Technology plan for the City of Chicago

• Govtech
• Digital transformation

The Digital Services team works to make city services more accessible and inclusive for Chicago residents. It’s our mission to listen, amplify, and design with the community to build better technology experiences for everyone.

• cities

• Govtech
• Design

Mayor Emanuel's tech plan for Chicago

• cities

• Govtech
• Digital transformation

A freely browsable database of crimes reported in Chicago.

• crime

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Graveyard

This site tracks COVID-19 testing data and hospital bed availability over time in the city of Chicago.

• health
• Good health and well-being

• Data visualization
• COVID Data Projects

Our Region's Community Foundation

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

Chicago Cityscape shows where development is happening by combining data from dozens of sources.

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Data visualization

New America Chicago is a nonpartisan policy innovation lab based at The Chicago Community Trust.

The MSCAPP curriculum is a three-legged stool, building foundational knowledge of computer science, statistics, and public policy analysis.

• Tech or Digital Policy
• Degree programs

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

The Emanuel administration hoped to harness the city’s trove of digital data to improve Chicagoans’ health, safety, and quality of life.

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

• The People
• Learn about civic tech
• Courses

CUTgroup gives residents the opportunity to be a part of the design process for emerging civic technology initiatives through user testing and focus groups

• The People
• Graveyard
• Build something

University of Chicago's Office for Civic Engagement is committed to building community relationships.

• The People
• Learn about civic tech
• Courses

Data Science for Social Good Fellowship is a University of Chicago summer program for aspiring data scientists to work on data mining, machine learning, big data, and data science projects with social impact. Working closely with governments and nonprofits, fellows take on real-world problems in education, health, energy, public safety, transportation, economic development, international development, and more. For three months in Chicago they learn, hone, and apply their data science, AI,analytical, and coding skills, collaborate in a fast-paced atmosphere, and learn from mentors coming from industry and academia.

• The People
• Data science for social good
• Fellowships

CivicSpace focuses on building better feedback loops between residents and policymakers to build policies that improve racial and economic equity in Illinois.

• User research groups
• User research

Where Chicago's historically underrepresented tech founders find the funding, knowledge, and networks to help your business thrive.

• Build something
• Accelerators
• Building in the private sector

CUTgroup is a civic engagement program that includes residents throughout the technology design process.

• Graveyard
• User research groups
• User research

Helping You Move Beyond Debt

• Decent work and economic growth

• Adjacent Fields
• Fintech for good

Tonika Lewis Johnson’s Folded Map™ Project visually connects residents who live at corresponding addresses on the North and South Sides of Chicago.

• racial equity

• Civic maps
• Artistic interventions

Current is Chicago’s water innovation hub.

• Clean water and sanitation

• Smart Cities and sensors

The Sage project will design and build a new kind of national-scale reusable cyberinfrastructure to enable AI at the edge.

• air quality
• cities

• Smart Cities and sensors

Civic Bridge recruits private sector professionals to volunteer their time to work alongside government employees on critical City issues. Pro-bono, private-sector support can increase the City’s capacity to identify and analyze pain points, provide agile and iterative solutions, as well as increase interest in cross-sector collaborations. Civic Bridge is a cohort-based program, the program builds off of the example set by a number of Cities such as Chicago’s Civic Consulting Alliance and San Jose’s Silicon Valley Talent Partnership .

• Pro bono and volunteer

Three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative. By Christopher Whitaker Edited by Daniel X. O'Nei…

• books

• The People
• Learn about civic tech
• Books

Northwestern University has launched the Medill Subscriber Engagement Index, a tool that allows local news organizations to see what content encourages subscribers to stick around and lets publishers benchmark their performance against outlets in comparable markets.

• Media
• Media and social media analysis
• Benchmarks

IIT Institute of Design (ID) is a graduate design school with a history of innovation. ID pioneered the development and dissemination of modern design from its founding in 1937 as the New Bauhaus in Chicago. Today, our graduate design school focuses on global challenges. We prepare designers to take on the worlds complex, fast-changing, and unpredictable problems such as competitiveness, digital media and learning, health and wellbeing, and social innovation.

• The People
• Build something
• Toolkits

We are the place where social sector professionals gain the data skills they need to succeed.

• trainings

Most of these trainings include slides, an outline, and the appropriate worksheets, so you can either adapt the trainings for your own audience, or go through the training yourselves.

• trainings

• The Tech
• Organize campaigns

the social good predecessor to Groupon

• Graveyard
• Civic crowdfunding platforms

Your business is your livelihood and your reputation. Mind My Business™ sent you customized notifications to help you make more informed decisions that save you time and money.

• apps

• The Tech
• Govtech
• Engagement tech

The Siragusa Family Foundation is a private foundation that is committed to sustaining and developing Chicago’s extraordinary nonprofit resources.

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

Passport transforms the way cities manage their operations by reducing operational complexity and delivering intelligent data.

• Govtech
• Bureaucracy tech

Chicago's weekly event to build, share, and learn about civic tech.

• The People
• Meet the others
• Civic hacking meetups

Inclusive User Experience Research, Design, and Testing

• The People
• Build something
• User research groups

City Bureau is a nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago. We bring journalists and communities together in a collaborative spirit to produce media that is impactful, equitable and responsive to the public.

• The Tech
• Media
• Solutions journalism

A specification of the civic.json metadata standard for civic technology projects

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Data schemas and standards

New York City partnered with behavioral economics firm ideas42 and the University of Chicago Crime Lab to test simple “nudges” to get people to court; text reminders improved appearance rates, resulting in thousands fewer arrest warrants

• The Tech
• Govtech
• Organize campaigns

Polk Bros. Foundation focuses its work at the intersection of Chicago's most pressing issues to address the complex roots and devastating effects of poverty, and to challenge inequity. Learn more.

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

Grades how Chicago and Cook County government agencies share important meeting information like agendas, minutes and schedules with the public

• The Tech
• Govtech
• Advocacy tech

Illinois allocates an incredible amount of money to incarcerate people from Chicago's poorest neighborhoods — sometimes millions for residents on individual city blocks. There are more effective ways to invest public dollars.

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Data visualization

An API standard for ride hailing services

• mobility

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Graveyard

We seek to unlock the possibility inside every individual. We see equal value in all lives. And so we are dedicated to improving the quality of life for individuals around the world. From the education of students in Chicago, to the health of a young mother in Nigeria, we are catalysts of human promise everywhere.

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

At Mikva Challenge, we challenge high school students, teachers, and schools across Chicagoland to be active participants in the political process.

• The People
• Get funding
• Funders & donors

The International Innovation Corp at The University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy creates scalable solutions to critical development problems. We send top talent to work with government and development organizations on one to three year projects to implement innovative solutions to important development problems.

• The People
• Build something
• Innovation teams and labs

WindyGrid is a computer application, designed for City personnel, that makes Chicago’s big data easily and strategically accessible in one place.

• The Tech
• Civic data
• Data visualization

We train youth to produce high quality data about community assets that everyone can use to improve the human condition.

• youth

• Civic data
• Crowdsourcing
• Citizen science