Overview

Foodborne Chicago is a website that connects people who complain about food poisoning  on Twitter to the people who can help them out—  the Chicago Department of Public Health.

We use computers & code to search Twitter for tweets related to food poisoning in Chicago. We do as much as we can to automatically zero-in on the tweets we think are really about a possible food poisoning case and really coming from Chicago. Then real humans review the tweets and @reply back to people with a link back to this page. More detail here. Questions? We’ve got answers.

 

Partners

This is a unique project for Smart Chicago in that we have provided no funding to make this happen. It is the result of a loose and long-winding process of developers, public health officials, and leaders in the Chicago technology community coming together around a common mission. We work most closely with Joe Olson and Cory Nissen of Tracklytics and the Chicago Department of Public Health. Scott Robbin developed the admin tool and Raed Mansour has been instrumental in many ways. Q Ethan McCallum has also been there from the start. See complete information on who’s been involved in this project on the About page of Foodborne Chicago.

Media

Here’s a video that Raed made explaining the system:

Here’s some infographics:

And here’s a video explainer: