This week I had the opportunity to attend the OpenGovHack Night in Chicago. It happens every Tuesday night from 6-10 pm. They have free pizza and between 50-100 (or more) attendees each week! The meeting is part scheduled agenda and part time to meet with your group and work on ideas. It seems like a great way to create civic tools, promote tools and build skills within the community.

I would love to find a way for smaller communities to find a way to make similar meetings happen – so I took pretty good notes with an eye to helping that happen. Also, I know similar meetings happen on monthly basis in the Twin Cities (Open Twin Cities) – maybe these notes will be informative to those folks too.

The meeting started with brief introductions. There were about 50 people in attendance – including seasoned coders, new and wannabe coders, government and city employees with an interest in using technology to solve their problems and reporters. People come to be helpful and/or learn. Some are very passionate about a given project and they can really drive a project; some are less driven but certainly committed enough to show up for four hours on a Tuesday night!

The meeting started with brief introductions. I’d say 12 people were brand new and probably 12-15 come every week. I think there were as many as 10 women. Lots of different ages. People were friendly.

After introductions were announcements, which included the introduction of some cool tools, so I’ll include those:

1. Expunge.io expunging a juvenile record, which doesn’t necessarily expunge without a request!! It connects you with legal aid
2. Holla Back – public site to track street harassment
3. Codefund to raise funds for good code ideas; first user Rose Afriyie http://bit.ly/meet-rose
4. James Kalven wins open data battle to make Chicago police misconduct info public
5. Five-O app to help document police brutality
6. tutormentorprogramlocator.net app for parents, leaders, decision makers

Usually they have presentations next, but this was a working-only group so we got updates from workgroups:

• Civic hacking 101
• new coders – github & getting started today
• transportation – red light ticket analysis from tribe to tack right turn accidents on lights with cameras – tribune will actually be speaking to group next week
• education – CP’s procurement & easy to share info
• environment – rain intensity & take back recycling – landlords need to recycle 5- apts+ site to report
• vacant bldgs – open data to build model of when bldgs are likely to become vacant – mapping & predictive modeling;
• social service delivery – 10 program integrated into one app to assess eligibility – looking at design
• modeling pension reform – people are in for &40000 to bring pension to healthy – need to make info accessible – learn financial tools
• make research available to public

Then the groups met up and worked. I attended the Civic Hacking 101 session presented by Christopher Whitaker of Smart Chicago. I thought he did a very good job. I’ll include a very high level outline of his talk:

1. Intro to Chicago data portal
2. Intro to APIs
   1. Example: Wasmycartowed.com
3. Open source software
   1. Example: Chicago flu shot app – where to get it? Transportation? Code lives in github repository. Boston forked flu app in36 hours; made it better; made Chicago’s better; issues fork
4. Need community activist for real world problems to solve

Civic Hacking only lasted about 20 minutes with the idea that then folks could head off to another work group. I was very tempted – but had teens waiting for me. But next time I’m in Chicago on a Tuesday without kids, I’ll plan to join again.