1. End of` the Year Report
Team Chicago
Code for America, 2012
2. Chicago, Illinois
OUR APPROACH
The city of Chicago came to Code for America in 2012 with a primary goal of making its 311 data publicly available
using the Open311 standard. In addition to the core work on Open311, the Chicago team was also asked to build at
least one application that highlighted the benefits of the new data portal.
As CfA fellows, we intended to do more than simply fulfill Chicago’s technical goals. We aimed to engage with and
understand the needs of the communities of civic software enthusiasts (hackers), various community groups, local
businesses, educators, and government employees. To truly understand how the software we were creating should
work and best benefit its users, we needed to connect with as many of these people as possible.
Additionally, we wanted to use our work in Chicago as a platform for expanding about the Open311 standard and for
gaining a better understanding of its national and global implications. We hoped to reach out to cities, companies,
and organizations working on Open311 and civic data portal solutions to learn as much as possible about the space.
We felt that, if we were truly going to make a difference in the Open311 community, our work in Chicago had to be
innovative. And the only way to innovate effectively is to truly understand the existing Open311 landscape.
It’s worth nothing that, although the City of Chicago had very specific goals, our city partners John Tolva and Dan X.
O’Neil were always incredibly supportive of our broader goal of improving the Open311 specification, in some way,
for all cities.
MEET OUR TEAM
POPULATION
2,707,120
SOME NICKNAMES
Chicagoland, The Windy City, The Second City, Chi-town
WARDS
50
MAYOR
Rahm Emanuel
Ben Sheldon Rob Brackett
John Tolva
Chief Technology Officer
City of Chicago
Dan X. O’Neil
Executive Director
Smart Chicago Collaborative
Jesse Bounds Angel Kittiyachavalit
3. We had over 70 interviews during residency. We talked to city partners, community leaders, alderman,
alderman staff, civic developers, non-profits, professors, and start-ups to learn more about Chicago and
311.
Based on the feedback from Alderman, we created the Daily Brief. It’s a web application that allows you
to quickly see what is happening in your city right now based on Open311 service requests. It shows you
how many tickets are currently open, were opened yesterday, and were closed yesterday all on a map
and filterable. As we waited for data in Chicago, we deployed the application in Boston, Baltimore, and
Bloomington.
In May, we performed user testing on the Daily Brief. We met with ten people including Alderman staff,
civic partners, and civic developers. We received some really useful feedback and was able to tackle some
low hanging fruit to make the application better.
dailybrief.311labs.org/baltimore
PROJECTS
THE DAILY BRIEF
4. A webapp that pings and compiles data from ~30 cities’ Open311 endpoint servers. Used to advise Chicago
on how other cities have configured Open311 to expose SR types and provide a benchmark for citizen
utilization
open311status.herokuapp.com
PROJECTS
OPEN311 STATUS
Service Tracker gives citizens a Fedex-like view of their service requests, showing all the actions,
department changes, and other work that has happened.
servicetracker.cityofchicago.org
311 SERVICE TRACKER
5. PROJECTS
Still under development, this application brings together many of our learnings from previous application
experiments and the work done by fellows on the Open311 Dashboard in 2011. It’s most interesting feature
is that it provides an easy way to compare two distinct political boundaries (i.e. Chicago wards) to see how
they stack up in terms of 311 service requests and delivery performance.
311.fm
311 FM
We realized that what pioneering organizations and citizens need is a platform to experiment with 311
data and communicate with each other about their work. 311 Labs aims to encourage collaboration and
experimentation and start to tie together the work that folks have been doing in this space over the last
few years. It also showcases applications a city can potentially use once they adopt Open311.
311labs.org
311 LABS
6. Used the city’s Oracle database to analyze historical requests to determine what public SR types had
follow-ons, what types of follow-ons they were, and whether those follow-ons were of public or private
types. This was done to justify the need for accommodating follow-ons in Open311.
Using the results of the public/private follow-on analysis, we created the first version of an amended
Open311 specification that was capable of describing the follow-on activity that is often part of a service
request in Chicago. This amended specification (with some modifications) was eventually implemented by
the vendor in Chicago and powers the Chicago Service Tracker.
Performed a survey of OpenGov community and other allies to request their input on what types of
requests they would like to see made available through Open311. A brief report on its findings was
provided to the City of Chicago.
An implementation of Open311 with additions for solving the follow-on issue and querying by update time.
Based on Chicago’s nightly backups of CSR.
PROJECTS
PUBLIC/PRIVATE FOLLOW-ON ANALYSIS
OPEN311 SPECIFICATION ADDITIONS
OPEN311 SR TYPE SURVEY
OPEN311 TEST SERVER
Since the City of Chicago Open311 API contains some features and fields not currently available in any
other endpoint, the City requested that we create a page that highlights the differences and makes it easy
for developers to understand how to consume the API.
dev.cityofchicago.org
CITY OF CHICAGO DEVELOPER RESOURCES (API DOCUMENTATION)
7. Utilizes Chicago-specific Open311 API extensions to create an interactive (and fun!) nearly-realtime
dashboard for incoming and updated Service Requests.
super-mayor.herokuapp.com
PROJECTS
SUPER MAYOR EMANUEL
bit.ly/TwIi2y
WEEKLY RESIDENCY NEWSLETTERS
We kept a record of fellow interviews during the residency and shared our experiences with ~200 local
Chicagoans and allies.
8. During our residency in Feburary we hosted the Chicago Civic IdeaHack as part of Code for America’s
Code Across America event. We had over 70 attendees come together for a full day of learning, meeting,
planning and building. We kicked things off with four great presenters: Chicago CTO John Tolva, civic
entrepreneur Joe Flesh, community leader Pastor Phil Jackson, and hackathon veteran Kate Eyler-Werve.
Then we crowdsourced 150+ ways to make Chicago (more) awesome and broke off into working groups.
At the end of the day, we shared some great projects that are off to a strong start: a G8 news aggregator,
an improved bike crash browser, a Geek Prom, a nonprofit technology incubator, and a Public Schools
Project to coordinate requests for school data...among many others.
And we couldn’t have done it without Veronica Ludwig and our sponsors: Knight-Mozilla OpenNews,
Excelerate Labs, TrainSignal, Mobile Citizen, Spartz Media, Venchure, Technori, Hackatopia, Accolade, 21st
Century Youth Project, Ji-V Hack, Busy Beaver Buttons, and Dragonfly Mandarin Restaurant.
ideahackchicago.com
EVENTS
IDEAHACK
9. At the request of Brett Goldstein (CIO, City of
Chicago) we did two separate brown bag lunch
events for the City of Chicago IT staff. We covered
topics ranging from agile software development
practices and tools to programming languages like
Python. These sessions were well received by the
City of Chicago staff and were a key part of the CIO’s
initiative to encourage his team to learn about and
explore new technologies.
The Open Gov Chicago Meetup group invited us to
talk to their members and get to know them. We had
a panel where we talked about Code for America
in general and what we were doing with our time in
Chicago.
We attended an after school class and gave a short
demonstration of iPhone app creation. We promoted
technology as a valid career path for inner city kids
to choose. Also, encouraged them to explore and
analyze civic tech and data and help build apps that
service their communities (instead of just consuming
applications like facebook and foursquare).
LUNCH AND LEARNS
OPEN GOV MEETUP
COMMUNITY TECH EDUCATION
EVENTS
Showing students how you can code things that matter.
Packed house for our lunch and learn.
10. OUR CONTRIBUTIONS AND SUSTAINABILITY
Fellows were able to make significant contributions: both in technical applications (as described above),
as well as enabling a platform for innovation both inside of City Hall and beyond.
The primary contribution the fellows made was ensuring that Chicago’s Open311 implementation would
be accurate and comprehensive and a viable platform for technology innovation. A significant factor
in the delays was the inadequacy of the vendor’s Open311 “drop-in solution” to enable the platform for
innovation the city desired. As a result of the fellows needs-finding and technical expertise, they were
able to identify the shortcomings of that drop-in solution early on and spent a significant portion of
the fellowship working with both the city and the vendor to design an adequate implementation. The
resulting Open311 API ensures:
1. Data Accuracy: the original solution would would have declared a significant portion of requests
“closed” when in fact work was still ongoing. The fellows helped ensure the final implementation better
reflects the true status of a request.
2. Data Comprehensiveness: Chicago’s Open311 implementation is able to show the multiple steps a
service request may take---especially as it moves between departments and crews, which is not part of
the standard Open311 specification
3. Core application support: Chicago’s official Open311 application, Service Tracker, is powered by the
Open311 API itself; this is unlike many cities that, despite embracing Open311, still run their applications
using private APIs and data connectors. Because the city is actually using Open311 internally (as opposed
to just providing it as an external service), this should help ensure that Chicago’s Open311 API remains
accurate, comprehensive and able to power independently build applications.
