Presentation to the Northeastern Illinois Documents Librarians Group, Spring Meeting 2014

1. Documents!
Northeastern Illinois Documents
Librarians Group
Spring Meeting 2014
June 6, 2014 1

2. Documents | Smart Chicago
• I love documents
• A civic organization devoted to improving
lives in [place] through technology
• The philosophy & why the model works
• The founders & their roles
• The strategy & why it is important
• The funding & how it gets done
• The work & how we do it
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3. Documents
• Library geek
• Litigation paralegal
• Archiving enthusiast
• Documentation phreak
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4. Library geek
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5. Litigation paralegal
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6. Archiving enthusiast
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7. Documentation phreak
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8. Smart Chicago
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9. Our Principles
Technology
Open
Everyone
Chicago
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10. Philosophy: technology; open
• We are about technology
– Everything we do relates to technology. We are of and
about the Internet
– We believe in the transformative power of the Internet
to change lives and build the economy for all
• We are open
– We are a small organization looking to make the
biggest impact possible. We can’t do that by being
tight or closed
– We work in the open, using & publishing open source
technology
– We have methods for others allowed “in”, whether as
contributors, observers, users, whatever
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11. Philosophy: everyone; Chicago
• We seek to be of use to everyone
– We believe in the power of the network
– The network needs everyone in it to be
powerful
– We work on solutions that cover the entire city
• We focus on Chicago
– Our middle name
– We do seek to scale our solutions, but not
without serving Chicago
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12. The Strategy
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13. Access, Skills, and Data
• Access to the Internet for all
– Broadband at home
– Public computer centers and Community
technology centers
– Next generation stuff
• Skills once you’re on the Internet
– All on ramps
• Data so that there’s something worth looking
at once you’re on and know how to work it
– Apps
– Infrastructure
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14. The Founders
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15. 2 Philanthropies and
1 Municipality
• The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
– A center for ideation and conception
– 2007 report, “The City that NETWorks”
– The primary source of funding
• Chicago Community Trust
– Provides housing for the organization and is fiscal agent
– At the center of funding and knowledge for the region
– Critical financial, human resources, and other support
• The City of Chicago
– The most important policy lever in the region
– Departmental relationships
– Getting things done
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16. The Funding
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17. Sources of Capital
• Founders
– MacArthur: primary; essential
– CCT: critical support; real dollars
– City: BTOP; possible new sources at the Department
levels
• Other philanthropies
– Sprague: on-target programs
– Pritzker: allied goals; serving as an IT shop
– ISTC: expertise in the field of open data/ hackathons/
gov policy, etc
• Corporate
– Nothing really on this yet
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18. The Work
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19. Connect Chicago
• Connect Chicago is a loose network of more than
250 places in the city where internet and computer
access, digital skills training, and online learning
resources are available—for free.
• Recent metrics project
– Two teams of 7 people employed for the summer with
Federal money
– 1,110 photos
– 200+ records updated
– 197 in-depth interviews with front-line people working
in public computer centers and community technology
centers
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20. The Work
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21. Civic User Testing Group
• 512 signups in 49 wards. +119 since June 3
• Completed test #3
• Published results of FreedomPop test
• Patterns– our last month of Gansen
• We are planning a huge push on this, with a
project page listing our advisors and
philosophy
• Two partners (Hoy Newspaper and Open
Maps) want to do tests with us
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22. City Update
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23. Chicago Works For You
• A city services dashboard that helps
people see the entire corpus of the city at
once
• Not their little slice, but all of us
• We’re in this together, but we will have a
hard time seeing things that way unless
we have tools that frame it that way
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24. #CivicSummer
• 6 week program
• Learned a lot about
teaching youth (150+)
• Learned a lot about the
organizations (FSM and
Mikva)
• Learned a lot about how
summer works in
Chicago
• Badge!
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28. Moar
• There’s always more
• @danxoneil
• (773) 960-6045
• doneil@cct.org
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