How a Vibrant Open Data Community Has Flourished in Chicago
Sorbis / Shutterstock.com
Watch Derek Eder discuss the secrets of the local civic tech community’s successes.
It’s no secret that Chicago is home to one of the most robust civic tech communities in the nation.
One of the major figures in that community is Derek Eder, who has been very active in utilizing open data in the nation’s third-largest city and working with like-minded coders and open government advocates who want to make the city a better place to live and help find ways to make government work better.
Eder, who started DataMade, a civic technology company focusing on open government and open data, was a featured speaker at Socrata’s Customer Summit in Washington, D.C., in October.
Seattle-based Socrata, a privately held cloud software that helps public sector organizations with transparency, citizen services and data-driven decision-making, recently uploaded a series of videos from the summit to YouTube.
During his session, titled “How to Ignite Your Local Civic Tech Ecosystem,” Eder detailed the origins of how Chicago’s civic tech community came together to collaborate on various open data projects and work with the city’s government to improve access to information.
“Now that we have this really awesome group on the outside that’s doing all these amazing things that’s actually fed back into the way the city actually even looks at this stuff,” Eder said. “It’s a very virtuous positive feedback loop that’s happening between the civic tech community and government themselves.”
Eder helped bring together Chicago’s Opengov Hack Night, a weekly gathering for the local civic tech community.
While many cities have hosted their own hackathons, they’re often one-off events focused on trying to create a civic-focused app in a short amount of time.
“The biggest benefit from a hackathon is the social capital. It’s not apps,” Eder said. “Don’t think you’re going to solve all your problems in 48 hours and have a working app that’s actually any good. It’s about the people who meet and work on things together and the relationships, the connections that are made at that event. That is the value of a hackathon.”
Watch Eder’s full talk here:
(Top Image by Sorbis / Shutterstock.com)
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