Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Six nonprofit projects that aim to combine multiple sets of data to help solve social problems have each won $100,000 grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation…The winners:
• Pushpa Aman Singh, who founded GuideStar India as an effort of the Civil Society Information Services India. GuideStar India is the most comprehensive database of India’s registered charities. It has profiles of more than 4,000 organizations, and Ms. Singh plans to expand that number and the types of information included.
• Development Initiatives, an international aid organization, to support its partnership with the Ugandan nonprofit Development Research and Training. Together, they are trying to help residents of two districts in Uganda identify a key problem the communities face and use existing data sets to build both online and offline tools to help tackle that challenge…
• H.V. Jagadish, at the University of Michigan, to develop a prototype that will merge sets of incompatible geographic data to make them comparable. Mr. Jagadish, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science, points to crime precincts and school districts as an example. “We want to understand the impact of education on crime, but the districts don’t quite overlap with the precincts,” he says. “This tool will address the lack of overlap.”
• Vijay Modi, at Columbia University, to work with government agencies and charities in Nigeria on a tool similar to Foursquare, the social network that allows people to share their location with friends. Mr. Modi, a mechanical-engineering professor and faculty member of the university’s Earth Institute, envisions a tool that will help people find important resources more easily…
• Gisli Olafsson and his team at NetHope, a network of aid organizations. The group is building a tool to help humanitarian charities share their data more widely and in real time—potentially saving more lives during disasters…
• Development Gateway, a nonprofit that assists international development charities with technology, and GroundTruth Initiative, a nonprofit that helps residents of communities learn mapping and media skills. The two groups want to give people living in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, more detailed information about local schools…”
Selected Readings on Crowdsourcing Funds
The Living Library’s Selected Readings series seeks to build a knowledge base on innovative approaches for improving the effectiveness and legitimacy of governance. This curated and annotated collection of recommended works on the topic of crowdsourcing was originally published in 2013.
Crowdsourcing funds, or crowdfunding, is an emerging method for raising money that allows a wide pool of people to make small investments, gain access to ideas and projects they feel personally connected to, and spur growth in small businesses and social ventures. Popular crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo helped bring the practice into the public consciousness. Now, civic crowdfunding platforms like Citizinvestor and Spacehive are helping to apply this innovative funding model already in use for helping to fund artists, charities and inventors to help address public concerns traditionally considered under government’s purview.
Crowdfunding has also received recent attention from policymakers in the US through the US Securities JOBS Act, which provides an exemption from the registration requirements for offerings of securities by a company made through an SEC registered Crowdfunding Platform.
Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
- Tanja Aitamurto — The Impact of Crowdfunding on Journalism — an article exploring crowdfunding in journalism, particularly related to reporting for the benefit of the public good.
- Peter Baeck and Liam Collins — Working the Crowd: A Short Guide to Crowdfunding and How It Can Work for You — a general overview of crowdfunding models and the technological advances that make them possible.
- Jason Best, Sherwood Neiss and Davis Jones — How Crowdfund Investing Helps Solve Three Pressing Socioeconomic Challenges — a paper describing the various public benefits of the rise of crowdfunding.
- Kristof De Buysere, Oliver Gajda, Ronald Kleverlaan, Dan Marom and Matthias Klaes — A Framework for European Crowdfunding — an exploration of the crowdfunding ecosystem in Europe with an eye toward developing strategic crowdfunding policy frameworks for the continent.
- Matthew Hollow — Crowdfunding and Civic Society in Europe: A Profitable Partnership? — a paper on crowdfunding’s effects on civil society in Europe.
- Ethan R. Mollick — The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Study — an overview of the varied dynamics of success and failure in crowdfunding initiatives.
- Abbey R. Stemler — The JOBS Act and Crowdfunding: Harnessing the Power—and Money—of the Masses — a discussion of the JOBS Act’s effects on the public, including changing the relationship between businesses and the government.
Annotated Selected Reading List (in alphabetical order)
Aitamurto, Tanja. “The Impact of Crowdfunding on Journalism.” Journalism Practice 5, no. 4 (2011): 429–445. http://bit.ly/1bk4wNI.
- This article analyzes the impact of crowdfunding on journalism, where, “readers’ donations accumulate into judgments about the issues that need to be covered.”
- Aitamurto’s central findings inspire optimism regarding the potential of crowdfunding for the public good. She finds that, “From the donor’s perspective, donating does not create a strong relationship from donor to journalist or to the story to which they contributed;” rather, “[t]he primary motivation for donating is to contribute to the common good and social change.”
Baeck, Peter and Liam Collins. Working the Crowd: A Short Guide to Crowdfunding and How It Can Work for You. Nesta, May 2013. http://bit.ly/Hkl3rx.
- This report “aims to give a quick overview of crowdfunding, the different versions of the model and how they work.”
- The authors list four technological innovations that have contributed to the growth of modern crowdfunding:
- An online place for pitches
- Moving your money with a click
- The social engine
- Fueling campaigns with algorithms
- Baeck and Collins consider public and social projects to be one of the areas where crowdfunding can have a significant impact. They argue that civic crowdfunding “has the potential to disrupt how money for charitable causes is sourced and how public services and spaces are used and paid for.”
Best, Jason, Sherwood Neiss and Davis Jones. “How Crowdfund Investing Helps Solve Three Pressing Socioeconomic Challenges.” Crowdfunding PR, Social Media & Marketing Campaigns. http://bit.ly/1aaTGwQ.
- This paper outlines the forces driving the widespread use of crowdfund investing, namely social media, the existence of funding systems that marginalize people outside of major urban centers and the ability of people to function remotely from their work spaces.
- The authors also discuss a number of public-facing benefits of crowdfund investing:
- Crowdfund Investing Creates Jobs
- Bringing capital in off the sidelines for use by small businesses
- Funding entrepreneurs everywhere
- Capital no longer for the chosen few
- Crowdfund Investing Grows GDP
- Reduction in the failure rate of small businesses
- Crowd monitoring reduces agency costs
De Buysere, Kristof, Oliver Gajda, Ronald Kleverlaan, Dan Marom, and Matthias Klaes. A Framework for European Crowdfunding, 2012. http://bit.ly/1aaTFsE.
- This paper seeks to provide a “concise overview of the state of crowdfunding in Europe, with the aim of establishing policy and a distinct framework for the European crowdfunding industry,” which the authors believe, “will aid in the economic recovery of Europe.”
- The authors, in their advocacy for greater crowdfunding opportunities for businesses in Europe, provide a rationale for the practice that also helps demonstrate the potential benefits of greater crowdfunding opportunities within government. They argue that, “Crowdfunding can offer unique support for budding and existing entrepreneurs on multiple levels. No other investment form, be it debt or equity, can provide the benefits of pre-sales, market research, word-of-mouth promotion, and crowd wisdom without additional cost.”
Hollow, Matthew. “Crowdfunding and Civic Society in Europe: A Profitable Partnership?” Open Citizenship 4, no. 1 (May 20, 2013). http://bit.ly/1cgzefL.
- In this paper, Hollow explores the rise of crowdfunding platforms (CFPs), particularly related to civil society. He notes that, “[f]or civil society activists and others concerned with local welfare issues, the emergence of these new CFPs has been hugely significant: It has opened up a new source of funding when governments and businesses around the world are cutting back on their spending.”
- Hollow argues that, “aside from their evident financial and economic benefits, CFPs also have the capacity to help foster and strengthen non-parliamentary democratic structures and practices. As such, they should be supported and encouraged as part of a framework of further European democratization and civic integration.”
Mollick, Ethan R. “The Dynamics of Crowdfunding: An Exploratory Study.” Journal of Business Venturing (June 26, 2013). http://bit.ly/1aaTJIV.
- This paper “offers a description of the underlying dynamics of success and failure among crowdfunded ventures,” focusing on how personal networks and the project quality and viability have an impact on the success of crowdfunding efforts.
- Mollick also highlights how other factors, like the geography of the project, design choices made by crowdfunding sites and developments in technology in this space all have an influence on the relationship between backers and project founders.
- The paper finally demonstrates that projects that succeed do so by a small margin and those that fail seemingly by a large margin suggesting the influence of social bias and crowd influence.
Stemler, Abbey R. “The JOBS Act and Crowdfunding: Harnessing the Power—and Money—of the Masses.” Business Horizons 56, no. 3 (May 2013): 271–275. http://bit.ly/1ih9lts.
- This paper discusses the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act signed into law by President Obama in 2012, with a specific focus on the CROWDFUND Act, which enables entrepreneurs and small business owners to sell limited equity in their companies to a “crowd” of investors.
- The objective of the Act is to exempt crowdfunding from registration requirement costs, allowing the potential of equity-based funding to be realized, by creating a pathway for underfunded entrepreneurs to access otherwise inaccessible streams of funding.
- Stemler argues that the Act helps to legitimize crowdfunding as a community-building and fundraising tool for the business community, and also helps build better relationships between small business owners and government.
Crisis response needs to be a science, not an art
Jimmy Whitworth in the Financial Times:”…It is an imperative to offer shelter, nutrition, sanitation and medical care to those suddenly bereft of it. Without aid, humanitarian crises would cause still greater suffering. Yet admiration for the agencies that deliver relief should not blind us to the need to ensure that it is well delivered. Humanitarian responses must be founded on good evidence.
The evidence base, unfortunately, is weak. We know that storms, earthquakes and conflicts have devastating consequences for health and wellbeing, and that not responding is not an option, but we know surprisingly little about how best to go about it. Not only is evidence-based practice rare in humanitarian relief operations, it is often impossible.
Questions about how best to deliver clean water or adequate shelter, and even about which health needs should be prioritised as the most pressing, have often been barely researched. Indeed, the evidence gap is so great that the Humanitarian Practice Network has highlighted a “dire lack of credible data to help us understand just how much populations in crisis suffer, and to what extent relief operations are able to relieve that suffering”. No wonder aid responses are often characterised as messy.
Good practice often rests on past practice rather than research. The Bible of humanitarian relief is a document called the Sphere handbook, an important initiative to set minimum standards for provision of health, nutrition, sanitation and shelter. Yet analysis of the 2004 handbook has revealed that just 13 per cent of its 346 standards were supported by good evidence of relevance to health. The handbook, for example, recommended that refugee camps should prioritise measles vaccination – a worthwhile goal, but not one that should clearly be favoured over control of other infectious diseases.
Also under-researched is the question of how best to provide types of relief that everybody agrees meet essential needs. Access to clean water is a clear priority for almost all populations in crisis but little is understood about how this is most efficiently delivered. Is it best to ship bottled water to stricken areas? Are tankers of clean water more effective? Or can water purification tablets do the job? The summer floods in northern India made it clear that there is little good evidence one way or another.
Adequate shelter, too, is a human essential in all but the most benign environments but, once again, the evidence base about how best to provide it is limited. There is a school of thought that building transitional shelter from locally available materials is better in the long run than housing people under tents, tarpaulins and plastic, which if accurate would have far-reaching consequences for standard practice. But too little research has been done…
Researchers also face significant challenges to building a better evidence base. They can struggle to secure access to disaster zones when getting relief in is the priority. The timescales involved in applying for funding and ethical approval, too, make it difficult for them to move quickly enough to set up a study in the critical post-disaster period.
It is to address this that Enhancing Learning and Research for Humanitarian Assistance, with the support of the Wellcome Trust and the UK Department for International Development, recently launched an £8m research programme that investigates these issues.”
New U.S. Open Government National Action Plan
The White House Fact Sheet: “In September 2011, President Obama joined the leaders of seven other nations in announcing the launch of the Open Government Partnership (OGP) – a global effort to encourage transparent, effective, and accountable governance.
Two years later, OGP has grown to 60 countries that have made more than 1000 commitments to improve the governance of more than two billion people around the globe. OGP is now a global community of government reformers, civil society leaders, and business innovators working together to develop and implement ambitious open government reforms and advance good governance…
Today at the OGP summit in London, the United States announced a new U.S. Open Government National Action Plan that includes six ambitious new commitments that will advance these efforts even further. Those commitments include expanding open data, modernizing the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), increasing fiscal transparency, increasing corporate transparency, advancing citizen engagement and empowerment, and more effectively managing public resources.
Expand Open Data: Open Data fuels innovation that grows the economy and advances government transparency and accountability. Government data has been used by journalists to uncover variations in hospital billings, by citizens to learn more about the social services provided by charities in their communities, and by entrepreneurs building new software tools to help farmers plan and manage their crops. Building upon the successful implementation of open data commitments in the first U.S. National Action Plan, the new Plan will include commitments to make government data more accessible and useful for the public, such as reforming how Federal agencies manage government data as a strategic asset, launching a new version of Data.gov, and expanding agriculture and nutrition data to help farmers and communities.
Modernize the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA): The FOIA encourages accountability through transparency and represents a profound national commitment to open government principles. Improving FOIA administration is one of the most effective ways to make the U.S. Government more open and accountable. Today, the United States announced a series of commitments to further modernize FOIA processes, including launching a consolidated online FOIA service to improve customers’ experience and making training resources available to FOIA professionals and other Federal employees.
Increase Fiscal Transparency: The Administration will further increase the transparency of where Federal tax dollars are spent by making federal spending data more easily available on USASpending.gov; facilitating the publication of currently unavailable procurement contract information; and enabling Americans to more easily identify who is receiving tax dollars, where those entities or individuals are located, and how much they receive.
Increase Corporate Transparency: Preventing criminal organizations from concealing the true ownership and control of businesses they operate is a critical element in safeguarding U.S. and international financial markets, addressing tax avoidance, and combatting corruption in the United States and abroad. Today we committed to take further steps to enhance transparency of legal entities formed in the United States.
Advance Citizen Engagement and Empowerment: OGP was founded on the principle that an active and robust civil society is critical to open and accountable governance. In the next year, the Administration will intensify its efforts to roll back and prevent new restrictions on civil society around the world in partnership with other governments, multilateral institutions, the philanthropy community, the private sector, and civil society. This effort will focus on improving the legal and regulatory framework for civil society, promoting best practices for government-civil society collaboration, and conceiving of new and innovative ways to support civil society globally.
More Effectively Manage Public Resources: Two years ago, the Administration committed to ensuring that American taxpayers receive every dollar due for the extraction of the nation’s natural resources by committing to join the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). We continue to work toward achieving full EITI compliance in 2016. Additionally, the U.S. Government will disclose revenues on geothermal and renewable energy and discuss future disclosure of timber revenues.
For more information on OGP, please visit www.opengovpartnership.org or follow @opengovpart on Twitter.”
See also White House Plans a Single FOIA Portal Across Government
Connecting Grassroots and Government for Disaster Response
New Report by John Crowley for the Wilson Center: “Leaders in disaster response are finding it necessary to adapt to a new reality. Although community actions have always been the core of the recovery process, collective action from the grassroots has changed response operations in ways that few would have predicted. Using new tools that interconnect over expanding mobile networks, citizens can exchange information via maps and social media, then mobilize thousands of people to collect, analyze, and act on that information. Sometimes, community-sourced intelligence may be fresher and more accurate than the information given to the responders who provide aid…
Also see the companion report from our September 2012 workshop, written by Ryan Burns and Lea Shanley, as well as a series of videos from the workshop and podcasts with workshop participants.”
More Top-Down Participation, Please! Institutionalized empowerment through open participation
Michelle Ruesch and Oliver Märker in DDD: “…this is not another article on the empowering potential of bottom-up digital political participation. Quite the contrary: It instead seeks to stress the empowering potential of top-down digital political participation. Strikingly, the democratic institutionalization of (digital) political participation is rarely considered when we speak about power in the context of political participation. Wouldn’t it be true empowerment though if the right of citizens to speak their minds were directly integrated into political and administrative decision-making processes?
Institutionalized political participation
Political participation, defined as any act that aims to influence politics in some way, can be initiated either by citizens, referred to as “bottom-up” participation, or by government, often referred to as “top-down” participation. For many, the word “top-down” instantly evokes negative connotations, even though top-down participatory spaces are actually the foundation of democracy. These are the spaces of participation offered by the state and guaranteed by democratic constitutions. For a long time, top-down participation could be equated with formal democratic participation such as elections, referenda or party politics. Today, however, in states like Germany we can observe a new form of top-down political participation, namely government-initiated participation that goes beyond what is legally required and usually makes extensive use of digital media.
Like many other Western states, Germany has to cope with decreasing voter turnout and a lack of trust in political parties. At the same time, according to a recent study from 2012, two-thirds of eligible voters would like to be more involved in political decisions. The case of “Stuttgart 21” served as a late wake-up call for many German municipalities. Plans to construct a new train station in the center of the city of Stuttgart resulted in a petition for a local referendum, which was rejected. Protests against the train station culminated in widespread demonstrations in 2010, forcing construction to be halted. Even though a referendum was finally held in 2011 and a slight majority voted in favor of the train station, the Stuttgart 21 case has since been cited by Chancellor Angela Merkel and others as an example of the negative consequences of taking decisions without consulting with citizens early on. More and more municipalities and federal ministries in Germany have therefore started acknowledging that the conventional democratic model of participation in elections every few years is no longer sufficient. The Federal Ministry of Transport, Building and Urban Development, for example, published a manual for “good participation” in urban development projects….
What’s so great about top-down participation?
Semi-formal top-down participation processes have one major thing in common, regardless of the topic they address: Governmental institutions voluntarily open up a space for dialogue and thereby obligate themselves to take citizens’ concerns and ideas into account.
As a consequence, government-initiated participation offers the potential for institutionalized empowerment beyond elections. It grants the possibility of integrating participation into political and administrative decision-making processes….
Bottom-up participation will surely always be an important mobilizer of democratic change. Nevertheless, the provision of spaces of open participation by governments can aid in the institutionalization of citizens’ involvement in political decision-making. Had Stuttgart offered an open space of participation early in the train station construction process, maybe protests would never have escalated the way they did.
So is top-down participation the next step in the process of democratization? It could be, but only under certain conditions. Most importantly, top-down open participation requires a genuine willingness to abandon the old principle of doing business behind closed doors. This is not an easy undertaking; it requires time and endurance. Serious open participation also requires creating state institutions that ensure the relevance of the results by evaluating them and considering them in political decisions. We have formulated ten conditions that we consider necessary for the genuine institutionalization of open political participation [14]:
- There needs to be some scope for decision-making. Top-down participation only makes sense when the results of the participation can influence decisions.
- The government must genuinely aim to integrate the results into decision-making processes.
- The limits of participation must be communicated clearly. Citizens must be informed if final decision-making power rests with a political body, for example.
- The subject matter, rules and procedures need to be transparent.
- Citizens need to be aware that they have the opportunity to participate.
- Access to participation must be easy, the channels of participation chosen according to the citizens’ media habits. Using the Internet should not be a goal in itself.
- The participatory space should be “neutral ground”. A moderator can help ensure this.
- The set-up must be interactive. Providing information is only a prerequisite for participation.
- Participation must be possible without providing real names or personal data.
- Citizens must receive continuous feedback regarding how results are handled and the implementation process.”
The Brave New World of Good
Brad Smith: “Welcome to the Brave New World of Good. Once almost the exclusive province of nonprofit organizations and the philanthropic foundations that fund them, today the terrain of good is disputed by social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, impact investors, big business, governments, and geeks. Their tools of choice are markets, open data, innovation, hackathons, and disruption. They cross borders, social classes, and paradigms with the swipe of a touch screen. We seemed poised to unleash a whole new era of social and environmental progress, accompanied by unimagined economic prosperity.
As a brand, good is unassailably brilliant. Who could be against it? It is virtually impossible to write an even mildly skeptical blog post about good without sounding well, bad — or at least a bit old-fashioned. For the record, I firmly believe there is much in the brave new world of good that is helping us find our way out of the tired and often failed models of progress and change on which we have for too long relied. Still, there are assumptions worth questioning and questions worth answering to ensure that the good we seek is the good that can be achieved.
…
Open Data
Second only to “good” in terms of marketing genius is the concept of “open data.” An offspring of previous movements such as “open source,” “open content,” and “open access,” open data in the Internet age has come to mean data that is machine-readable, free to access, and free to use, re-use, and re-distribute, subject to attribution. Fully open data goes way beyond posting your .pdf document on a Web site (as neatly explained by Tim Berners Lee’s five-star framework).
When it comes to government, there is a rapidly accelerating movement around the world that is furthering transparency by making vast stores of data open. Ditto on the data of international aid funders like the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. The push has now expanded to the tax return data of nonprofits and foundations (IRS Forms 990). Collection of data by government has a business model; it’s called tax dollars. However, open data is not born pure. Cleaning that data, making it searchable, and building and maintaining reliable user interfaces is complex, time-consuming, and often expensive. That requires a consistent stream of income of the kind that can only come from fees, subscriptions, or, increasingly less so, government.
Foundation grants are great for short-term investment, experimentation, or building an app or two, but they are no substitute for a scalable business model. Structured, longitudinal data are vital to social, environmental, and economic progress. In a global economy where government is retreating from the funding of public goods, figuring how to pay for the cost of that data is one of our greatest challenges.”
Best Practices for Government Crowdsourcing Programs
Anton Root: “Crowdsourcing helps communities connect and organize, so it makes sense that governments are increasingly making use of crowd-powered technologies and processes.
Just recently, for instance, we wrote about the Malaysian government’s initiative to crowdsource the national budget. Closer to home, we’ve seen government agencies from U.S. AID to NASA make use of the crowd.
Daren Brabham, professor at the University of Southern California, recently published a report titled “Using Crowdsourcing In Government” that introduces readers to the basics of crowdsourcing, highlights effective use cases, and establishes best practices when it comes to governments opening up to the crowd. Below, we take a look at a few of the suggestions Brabham makes to those considering crowdsourcing.
Brabham splits up his ten best practices into three phases: planning, implementation, and post-implementation. The first suggestion in the planning phase he makes may be the most critical of all: “Clearly define the problem and solution parameters.” If the community isn’t absolutely clear on what the problem is, the ideas and solutions that users submit will be equally vague and largely useless.
This applies not only to government agencies, but also to SMEs and large enterprises making use of crowdsourcing. At Massolution NYC 2013, for instance, we heard again and again the importance of meticulously defining a problem. And open innovation platform InnoCentive’s CEO Andy Zynga stressed the big role his company plays in helping organizations do away with the “curse of knowledge.”
Brabham also has advice for projects in their implementation phase, the key bit being: “Launch a promotional plan and a plan to grow and sustain the community.” Simply put, crowdsourcing cannot work without a crowd, so it’s important to build up the community before launching a campaign. It does take some balance, however, as a community that’s too large by the time a campaign launches can turn off newcomers who “may not feel welcome or may be unsure how to become initiated into the group or taken seriously.”
Brabham’s key advice for the post-implementation phase is: “Assess the project from many angles.” The author suggests tracking website traffic patterns, asking users to volunteer information about themselves when registering, and doing original research through surveys and interviews. The results of follow-up research can help to better understand the responses submitted, and also make it easier to show the successes of the crowdsourcing campaign. This is especially important for organizations partaking in ongoing crowdsourcing efforts.”
The Solution Revolution
New book by William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan from Deloitte: “Where tough societal problems persist, citizens, social enterprises, and yes, even businesses, are relying less and less on government-only solutions. More likely, they are crowd funding, ride-sharing, app- developing or impact- investing to design lightweight solutions for seemingly intractable problems. No challenge is too daunting, from malaria in Africa to traffic congestion in California.
These wavemakers range from edgy social enterprises growing at a clip of 15% a year, to mega-foundations that are eclipsing development aid, to Fortune 500 companies delivering social good on the path to profit. The collective force of these new problem solvers is creating dynamic and rapidly evolving markets for social good. They trade solutions instead of dollars to fill the gap between what government can provide and what citizens need. By erasing public-private sector boundaries, they are unlocking trillions of dollars in social benefit and commercial value.
The Solution Revolution explores how public and private are converging to form the Solution Economy. By examining scores of examples, Eggers and Macmillan reveal the fundamentals of this new – globally prevalent – economic and social order. The book is designed to help guide those willing to invest time, knowledge or capital toward sustainable, social progress.”
Chicago Works For You
“Chicago Works For You is a citywide dashboard with ward-by-ward views of service delivery in Chicago. …The homepage is a citywide map with a daily summary of all service requests submitted, by service type and ward.Dark lines under and up-arrows next to a request type means there were more requests of that type on that date than average. The longer the line, the higher above average. Highest above average is highlighted on the map as default. Click any service request type to see the raw numbers and averages. The legend in the lake shows you the number ranges for each type in each ward. Click any service type to see those numbers for any day….
This data comes directly from the City of Chicago’s Open311 API. Chicago’s Open311 API can be used to both view 311 request data as well as enter new requests directly into the system. In 2012, the City of Chicago became a Code for America partner city. A team of four technologists worked to build an Open311 system for Chicago that would help residents track what was happening with their service requests. Through a grant from Smart Chicago the team built Chicago Service Tracker which shows each step the city takes to resolve a 311 request. This also enabled all the 311 data to be accessible on the city’s data portal….
The Smart Chicago Collaborative is a civic organization devoted to using technology to make lives better in Chicago. We were formed to address the challenge of the lack of broadband Internet access for all Chicagoans. More broadly, we work to apply the transformative power of technology to solve problems for the people of Chicago.
We are a startup that was founded in part by our municipal government and nurtured by some of its most venerable institutions. Our founding partners are the City of Chicago, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and The Chicago Community Trust. As a funding collaborative, we help bring together municipal, philanthropic, and corporate investments in civic innovation.
We have a host of current projects and partnerships, and we are actively seeking to connect ideas and resources in all areas of philanthropy in Chicago.”