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 help complete Linda’s research of 30 years of honorary sign designations (more than 2,000 signs!). Most of 1985-present has been collected, there are some gaps, especially in the 2003-2009 timeframe.
We’re going to help her with that. This is a perfect project for our Documenters program, for a number of reasons:
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Focus is on city data and helping people understand a central record of our municipal government
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Gets Chicago residents paid while learning and being civically engaged
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Helps out a great actor in civic tech who has already done an enormous amount of work
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We get to hang out at one of our central shared spaces— the public library!
I invented the Documenters program to “add new thinkers, generate ideas, and expand the field for civic tech”.