Category: Civic Tech & Open Government

The way that police unions routinely bargain away public transparency is at the core of the legal battle in Chicago that has unleashed a stunning series of events.

Open government advocates consider “open by default” to be the gold standard for public records. But for Chicago’s Fraternal Order of Police, ”closed by default” has been the standard upheld by collective bargaining agreements with the City of Chicago.

This standard is the case with the police union not only in Chicago, but in many cities nationwide, says Craig Futterman, who is a clinical law professor at the University of Chicago Law School Mandel Legal Aid where he directs the University of Chicago’s Civil Rights and Police Accountability Clinic.

Futterman has been working with independent journalist Jamie Kalven, founder of Chicago’s Invisible Institute, for more than a decade to open to the public the misconduct records of Chicago police officers through Freedom of Information Act requests and civil rights litigation.

Their vision is for an open data portal that will capture and make public the entire disciplinary database for the Chicago Police Department. The portal will be easily accessible for all to use, including journalists, researchers and community.

A common body of evidence

Fully stocked and fully iterative, the data portal will be a common body of evidence around which discourse, however contentious, however collaborative, can take place.

“The database we are talking about …. there has been nothing like this in Chicago or anywhere,” Futterman said. “It is unique in that it is dedicated to the principle that public means ‘public.’ This database is an attempt to make this more than an abstract principle and to make that principle real in Chicago.”

The portal already has a strong start with the Chicago Police Database Project (CPDP), a fully searchable community data portal announced in early November that contains the complaint records for more than 8,500 Chicago Police officers over the past four years.

A dark achievement 

In a significant step toward transparency, the City of Chicago had agreed to turn over its full list of misconduct complaints for all officers, dating back to 1967, to the Invisible Institute, Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times. But the Chicago Fraternal Order of Police has taken legal action to block its release, saying they would destroy hundreds of thousands of pages of evidence, files and records related to Chicago police misconduct reports older than four years.

Kalven petitioned the court and an Illinois Circuit Court Judge ruled in an emergency order that Chicago authorities must notify journalists, activists and the public before they destroy records. This is a heated time, when the U.S. Department of Justice is preparing its investigation of the Chicago Police Department, said to be the largest investigation ever of a police operation.

Futterman’s work with Kalven paid off big time in early 2014 when Kalven won as plaintiff in Kalven v. City of Chicago, a watershed court decision in Illinois that made police misconduct records public. That opened the floodgates to information on the Laquan McDonald shooting. Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Kalven obtained the autopsy that showed McDonald had been shot 16 times.

The Nov. 24 release of a Chicago Police Department dash-cam video shows Chicago Police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 16 times and killing 17-year old Laquan McDonald. The brutal image contradicts the official account given by the Fraternal Order of Police spokesman on Oct. 20, 2014. Also raising questions is the $5 million paid by the City of Chicago to McDonald’s family to settle out of court prior to a lawsuit.

In the streets, black youth, ministers and concerned citizens have been marching. In response, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has fired the Chicago Police Superintendent, the head of the Independent Police Review Authority and the Chief of Detectives. More heads could roll, some are saying, perhaps even the Mayor’s.

These extraordinary events add up to what Rachel Maddow called a “dark achievement” for Kalven’s journalism and police reform and open government in Chicago.

In this latest round with the police union, Kalven believes his effort will prevail and  ultimately, after many legal volleys, the public records issue will be resolved permanently by the Illinois Legislature.

$500 million in police settlements

In addition to the human costs, the City of Chicago has paid out more than $500 million on police-related settlements, judgments, legal fees and other costs during the past decade, according to the Better Government Association, an independent watchdog group. The city shelled out $84.6 million in 2013 alone.

Meanwhile the existing data portal is there to carry water for Kalven and Futterman’s full transparency vision. Kalven is quick to say this is not a story about technology.

“The data is fragmentary in terms of the larger phenomena,” says Kalven, whose Invisible Institute first sprouted roots in an empty apartment at the old Stateway Gardens Housing Development. “That’s because there are things you can learn from the data. There are things you can only learn on the streets.”

“All the knowledge to reform the system is in the system, but it’s divided and scattered and divided from itself. (Events of the last few weeks) represent a huge breakthrough in (shattering) official secrecy. … Now, the key is to connect that knowledge with other kinds of knowledge on the street, in the department itself,” Kalven says.

System improvement as journalism

Kalven’s goal is to engender and fortify the feedback loops between the data and the people on the street and between the data and the police officers on the beat to create a systemic cycle of continuous improvement.

“I see that as fundamentally a journalistic project.”

When taken together, all the data completes the picture for public discourse on systemic police reform. Using the information in these documents and others as added, activists and journalists can map out the many interrelated components that form the entire  “system” of police misconduct: everything from the attorneys who approach families to negotiate settlements; to how abusive police disrupt community trust; to how their abuse thwarts the work of conscientious and law-abiding police; to how the $500 million in settlements paid affects the system that is the City of Chicago and on.

An open newsroom ecosystem

All this will be rich fodder for a journalistic ecosystem Kalven hopes to see sprout around the police misconduct data. Already running as a pilot is a new newsroom called City Bureau directed by Darryl Holliday (who also works part-time for Invisible Institute). Publishing in partnership with the Chicago Reporter, the Chicago Reader and The Guardian, City Bureau has partners in the journalism, civic media and education spaces.

Kalven points out that that newsrooms themselves have an important place on the systems map and how open or closed they are as a component has a significant impact on working toward a systemic solution.

“There’s a strategy to secrecy. For instance, ‘If you knew what we (the Chicago Tribune) know, but we can’t tell you, but if you knew it, you would know we’re right’,” Kalven says. “We’ve had versions of that for years around these issues. Everybody picking their own facts, so to speak.”

“That’s no longer possible,” he says.

“What’s powerful about this is the publicness of it. … I see the journalism as an extension of that. As a possibility of really building an ever more robust ecosystem of journalists at different points in their career working individually, in collaboration on a whole constellation of issues bearing on these general themes and then having that work accumulate in a coherent way and be at the center of really critical public policy decisions that are going to be made in coming months and years about how the police operate in the city.”

“We made a very significant kind of down payment with the data we have on a public resource that’s open and available to everybody,” Kalven says. Now for others working on this issue, it’s  “write your scoop, but then pass that material on to us. Don’t just put it in a file cabinet somewhere. Incorporate it into this expanding resource that’s of ever great use to everybody.”

The way forward for Chicago police reform

“This is an extraordinary moment in terms of possibilities for police reform, Kalven says. “If we have the black caucus and the ministers and various civic organizations, at least loosely, behind a clear, coherent reform agenda, that will be huge. There’s never been that kind of constituency for reform of this nature before.“

To Kalven’s view, four fundamental issues guide the police reform process forward.

They are —

1. Transparency
2. Accountability
3. Code of Silence
4. The Fraternal Order of Police Contract.

1) Transparency. It’s critical the information is made available to the public.

“That’s the phase we’re in and the drama we’re living through,” Kalven said. When Invisible Institute won the court decision in 2014 saying that police misconduct files are public information, he, his lawyers and Craig Futterman sat down and negotiated with Steve Patton, the corporation counsel and his team about how to operationalize the decision. “It was really successful and it was really a good negotiation,” Kalven said.

2) Accountability in terms of how citizen complaints are investigated and in the disciplinary process.
“Fundamentally, it doesn’t work,” Kalven said. “I think what our data show, overall, is they provide a kind of portrait of impunity.” Because the odds are against an abusive officer being identified, investigated and disciplined, there’s no real fear of punishment. And because of that residents of neighborhoods most affected by these patterns feel there’s no use in filing a complaint.

In addition, most large organizations that interface with the public conduct pattern analysis as part of quality control. Kalven cites airline practices that look at complaints as an important source of information for improving the bottom line. The City of Chicago ignores this large body of evidence.

3) The Code of Silence and the culture that enables it.
“This is where leadership really matters,” Kalven says. In the Laquan McDonald case, “I think it’s more disturbing how the culture of the department responds. This wasn’t some dramatic departure from the norm. This is the norm,” Kalven says.  The way the institution responded was symptomatic of larger patterns. At every level, from officers on the scene as the boy was lying there bleeding to the highest levels of the city. “Over time, everybody’s instinct was to circle the wagons. To put out a false narrative and then double down on that false narrative when it was challenged. We now have more and more evidence and more will come out. That process of maintaining the false narrative required destruction of evidence, intimidation of witnesses, falsification of police records and, ultimately, the five million dollar settlement with the family, “ Kalven says.

4) Removing impediments in the union contract to vigorous, timely investigations.
This is likely to happen. Mayor Emanuel has referred to going back to the bargaining table with the police union, Kalven says. “The Fraternal Order of Police has succeeded in negotiating in their collective bargaining agreement so many layers of protection for police officers who are accused of crimes that it really is, ultimately, antithetical to the public interest,” Kalven says.” I joke sometimes, but it’s not really a joke that there’s no category of citizens including children and the mentally ill who have as much due process as police officers do.”

by: Sally Duros | Apr 28, 2015

Through low-cost tools, Public Lab injects community knowledge into civic decision-making about local environmental issues. This community engagement also alleviates media blackouts and information shortfalls that can occur after a major environmental event.

“That’s one of the essential tenets of Public Lab. It’s about rethinking how people can become involved in the decisions that are being made about the places where they’re living,” says Shannon Dosemagen, CEO and a founder of Public Lab.

Public Lab was born from balloon mapping work during the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf Coast. Balloons and kites in the hands of community members provided low cost, easy to use transportation for cameras that took aerial images to create maps and provide data for the community’s case on cleanup priorities.

“After the BP oil spill happened … there wasn’t a lot of good or solid information that was coming from the spill. And, so I started using a crowd-sourcing platform and getting people to report what they were seeing or what they smelled or other changes in their environment. And then another project that I ended up working on during that time was with the aerial mapping kit that Public Lab is pretty well known for,” Dosemagen says.

This work earned Public Lab $500,000 in the 2011 Knight News Challenge and in 2013, they were awarded $350,000 in the Knight News Challenge for Health to build a suite of pollution detection tools.

Today five years after its founding, Public Lab says it is an “open community supported by a non-profit” that creates low-cost tools that everyday people can use to create information that residents need about the places where they live. The data collection methods for researching environmental impact typically cost less than $150. The group’s website lists 22 low-cost technologies and more are being developed every day. Public Lab’s map archive includes 326 citizen-made maps from around the world and some are included in Google maps.

The Public Lab non-profit has staff offices in five states with 62 organizers, who Dosemagen describes as “super volunteers.” The super volunteers integrate Public Lab methods or tools with the work they’re doing and the organizations they’re working with. Activities are under way in 12 to 15 solid chapters and a broader community of between 5,000 and 6,000 people who contribute research notes based on the work that they’re doing or participate in one of the many mailing lists that Public Lab maintains.

Public Lab lists scores of DIY citizen projects on its extensive community populated Wiki website. For instance, in Philadelphia, geographers are mapping to visualize and document community events and gatherings in parks and plazas throughout the city. In Southeast Chicago, in an old steel mill industrial area, massive piles of ‘petcoke’ or petroleum coke waste from Canada, are accumulating. Activists and media outlets such as NPR and Vice News have reported on the piles and the possible health hazards. With Public Lab training, the community is documenting the petcoke piles, mapping them and discussing ways to estimate their volume as well as monitor air quality around them. In June, Public Lab will be hosting a Chicago “barn raising” to mobilize community around the petcoke issue.

The belief that decisions about the environment belong to everyone is core to Public Lab’s philosophy.

The non-profit creates space for different types of expertise — from scientists associated with a research institute to community organizers to community educators.  “We’re interested in creating a place where people can bring their different experiences and backgrounds and think through processes together,” Dosemagen says.

This culture springs from the unique perspectives of the seven co-founders of Public Lab. The founders include an environmental organizer, a professional cryptographer, a biologist, an urban designer, another designer and two anthropologists, including Dosemagen. Dosemagen says her training as an anthropologist brings listening and analytical skills that help her understand how to make connections across different groups of people.

“We’re connecting on a different front with the much broader concept of climate change in terms of what it means,” Dosemagen says. It’s not big data, it’s local data, observing the impact from a very local level.

Historically, most tools used to research the environment are created at a price point that’s accessible for research institutions, corporations and government. Few tools have existed that allow people in a community to investigate local environmental concerns.

Public Lab changes that by enabling ground up data-based research and communication from the people in a place to the local governments and the industries whose policies impact the environment.

That’s a huge information gap that community members can fill. Activists, change agents, journalists are limited. They can’t participate in every minute of an event. Public Lab puts the tools — the media platforms and devices — in the hands of the community. Using the tools, the communities can gather information and fill in the gaps.

The outcome could be a media campaign, interfacing with journalists or calling for a larger, systematic study of a certain area.

The annual conferences, or barn raisings, bring people together in the spirit of thinking through a problem and putting together a tool. The gatherings are “unconference” style, which is a flexible facilitation method that allows people to self-organize around the issues and activities they are most passionate about.

While good solid data can be collected by putting accessible tools into the hands of community, the tools themselves can become self-replicating and viral by providing hand drawn, illustrated guides on how to create them. Public Lab’s video tutorials walk people through each step of the process of using them to collect data.

Open source licensing has fed into Public Lab’s sudden growth.

“I’ve heard the word float around several times that using those licenses is infectious in terms of the way things are able to spread,”  Dosemagen says. “If a certain component of that hardware tool is not available they could locally source it and then share that information back with the community. So I think that’s how the community really gains strength and momentum over the years.”

by: Sally Duros | Mar 24, 2014

Two foundations in California are priming their communities for open government initiatives by teaching them how the local government budget works and that they can have a hand in influencing it.

The California Endowment has hired the nonprofit consultant, Participatory Budgeting Project, to launch participatory budgeting initiatives in 14 low-income areas across the state. And Liberty Hill Foundation is training the community at the grass roots level about what the budget means in preparation for Los Angeles’ open data Websites.

Participatory budgeting, PB, is a process that any institution with a publicly oriented budget can try. Even though it is new in the United States, it has a long track record, says Josh Lerner, Executive Director of the Participatory Budgeting Project.

Participatory budgeting started in Brazil about 25 years ago and since then has spread throughout Latin America, Europe, Africa, Asia and now the United States. “It’s as much about learning about the government for community groups as it is a way to organize,” he says.

The process is not about consulting the public; it is about giving them real power to make real decisions about a real pot of money, Lerner says. It’s not usually for the whole budget but rather for that part of the budget that is discretionary. And it’s not a one-off event. It usually lasts for several months so that people have the time as well as the power to make decisions.

In the work for the California Endowment, “We’re trying to bring groups together to collaboratively build healthier communities.” That entails going out into the neighborhoods and holding community workshops and strategy sessions at the places where people gather.

Launched in Chicago

In 2009, Alderman Joe Moore of the 49th Ward in Chicago was the first U.S. politician to sign on and use the principles. When members of his ward successfully used it to choose neighborhood improvements, the PB process caught on and was quickly adopted by three other wards. It spread to New York in 2011, where 8,000 people decided how to spend $6 million across four city districts.  And in 2012, Vallejo, Calif., in the midst of its bankruptcy launched the first citywide project. At least eight U.S. cities — now including St. Louis, Boston and San Francisco— have used participatory budgeting, and around 20 more are planning new processes, Lerner says.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is said to be very close to hiring a director of participatory budgeting.

Participatory budgeting replaces that city budget meeting that often turns into a shouting match with a more orderly structured process that encourages people to engage more effectively.

“It is really a laboratory for uncovering how government works and how it could work differently,” Lerner says.

Lerner says community foundations or other civic leaders interested in participatory budgeting should consider three main factors in making a decision whether to pursue it.

Community support: Participatory budgeting works best when there is strong community interest in having input into the budget.

Political support: Elected officials must be invested in the idea and understand the commitment to going along with the process.

Funding support: Participatory budgeting is primarily an engagement process and as such it takes time and resources.

“Democracy takes time and takes a lot of work,” Lerner says.

One you’ve made the decision to go with participatory budgeting, the process looks like this, with some variations depending on local needs.

Brainstorm, bring people together to brainstorm either in large meetings or online.

Recruit volunteers to act as community liaisons.

Turn the ideas into proposals for funding.

Present proposals to the city for vetting and cost estimates.

Assess feasibility, the city determine whether it can be technically done and how much it will cost.

Put the projects that are technically feasible on the ballot.

Vote. Community members vote for their top projects, and the projects with the most votes get funded.

“The vote is not just to have people fill out a ballot,” Lerner says. ”Often people will spend a half an hour reading through the project and learning about their neighborhood or their city and talking about it with neighbors.”

It is key to have a concrete vote at the end on the actual project. But unlike votes for public office that are held in a polling place, PB voting can be held in a supermarket, at a school, in the subway — wherever people gather.  As to who is eligible to vote, that is decided by each locality. In many cases, local steering committees have put that age at 16.

In addition to the on-the-ground votes, some localities are using online platforms. And Lerner says that SMS and mobile tools are being developed that can be useful. Boston is developing some tools to be used in a youth development project.

Preparing Los Angeles’ community for OpenGov 

In Los Angeles, Liberty Hill Foundation is providing training about the Los Angeles Budget and energizing youth to get involved in spending new discretionary funding on programs tailored for them.

Liberty Hill’s motto is ‘Change, not Charity’,” says Chief Operating Officer Preeti Kulkarni. “One way we foster change for the better is by encouraging civic engagement, not only through get-out-the-vote efforts, but through improving access for grassroots community members to develop the skills and knowledge to participate in the decision-making process.”

To that end, the Advancement Project, one of Liberty Hill’s grantees, has been meeting with the Mayor’s Office of Budget and Innovation as well as the Controller’s Office as open data rolls out in Los Angeles. The Controller’s office recently launched Controller Data and the Mayor’s office will soon be launching its open data site.

“Currently we have created training curriculum and materials to increase access and make the Los Angeles City budget understandable and useable for community advocates,” says Lori Thompson Holmes, Manager of Online and Digital Initiatives for Advancement Project. That project is funded in part by a $50,000 grant from Knight Foundation.

Open data, community priorities a force for change

Through its training, the Advancement Project shares the government Websites with the community and helps them understand how the information on the sites, combined with community’s clear view of priorities, can be a force for change. To that end, early this year, the social justice group started sharing information online through a Tumblr WeBudgetLA.org

Teaching the public about the budget is essential, because as we have learned from the open government world, “Start with a problem. Use data as a resource.” Not the other way around.

In addition to the City of L.A. budget training, Liberty Hill is also focusing on its youth-activist program — Brothers Sons Selves. Through that Liberty Hill is bringing the voices of boys and young men of color to the discussion of how L.A. will spend the billions in education funding that will soon be coming to the city through Local Control Funding Formula—a new school funding system.

by: Sally Duros | Nov 5, 2013

Civic Insight and LocalData are bookends for making information about the built environment of a place accessible to the public and easy to use. The major difference is one start-up collects data from inside the municipal bureaucracy and the other collects it from the outside, from the sidewalks of neighborhoods.

Civic Insight’s tool makes existing hard-to-find government data sets easier to access and understand.  LocalData’s makes it efficient for residents to collect data and create new datasets useful to both residents and government.

Both start-ups got their beginnings during 2012 Code for America Fellows projects and both are funded in part by the Knight foundation.

Both Civic Insight and LocalAccess are being used to help municipalities and residents address blight and vacancy that remains in the aftermath of the disastrous housing bubble. Both products improve the quality of municipal data and make it visually more intuitive and seamlessly interactive. They are flexible enough that they can be used for a range of projects and they are open source.

Civic Insight was born from a CFA project in New Orleans called “Blight Status,” says Alex Pandel, a CFA Fellow and co-founder. (Watch a PBS video about Civic Insight.)

With the mission of co-creating technologies that would help their host municipality, the CFA team took a deep dive into the New Orleans civic landscape. The Fellows met with city employees, community groups, residents  and non-profits to understand the information needs of residents and how the team could help. In addition, they tapped into the expertise of The Greater New Orleans Community Data Center which does mapping and Who Data at the University of New Orleans run by Michelle Thompson.

“We were able to identify that there was this information gap between what citizens knew was going on with abandoned properties and what the city was doing, “ Pandel says. “We asked, ‘What do citizens know ?’ and ‘Why are they not getting the whole picture?’”

What the team discovered is that in New Orleans – as in most municipalities — the data was managed by multiple agencies.

“It was a case of decentralized information that made it difficult for everyone to be on the same page,” Pandel says. “I thought, we can do something about that.”

The team took on a role that in the past might have been contracted out to a team of blue-suit IT or management consultants.

“We went from department to department and found where all the data was living and brought it all together so we could have a “live” connection with it,” she said.

Data is the lifeblood of decision-making in many government agencies, but the problem is that data constantly changes so it is “dead” almost as soon as it is collected. The “live” connection was essential. Although the ideal way to capture data live is through APIs, they also wrote custom importers for some data sources that didn’t have APIs. “Whatever our city customers have, we try to accommodate,” she says.

A designer by training, Pandel worked on user interface. “I was working from the heart of the community to understand how the community understands the process and how does that match up to what the process is really like and how do we communicate that process out,” she says.

Civic Insight has found its next customer in Palo Alto.

Since the company’s core offering is accessing opaque city data sets and making them easy to understand, their product can work with any data. Palo Alto has hired them to simplify permit data so construction companies and architects can have a better feed back loop with the city on their projects.

Pandel and her colleagues thought their product would resonate only with the community and have been surprised by the numbers of inquiries they’ve had.

“We did not want to charge users for access and we want it to be equally accessible for everybody,” Pandel says. “Cities pay a small subscrition fee annually for access to the site. It is publicly available to the residents.”

“We’re different from LocalData because we  need to have an established relationship with whomever is holding data” she says. “Our goal is to reduce duplicate work. Our goal is to go to the source so that we are saving everybody else time.”

Pandel says she doesn’t view this work as journalism exactly.

“I like to think of it as promoting government transparency,” she says. “We take it from being data to being information  that could be understood by a regular person an dthat coiuld be a journalist.”

“The Code for America position is this is a public data. It should be public data. It should be easy to access.  Keep it public. Keep it free,” she says.

The biggest pushback they felt on the project was from city worker who feared that making the data available would make the municipality look bad, but it actually worked in the reverse.

“There was an increase in empathy once residents were able to understand the magnitude of the problem,” Pandel says.

The Greater New Orleans Foundation helped pay for the team’s initial work. The Knight Foundation made a program related investment of $220,000 — technically a convertible note —  through the Knight News Challenge to support Civic Insight’s launch as a company.

In Detroit, a different group of CFA Fellows created the tool LocalData to be used on smartphones and tablets.

“LocalData believes better data helps cities and organizations make better decisions,” says Matt Hampel, a former CFA Fellow who co-founded LocalData.

“The City of Detroit had a huge problem of foreclosure and blight,” Hampel says. “We talked to a number of groups doing important work, walking their streets with printed maps and clipboards, trying to figure out where the abandoned buildings were.“

The Fellows partnered with the City of Detroit and Wayne State University to do a survey of all the commercial corridors in Detroit in record time. The CLICS survey as it is called, was the first comprehensive survey of Detroit’s commercial properties in 28 years.  Using the LocalData tool on Smart Phones, they surveyed 9,538 commercial properties, recording a range of information about their occupation and condition.

“With support from the Knight Founation we expanded nationwide and are providing the toolsets for cities and organizations around the country,” Hampel says.

LocalData builds off the city’s existing geodata. They have a record of where every property is.   “If you have geocodes you can see what has been covered so far, unlike when you drop points on a map,” he says.

“Cities are increasingly seeing the value of opening up their data,” Hampel says. “That leads to support for the goals they want to achieve.”

LocalData has projects under way nationwide – one of the latest is with the SouthWest Organizing Project on Chicago’s SouthWest side. “Residents will be able to collect the data to rehab dozens of properties in their neighborhood,” he says.

Knight is supporting LocalData with $300,000 from the Knight News Challenge.

Hampel says  organizations will pay a fee to use LocalData and they own the data that is collected.“You can have 100 people or 1 person out collecting data,” using the LocalData tools. “You can do your entire neighborhood or just a few blocks,” he says.