Month: October 2015

  • Panel: Mind Bytes— Current and Future Urban Challenges: The Role of Big Data and Technology

    Today I participated in a panel for Mind Bytes. Here’s a description: Projections show that urbanization, combined with the overall growth of the world’s population, could add another 2.5 billion people to urban populations by 2050. Exponential growth in urban density and cities brings numerous challenges and opportunities, both in the short and long term. Various…

  • Panel: Big Data Driving Big Change for the Denver Chamber of Commerce

    Today I participated in a discussion about the use of big data in helping economic development in regional planning. The focus is on the value of humans in designing and validating systems.

  • Design Thinking Day with Madonna Scholars

    Today I lead the current crop of Madonna Scholars in a day of design thinking at The Chicago Community Trust. Here’s a presentation from the day: Madonna youth from Daniel X. O’Neil And a team pic:

  • Documenters Session with Honorary Chicago

    This evening I helped set up and run a Documenters session for Honorary Chicago. Here’s a snip from a blog post I wrote about the work on the Smart Chicago blog: All of this is a part of digitizing the official records of the streets from City Council data not yet available in digital format to…

  • The Essential Civic Whitaker

    The Essential Civic Whitaker

    I edited and published “The @CivicWhitaker Anthology: three years of organizing, writing, and documenting in Chicago civic tech at the Smart Chicago Collaborative”. Here’s my introduction: Hiring Christopher Whitaker to work as a consultant for Smart Chicago was one of the best decisions I made here. Together, we created a new job type— part documenter, part…