclusively designed for leaders in current and emerging Gigabit Cities. Cities convened to discuss how to facilitate business & startup growth, spark government innovation, and achieve equity of access in the presence of next generation speeds. You can see our presentation here and read our recap of the event here.  Denise Linn, who we would later hire as our Program Analyst in June, was also at the Gigabit City Summit. Here is her recap of the Summit on the Living Cities blog and her research on digital equity & gigabit cities.

 

Game of Gigs Gigabit City Summit 2015

With the start of 2015 seeing this event and the end seeing Google Fiber’s announced interest in Chicago, the topic of gigabit connectivity has come full circle. Smart Chicago is deep in this work – right at the intersection of city data, access, skills, and infrastructure.

February: Textizen Campaign for Placemaking

Smart Chicago used Textizen to get feedback from residents on the Chicago Complete Streets Program. Chicagoans were asked to give input on utilizing and improving public street spaces. At Smart Chicago, we understand how powerful text message can be to reach new audiences and listen to our community. This was a great collaboration with the City of Chicago’s Department of Transportation. You can read a blog post about the initiative here.

By July, Textizen was purchased by GovDelivery. We see the success of this company— one that started in a Code for America fellowship, became a CfA Accelerator company, as a success for us and our quiet support. We were deeply involved at the product level— sourcing customers, paying for the service, providing brass-tacks product feedback.

March: Expunge.io & Fingerprint Terminal

Expunge.io was launched in January of 2014 as a website that helps start the process of erasing juvenile arrests and/or court records. Smart Chicago has a long history working on Expunge.io starting with the inception of the idea during our #CivicSummer program in 2013. With the support from The Chicago Community Trust, we continue to increase public awareness, support institutions, and document the juvenile expungement application process.

In March, we secured a fingerprint terminal at the Cook County Juvenile Court to help youth get their rap sheet. We know that juvenile expungement is an arduous legal process that prevents many young adults from expunging their records. The fingerprint terminal for the Cook County Juvenile Center helps young adults connect with free legal aid at the Juvenile Expungement Help Desk while also getting their rap sheet — one of the most important pieces to starting the expungement process.

April: Experimental Modes Convening  

Our consultant, Laurenellen McCann, invited technology practitioners to The Chicago Community Trust on April 3 & 4, as part of our Knight Deep Dive work. The Community Information Deep Dive initiative (or just “Deep Dive”, for short) is an experiment in synthesizing new & existing community information projects into a cohesive system for engaging with residents from the seat of a community foundation.

Experimental Modes Group photo

The convening was an investigation into what it means to build civic tech with, not for. It answered the question, “what’s the difference between sentiment and action?” through the experiences from the practitioners in the room. Here is a recap of the day including everyone who attended the convening. Laurenellen conducted an enormous amount of research around this topic which can be found on our website and in this book.

May: Foodborne Chicago Recognized as the Top 25 Innovations in Government

In May, our partner Chicago Department of Public Health (CDPH) was recognized as a Top 25 program in the American Government Awards competition by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation for its Foodborne Chicago program. Smart Chicago launched Foodborne Chicago in March 2013 with the goal of improving food safety in Chicago by connecting people who complain about food poisoning on Twitter to the people who can help them out —  the Chicago Department of Public Health.

June: City of Chicago Tech Plan 18-month Update

The City of Chicago released the 18-month Update to its Tech Plan and highlighted a number of Smart Chicago projects: Smart Health Centers, Youth-Led Tech, Connect Chicago, Foodborne Chicago, and CUTGroup. The Plan also discussed WindyGrid and the Array of Things sensors — projects where Smart Chicago is a civic engagement partner.  

Read Smart Chicago’s take on the 18-month update here.

July: Youth-Led Tech

We can’t talk about Smart Chicago’s work in 2015 without talking about Youth-Led Tech. Youth-Led Tech was supported by a grant from Get IN Chicago, an organization that supports and evaluated evidence-based programs that lead to a sustainable reductions in violence. For 6 weeks, 140 youth were taught technology curriculum in 5 neighborhoods  across the city of Chicago: Austin, Englewood, Humboldt Park, North Lawndale, and Roseland. After completing 170 hours of WordPress training and content creation, the youth earned their own laptops in a graduation ceremony at Microsoft Chicago’s offices. Youth-Led Tech Celebration Ceremony

Smart Chicago documents everything, not only for our sake, but for the sake of others in the digital skills & access ecosystem. We have released the full curriculum online for anyone to use and adapt. We have our catering data, our instructor hiring process, profiles of our learning environments, and screenshots of the youth websites online. Later in 2015, Susan Crawford wrote a piece about the program in Medium, documenting the philosophy of the tech program where the youth, and not the tech, were prioritized:

There were also social-emotional learning elements of the program — peace circles, restorative justice — and talks about power in the city of Chicago. And here’s where Dan O’Neil’s attention to food fits in: O’Neil says the number one message he wanted to get across to the youth in the program was, “”We love you and we’re never going to let you go.’”

To access more links about Youth-Led Tech, visit this section of our website.

August: Bud Billiken Parade

Smart Chicago partnered with Chicago Defender Charities to support their efforts to include more technology tools (such as live-streaming and Textizen voting) in their programs. In August, we provided text voting during the Bud Billiken Parade so spectators could vote for their favorite youth dance teams, music groups, and performers.

Smart Chicago staff, consultants, Smart Health Navigators, and Youth-Led Tech instructors also marched in the parade! We marched with our friends Gray Era Brass, handing out swag, promoting the text voting campaign, and shared information about Smart Chicago programming.

Bud Billiken Parade 2015 We look forward to continued collaboration with Chicago Defender Charities beyond 2015. For more information on the Bud Billiken Parade, see this blog post.

September: Our Civic Tech Publications & Philosophy

September 2015 saw the launch of publications and thought pieces emphasizing the importance of authentic civic engagement in technology and articulating Smart Chicago’s civic tech framework. We believe that the real heart of civic tech isn’t code, the apps, or the open data. It’s the people. The neighborhood tech youth instructor, for instance, onboards family, friends and neighbors into the digital economy and tech pipeline, but their work is too often hidden or uncelebrated. Executive Director Dan O’Neil penned the Civicist post, “The Real Heart of Civic Tech isn’t Code.” Here’s an excerpt:

Civic tech that doesn’t include people like Akya, Angel, and Farhad leads to a distorted vision of the field. A vision that leads with technical solutions rather than human capacity. A vision that glorifies the power of the developer rather than the collective strengths of a city.

Experimental Modes of Civic Engagement in Civic Tech by Laurenellen McCann was also published in September. This book represents the culmination of the Experimental Modes work under Deep Dive and was fueled by a scan of the field and practitioner convenings. It can be ordered on Amazon and read online. Our friend and former consultant Chris Whitaker also documented his civic tech lessons learned in the Civic Whitaker Anthology. These books are a testament to the great work of the authors, but also catalyze conversation for the civic technology and how the movement be innovative, engaging, and inclusive.

October: NNIP & Chicago’s Data Ecosystem

To build on the data ecosystem research and work of the Chicago School of Data, Smart Chicago started engaging with the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP).  We attended the Dallas NNIP meeting in October. NNIP is a collaborative community of 35+ cities and the Urban Institute. Partners centralize, analyze, and engage residents with neighborhood-level data. You can read our recap of the NNIP meeting lessons and themes in this blog post.

Continuing last year’s work with the Chicago School of Data survey and the Chicago School of Data Days, we seek to coordinate and support Chicago’s strong data ecosystem. Who is in that ecosystem? Institutions like DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies, the Woodstock Institute, Chapin Hall, and the Heartland Alliance, just to name a few. Here is a taxonomy of this ecosystem that fuels our thought and collaborative framework in this area.

We look forward to continuing our engagement with NNIP and contributing to that network of cross-city practitioners.

November: Smart Health Centers

Our Smart Health Centers program places trained health information specialists in clinics to assist patients in connecting to their own medical records and find reliable information about their own conditions. In 2015, we expanded the program to more locations and hired a few of our Youth-led tech instructors from the summer as navigators. You can read Akya Gossitt’s story about her path leading to becoming a Youth-led Tech instructor and then a Smart Health Center Navigator.

We also began recording and sharing podcasts developed by the Smart Health Center Navigators. The Navigators discuss topics like healthy holiday meals and the digital divide in health care. You can listen to them on the Smart Chicago soundcloud account. We are excited to provide more opportunities like this to our Navigators and amplify their voices.

December: Final Integration of CUTGroup Text Message Solution

In September, we announced that residents can now sign up for CUTGroup via text message. This month, we implemented the last piece of this work where testers can also learn about new testing opportunities and respond to screening questions via text.

We did this work because if you do not have Internet access at home, you are limited by your time commitment on a public computers and might not have a chance to respond toemails in time to participate in a test. Out of our 1,200+ CUTGroup members today, 29% of our testers said their primary form of connecting to the Internet is either via public wifi or their phone with data plan. The impetus behind this project is to serve the large and growing number of residents who do not have regular access to the internet. By adding a text mode, the CUTGroup will be more effective at discovering resident’s voice.

CUTGroup-Twittercard

More in 2016

We thank all of our founderspartners and consultants who have been a crucial part of this work.

Events & Resources for #HourofCode & #CSEdWeek 2015

December 7th through 13th is  Computer Science Week! This campaign is all about raising awareness for computer science education. Throughout the week, through Hour of Code events, students will try coding for the first time. 

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Though one hour isn’t enough to make anyone an expert, that’s not the goal:

The measure of success of this campaign is not in how much CS students learn – the success is reflected in broad participation across gender and ethnic and socioeconomic groups, and the resulting increase in enrollment and participation we see in CS courses at all grade levels. – Hour of Code

Hour of Code in Chicago

This year in Chicago, there are 100+ Hour of Code events across the City both inside and outside of schools. Students can earn an Hour of Code Digital Learning Badge as proof of participation and the skills they gained. To find out more about these learning opportunities, visit Chicago City of Learning webpage. Hour of code has published a list of all Hour of Code events in Illinois here. Below is all of the Chicago Public Library’s Hour of Code 2015 programming for teens:

Tutorials & Resources for Instructors

Whether in a group or at home, students can tackle computer science for the first time through custom tutorials – sometimes involving their favorite games or fiction characters. Check out the Star Wars Coding Tutorial and the Minecraft Coding Tutorial. Here is an introduction to the new Star Wars Tutorial:

If you’re a parent, tutor, digital trainer or teacher and are interested in teaching an Hour of Code this week or in the future, check out this How-to Guide and the video below:

If you come across a student that wants to continue learning computer science beyond the organized Hour of Code, we encourage all instructors to apply for free student accounts to Taken Charge, a browser-based ISTE certified game for youth.

Ideas for Collaboration Between Digital Literacy & Traditional Literacy Organizations

Smart Chicago’s resident membership at Literacenter means that our Connect Chicago trainers and programs can collaborate with the greater literacy community in Chicago. We see great potential for these two communities to strengthen one another and create a useful cross-program referral network for residents.

On November 24th, I led a Brown Bag Lunch at Literacenter and put forth some of ideas for how literacy organizations and digital literacy organizations can amplify each other’s work. Literacenter DT + TL Slide

Why Does this Collaboration Matter?

First, basic literacy is often a prerequisite for most digital skills trainings. For instance, Smart Chicago is giving away free licenses to the youth browser-based game Taken Charge, but the game is best for students at a 3rd grade reading level or above. Second, strengthening one’s reading or writing and strengthening one’s digital skills are not always achieved separately. For instance, our friends at Hooray for Learning use technology to help teachers foster creative writing. The Chicago Citywide Literacy Coalition is undertaking a Technology Pilot Program for their adult learners, recognizing that technology literacy has a place in the greater literacy mission.

Of course, without access to devices and the Internet, gaining digital skills and literacy skills through technology is difficult. This is a challenge that Chicago’s literacy and digital literacy organizations share. In both fields, there is a reliance on the existence of at-home supplementary resources. Residents can retain knowledge and practice skills easily when they have books, devices, connections and social support in the comfort of their homes.  

Frameworks for Collaboration

When we think about ways that these two fields can work together, it helped to begin by understanding how they are different and similar:

Literacenter DigLit vs Lit Slide

The goods news is that digital literacy/skill-building programs and more general literacy programs have complementary strengths and needs:

Literacenter Inventory Slide

While digital skills programming can do more to serve and reach residents at lower reading and English language levels, that happens to the literacy community’s comfort zone. Digital skills programming can take note of literacy programs’ best practices on cohort learning and social support while learning. Both sets of programming are conducted by trusted institutions and both are in need of a strong referral network for its patrons. Where do we we send a job seeker at “X” reading level who wants to learn “X” computer skill?

Here are some preliminary ideas we can run with:

Literacenter Brown Bag Lunch November 24, 2015

This is a start. Through more gatherings like the one last week, we can expand the list of ideas above and understand the added value that collaboration can bring to each field’s mission.

Smart Chicago’s full presentation here:

Thanks so much to representatives from Literacenter, Chicago Literacy Alliance, Literacy Works, Chicago Public Library, WTTW, Chicago Citywide Literacy Coalition, Open Books, Hooray for Learning, the Children’s Literacy Initiative, and others for coming out to the lunch and participating in this important conversation!  

Recap of the Digital Inclusion Leadership Awards at #NLC15

Smart Chicago was at  the National League of Cities 2015 Congress of Cities in Nashville, TN to help distribute the first annual Digital Inclusion Leadership Awards. The awards were created by Next Century Cities and the National League of Cities in partnership with Google Fiber to recognize municipalities that have made major strides and investments in closing their digital divides.

Chatt pic for blog

I assisted with the planning and judging of these awards. As a Program Analyst for Smart Chicago working for the Connect Chicago Initiative, I have have had the privilege to be part of this cross-city, cross-sector community of practitioners who think about the digital divide everyday.

Over 30 city governments applied for the awards. From mobile tech vans to matching technology grant programs, these city-supported programs have helped helped get more residents online.

Here are the winners:

Screen Shot 2015-11-17 at 11.24.37 AM

You can read cases about the winners and each winning program here!

How to Get More Residents Online

At the Congress of Cities, I moderated a Solutions Session with two of the Digital Inclusion Leadership Award winners: Austin, TX and Davidson, NC. The cities were invited to describe their winning programs and give concrete, specific recommendations to other municipalities seeking to replicate their work.

Screen Shot Panel

I found both of these cases to be compelling. Austin’s Digital Assessment survey work (conducted every three years) is a great model for institutionalizing the regular collection of essential Internet access and use data across neighborhoods. Davidson’s Eliminate the Digital Divide Program featured the clever “Squeeze Out the Digital Divide” – a part fundraiser, part youth-driven community awareness campaign that uses lemonade stand revenue to fund devices for school-age children.

Here is the full presentation from the Solution Session:

Lessons for Chicago

Back in 2009, the American Reinvestment & Recovery Act infused Broadband Technology Opportunity Fund grant money into many cities to help close the digital divide. Cities like Chicago and the ones above are all experimenting with ways to institutionalize digital inclusion work in the aftermath of that grant funding – whether it’s device lending and refurbishment, public computing labs, awareness campaigns, Internet access survey work, and digital training programs.

This is why Connect Chicago is so important. We’re working with partners all over the city – both public and private – to coordinate Chicago’s digital access and skills ecosystem and support the trainers on the front lines of digital inclusion work.

One thing I noticed was that almost every winning city from the Digital Inclusion Leadership Award had a City Hall Champion in the form of a mayor, an agency head, or a department. Connect Chicago benefits from both the Mayor’s office and the Chicago Department of Innovation & Technology being on its Steering Committee. This involvement sends a clear message: the digital life of every Chicagoan matters.

Despite the great work being done in the field, there are untapped opportunities for  innovation and experimentation. At Smart Chicago, we want to understand how to increase and strengthen the network of digital access and skills resources across the City. Specifically we’re thinking about:

  • How to create referral systems for training across decentralized, but complementary services
  • How to track digital access and skills outcomes. Though we can collect data on participation and certification
  • How to engage with residents about their desire to learn new digital and technical skills. How do they want to learn? What do they want to learn? What are the obstacles in the way of learning those things?

We know we are not alone in asking these questions. Now, through the Digital Inclusion Leadership Awards and the community of applicants, winners, and best practices that it’s assembled across the country, we have a peer network of organizations to collaborate with.

To become a member of the Digital Inclusion Learning Network, fill out this form. 

A Taxonomy for Regional Data Ecosystems

This post is about designing a taxonomy for Chicagoland’s data ecosystem, and why a taxonomy would be useful for the growth and development of the ecosystem.

Taxonomies are used in many disciplines to organize knowledge. Carl Linneaus’s taxonomy to classify species — like Homo sapiens — is used today, almost three hundred years later. It’s a good example of a nested hierarchy, where each category is a subset of a broader category. A strong taxonomy has a notation convention for classifying individual items and an organizing principle (or principles!) for putting items in relationships with each other. Structured lists, alphabetical order, numerical order, headers, indexes, tables of contents, the branching diagram, all kinds of finding aides — these things are so common now, most people take reference tools for granted. So what?

This is a diagram from Howard T. Odum’s 1971 study of Silver Springs, Florida, an early, pioneering effort to model the thermodynamic and material flows for an ecosystem. What are the elements of a data ecosystem?

The Ecosystem Project

The warrant for Smart Chicago’s “ecosystem project” is to build with, not for, to be at the service of people. Enter the Chicago School of Data. We’ve done interviews, surveys, a convening, and are writing a  book dedicated to how we shape Chicagoland’s data ecosystem to fit the needs of people in Chicagoland. Thanks to our documenters, the convening had an unprecedented amount of raw, in-the-moment documentation. We’ve classified these resources, archived them, and analyzed parts of the data already — data about how organizations in Chicagoland put data to work (how meta!). Now we need to make sure our work doesn’t collect dust. A taxonomy for Chicagoland’s regional ecosystem would turn our documentation into actionable intelligence.

I’m helping develop the structure of this taxonomy so it works for the community. The taxonomy is a way to format data about organizations who participate in the regional ecosystem. With structured metadata, we’ll be able to manage the knowledge we have about these organizations, such as organizations’ sizes, missions, and skill gaps. Regardless if this or a version of this specific structure is used, an established taxonomy for managing knowledge about data ecosystems is a good idea. It will accelerate the hardest parts of building capacity, building technology skills, and building coalitions. Designed to get data to work for people, a simple reference directory for organizations in the ecosystem would help organizations find worn paths to cross technology skill gaps. It would help organizations quickly match themselves with other organizations facing similar challenges, sharing similar successes. A taxonomy acts as a backbone for these kind of reference directories.

Originally, we classified Chicago School of Data participants by industry. Participants were either a university, government department, non-profit, or private company. These buckets were useful when we were finding people to interview. We wanted to get as broad a cross-section of the landscape as possible. We didn’t want to miss the perspective of any of our partners. Over time, though, we found that these buckets weren’t specific enough for our purposes. They weren’t organized in a way that told us anything about how our partners really used data. Ideally, we wanted look at an organization’s place in the ecosystem, its niche, and know exactly what support it needed around data and how else the organization could benefit — and be benefited by — the ecosystem.

Landscape Scan

I listened to and transcribed all the interviews and analyzed the pre-convening survey material. I tried to capture what were, by my lights, the main themes brought up during our scan of the ecosystem. I wrote a draft taxonomy in JSON. It’s okay if you don’t know JSON from a day salon. The drafts were guided by the idea that our data should work for people in the ecosystem, people we know and work with every day, and that it’d be easier to work with our project material if it were indexed. I classified ecosystem members, often non-profit organizations, as creators, consumers, and enablers of data. Wide nets, to be sure, so I introduced a few sub-classifications. The teased out data ecosystem looked like this:

  • The data ecosystem has
    • Creators
      • Who open their data for free
      • Who open their data for a price
      • Who don’t open their data
        • Because of technical capacity
        • Because of cost
        • Because of legal agreements
        • Because of the public interest
        • Because of other reasons
    • Consumers
      • Who only consume free data
      • Who pay for some of their data
      • Who use data
        • To evaluate their own operations
        • To evaluate other organizations’ operations
        • And turn it into a digital product
        • And turn it into a printed product
    • Enablers who provide services and goods in the ecosystem such as
      • Volunteers
      • Consultants
      • Funded organizations
      • Paid organizations

This taxonomy gives you a better sense of the ecosystem’s niches, but it amounts to a bunch of redundant lists of participants. An institution as big as Chicago Public Schools, say, is clearly a creator, consumer, and enabler of data in the ecosystem. CPS shares some data while protecting other data. Different departments use data in different ways. One department might focus on general national trends in education policy while another focuses on budget allocation versus tenure within one district. CPS is a good test case. Its multi-faceted role shows that members of the data ecosystem aren’t easily classified.

Survey Responses

After the convening, on September 19th and 20th, 2014, it was clear that the taxonomy needed revision. More detail was important, especially about how participants used data. Through a survey we found lots of ways data works in the ecosystem. I incorporated categories from our survey into the ecosystem, which changed the structure from:

  • The data ecosystem has
    • Consumers
      • Who use data
        • To evaluate their own operations
        • To evaluate other organizations’ operations
        • And turned it into a digital product
        • And turned it into a printed product

to look like this:

  • The data ecosystem has
    • Consumers
      • Who use data for
        • Resource allocation
        • Measuring impact
        • Advocacy and outreach
        • Understanding the needs of people served
        • Donor development
        • Operations
        • Research

Much better! This structure is more specific and it gives you a clearer picture about the many different ways data gets used by organizations in the ecosystem. This set of categories are specific to our ecosystem, given they were after all created in conversation with a specific group of partners mostly from the Chicagoland region for a conference. That said, my bet is that many organizations would say they use data for at least 1 of these 7 reasons. It’s important for any taxonomy to be flexible enough for people to enter and update survey data, though. Surveys are one of the most important instruments in civic technology.

Most of our survey categories are not mutually exclusive. When you look at our 246 participating organizations’ responses, the network of responses they share is extremely dense, with many millions of combinations. Without more metadata, we may as well reference the raw results of the survey, to learn, for example, that desktop spreadsheets are the most used tool among survey respondents. These survey categories are not enough when there’s already data available to see the ins-and-outs of the ecosystem.

Moar Metadata

People have worked hard to classify organizations. We can build off their work. Our taxonomy can incorporate IRS codes, property tax identifiers, budget, size, whatever’s useful. There are several classification systems for economic entities, such as S&P’s Global Industry Classification Standard, Forbes’s Industry Classification Benchmark, the UN’s International Standard Industrial Classifications. The 501(c)3 classification for a non-profit is one of twenty-nine other types of 501(c) organizations. Usefulness for these codes is measured by how many people actually use them to collect and organize data.

Categories developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) are extremely useful for our ecosystem project and for other regional initiatives trying to get working inventories of their local data ecosystems. The NCCS categories are organized in their National Tax-Exempt Entities taxonomy.

Incorporating our survey data, NCCS categories, and a few federal codes, an organization’s place in the taxonomy might look like this:

  • Organization name
    • Type
      • NTEE Code
        • A54
      • IRS Code
        • 501(c)4
      • EIN
        • 43-219431A
    • Size
      • Revenue
        • $1,000,000
      • Employees
        • 15
    • Scan
      • Uses data for
        • Resource allocation
          • Yes
        • Measuring impact
          • Yes
        • Advocacy and outreach
          • Yes
        • Understand the needs of people served
          • Yes
        • Donor development
          • Yes
        • Operations
          • Yes
        • Research
          • Yes
      • Needs support in
        • Outreach
          • Yes
        • Analysis
          • No
      • Survey question…
        • Survey category #1
          • Value
        • Survey category #2
          • Value

An abstract version of this taxonomy is available in JSON here. The biggest design change reflects a guiding principle that our work should benefit people. During the first phase of outreach we cast the widest net, grouping organizations in buckets like “non-profit”, “university”, or “government”. These categories were useful when we were scanning the landscape and trying to include as many voices as possible. We changed the categories before the Chicago School of Data convening in September 2014 so that we could group organizations relative to how they worked with data. The JSON taxonomy classified organizations by whether they created, consumed, or enabled the data ecosystem. We added subfields and, after the convening, revised these subfields to include categories from our survey.

This version of the taxonomy does not use the “creator”, “consumer”, or “enabler” categories. It replaces these with organization names, which are now the ‘top’ categories in the structure. Under organization names I included a “Type” category with a few subfields, a “Scan” category to house our survey results, and a blanket “Size” category for other relevant fields, such as budget, employee numbers, and so on. It can be filled out with a simple Google Sheets template, and the template, in turn, could streamline the early research and design phases of capacity building.

Real working standards are hard to create. They’re products of collaborative work. Please add to or modify the taxonomy on Github.

Look out for the Chicago School of Data book, dropping January 2016.

Themes from #NNIP Dallas 2015

The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a network of trusted city organizations committed to collecting, analyzing, and sharing neighborhood data in service to their communities. Partner organizations convene twice a year to share their work and collaborate on topics from policing to tracking investments in neighborhoods. Last week, I attended the NNIP meeting in Dallas, Texas.

NNIP_PartnersBadge_Logo_RGB

It’s worth noting that the humans behind the number crunching and data visualizations were of extremely high quality. I was struck by the camaraderie, creativity, city pride, and good ole fashioned work ethic coursing through the NNIP culture.

It’s also worth noting that any conference or meeting that starts with a “what’s your favorite dataset?” icebreaker is just awesome.

Here’s a look at the major themes that arose throughout the three days of conversations, panels, and tours.

Neighborhood Data Needs Context

It was no accident that presenters from Dallas, Austin, and other cities had trouble making sense of neighborhood indicators without also nodding to historical and social context.

The first panel of the NNIP meeting was just as much about the origins of geographic inequity as it was about the data of geographic inequity. Nakia Douglas of the Barack Obama Male Leadership Academy, John Fullinwider of Lumin Education, Regina Montoya of the Mayor’s Poverty Task Force in Dallas, Theresa O’Donnell of the City of Dallas, and Donald Payton of the African American Genealogy Interest Group discussed the city’s “divides” – especially the prominent north-south divide.  The panel pointed out that these modern inequalities stem from both historical and present racial discrimination.

nnip 2

Living out this need for context, NNIP scheduled tours in Dallas. I had the opportunity to visit the Cottages at Hickory Crossing, the city’s first Housing First community. The 50 approximately 400 square foot single occupancy homes are for the homeless, mentally ill, and previously incarcerated. Future residents of the Cottages will have access to a suite of supportive on-site health and social services.

We walked through the construction, asked questions, and learned about the evaluation plans paired with the program. Even before the residents have moved in, the Cottages are planning an evaluation of the initiative – tracking resident outcomes and savings to Dallas taxpayers, for example. Residents are those who incur the highest cost to taxpayers by remaining homeless, less healthy, and less supported.

nnip 1

By the way, the Cottages at Hickory Crossing have their own Target registry if you would like to help furnish the homes!

NNIP Partners as Local Leaders & Conveners

Several NNIP partners discussed how they lead the conversations and collaborations around data within their cities. Many hold “Data Days” – events usually involving trainings and/or collaborations around neighborhood datasets of interest. Milwaukee’s Impact Inc. is holding their first Data Days this week. Charlotte, NC held their Data Days earlier in October.

One of the most interesting examples of data leadership? Every month Cleveland’s NNIP partner, the Center on Urban Poverty and Community Development at Case Western University, convenes all of the city’s organizations that collect data so they can share their work and build up a citywide data catalogue.

To accomplish their local work, NNIP partners form strong, trusted relationships with government agencies, police departments and other public collectors of data. During the meeting, partners what it took to open up in-demand local data and information for residents. One of my favorite insights came from Data-Driven Detroit (D3) who shared concrete advice for cities working with police departments to open up data.

Going forward, I hope NNIP partners can continue to discuss how data can build and repair community relationships in our cities. In Chicago there is so much work to do in this area. Data can be open and free, but if residents don’t trust it, there is still work to be done. Our own Kyla Williams spoke to this on social media while following the NNIP meeting remotely:

Data for Local Action

NNIP isn’t just about the data for data’s sake; it’s about turning data into informed local action. At the end of the day, if the data aren’t useful, used, or noticed then they are worthless. It’s all about democratizing information for community empowerment and smart policy decisions. This theme echoed several times throughout the NNIP meeting. One example was in Impact, Inc.’s mantra: “No data without stories, no stories without data.”

During the meeting, NNIP dared its partners to make their tech ecosystem. What does that mean? It means taking inventory of information lifecycles in your city and where residents and local organizations fall in those process maps. After all, it’s not enough to know how data is collected, analyzed, and repurposed; cities also need to know how neighborhood indicators and data stories can be turned into smart policy changes and smart local programs.

Here at Smart Chicago we’re also been thinking about ecosystem definition, turning data into action, and formulating meaningful resident engagement around Chicago’s data work. Between Array of Things, WindyGrid, and last year’s Chicago School of Data, there’s a lot to talk about! There are also essential Chicago partners with excellent neighborhood data: DePaul’s Institute for Housing Studies, the Woodstock Institute, and the Heartland Alliance. We need to work together to centralize our neighborhood data, engage with residents and make sure that Chicago isn’t just a “smart city,” but a smart city that works for everyone.

NNIP as a Community of Learning

The NNIP meetings are called “meetings” and not conferences for a reason. There was a palpable roll-up-your-sleeves attitude across the participating partners. I heard stories of people traveling to friends and collaborators in other cities to help replicate successful work nationally. Again, this is a great group of humans.

Those of us visiting NNIP or attending for the first time certainly saw the value of these meetings. Collecting, using, and disseminating neighborhood data to improve your city can be slow work with long-term gains. Having a supportive national network facilitating peer learning seems like an essential ingredient to progress.

Well said, April! Let the homework begin!

To see all NNIP documentation on the Dallas 2015 meeting, see their website.