Open City - Civic apps built with open data

Civic apps built with open data

Open City was a volunteer group that created civic apps with open data to improve transparency and understanding of our government in Chicago.

We are no longer actively releasing apps under Open City, but the work continues and thrives every Tuesday night at Chi Hack Night in Chicago.

Projects

All of our projects are open source and free to use under the MIT license.

My Building Doesn't Recycle!: No recycling in your building? Tell us about it! Chicago law requires buildings with 5 or more residential units to provide adequate recycling services to occupants. However, the City of Chicago does not enforce this law—and this leads many landlords NOT to provide recycling services to tenants. Add your report to our registry to show that your building does not recycle.; GitHub repository; Team: Claire Micklin, Ben Wilhelm and Alex Kahn
Transit Future (inactive): An interactive map that explains the Transit Future, a campaign to get Cook County to build a dozen new rail lines by creating a dedicated local revenue stream.; GitHub repository; Team: Edward Oser, Catalina Velez, Nick Doiron, Juan-Pablo Velez; Collabotors: Cartografika, Center for Neighborhood Technology
Is there sewage in the Chicago River?: Every so often when Chicago gets a lot of rain or there's a significant snowmelt, the Chicagoland water management agencies pump excess wastewater into the lake and river in order to prevent flooding. This site notifies Chicagoans when this happens.; GitHub repository; Team: Derek Eder, Forest Gregg, Eric van Zanten, Scott Beslow and Andrew Clarke
Chicago Councilmatic: Are you curious about what legislation the Chicago City Council has been passing? Search, browse, subscribe and comment on everything the City Council has done since Jan 1st 2010.; GitHub repository; Now maintained by DataMade
CAPSure: Chicago Alternative Policing Strategy meetings, or CAPS meetings, are recurring events with the Chicago Police Department and Chicago residents that encourage community members and police to work together to reduce crime. CAPSure lets you find out when and where your next meeting is, in an effort to increase the level of citizen participation.; GitHub repository; Team: Derek Eder, Nick Doiron, Forest Gregg and Aya O'Connor
2nd City Zoning: 2nd City Zoning is an interactive map that lets you find out how your building is zoned, learn where to locate your business and explore zoning patterns throughout the city. To make Chicago’s zoning code digestible by humans, we took inspiration from one of our favorite games: Sim City 2000.; GitHub repository; Team: Derek Eder and Juan-Pablo Velez; Now maintained by DataMade
Edifice: Edifice is a series of maps that explore Chicago's built environment, from building footprints, to violations demolitions, and new construction.; GitHub repository; Team: Cory Mollet and Juan-Pablo Velez
How's Business?: How’s Business provides a dashboard of Chicago’s local economy. It uses open data from the City of Chicago, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Woodstock Institute to show how several economic indicators have been trending since 2005.; GitHub repository; Team: Daniel Morton, Derek Eder, Forest Gregg and Matt Gee
Crime in Chicago: Crime in Chicago is a data visualization that lets you explore crime trends in Chicago's 50 wards. It was built using open data about Chicago crimes released by the Chicago Police Department.; GitHub repository; Team: Nick Rougeux, Chad W Pry, Derek Eder, Paul Baker, Jim Breen and Juan-Pablo Velez
Chicago Public School Tiers: In Chicago, a student's chance of getting into the city's top, selective schools depends on where he or she lives. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) places every part of the city into one of four socio-economic "tiers" and requires selective schools to reserve the same number of spots for the students from each tier. This tool helps you find what CPS tier your are in.; GitHub repository; Team: Forest Gregg, Derek Eder and Juan-Pablo Velez
ClearStreets: On January 3rd 2012, the City of Chicago launched Plow Tracker , an app that tracks the city's snow plows in real time. This app uses the same data. By knowing where the plows are, we've figured out which streets have been plowed. Featured in Google's Fusion Tables Example Gallery.; GitHub repository; Now maintained by DataMade
Chicago Lobbyists: ChicagoLobbyists.org is an open data, open government, and open source project intended to improve the transparency of interactions between the City of Chicago and lobbyists and their clients.; GitHub repository | Chicago Lobbyists blog; Team: Chad W Pry, Ryan Briones, Nick Rougeux, Paul Baker and Derek Eder
Vacant and Abandoned Building Finder: ChicagoBuildings.org is a tool for finding vacant and abandoned buildings in Chicago. The data comes from reports made to the City of Chicago's 311 reporting service and is updated regularly.; GitHub repository; Team: Derek Eder
Look at Cook: Look at Cook is an easy-to-understand budget visualization for Cook County IL, which tracks government budgets and expenditures from 1993-2011 broken down by year and department. Developed in collaboration with Cook County Commissioner John Fritchey. Featured in Google's Fusion Tables Example Gallery and redeployed by the City of Whitewater, WI.; GitHub repository; Team: Derek Eder and Nick Rougeux
Metra Schedules: Created to visualize Metra's proposed 2012 service cuts due to high operating costs and shows how much of an impact the changes would have on riders' schedules. How the final result came about was a mixture of curiosity and fun with a pinch of obsession.; GitHub repository; Team: Nick Rougeux