In my experience, the system works great and it is a very positive addition to the overall CTA communications regime. Here’s why:

SMOOTH DESIGN

It is a native Web application that runs in a browser. That means it’s not an “app” — there’s nothing to download, no device-specific versions to cover– just go to the page on the Web and it works. The menus make sense, the flow is simple, and the interface is what you’d expect it to be– route-colored bars white familiar typography.

Lufrano also mentioned a permit request for new sign in Left Field. He said (and for all you serious Wrigley watchers, I may be getting this wrong, so feel free to correct me) that the sign will be placed “in the only place where they don’t have an agreement with owners” of rooftops across the street.Oddly enough, you can see in a map of the Wrigley Field business licenses (yes, there is a special type of license issued by the City for Wrigley Field rooftops), there is a gap in left field, right between seven licenses and two other licenses. I’m guessing that’s where the sign will go.”It’s all about the revenue”, said Lufrano. He also said that the sign will be understated, much like “the Under Armor signs on the outfield doors“. One reason he said that they are doing this is that the Cubs “the only team in baseball that gets zero public money.”

Today Blair Kamin (a hero) and another Tribune reporter covered the story as well, adding details on the content of the sign:Cubs owners swing for the fences with proposed giant sign: Cubs plan to put Toyota ad above left-field bleachers.Beating Blair Kamin to an architectural story… not a bad day

Two New Restaurants on Taylor Street: Vintage Lounge and Cafe 1.61

A 2nd Cork & Kerry Near Cellular Field

And a pickup from Grubstreet.

I say that copyright is the mechanism by which underground people or independent people or people without resources can create a stable entity. There’s only so much land in this world, but you can wake up every single day and create brand new intellectual property. That’s beautiful. Dan O’Neil, Emigre #36, 1996.

Leading With His Chin

by: Daniel X. O’Neil | 9/24/2009

The National GOP is champing at the bit to make the 2010 U.S. Senate election in Illinois all about former Governor Rod Blagojevich. This morning, the Alexi Giannoulias campaign is serving them up a free punch, trotting out an endorsement from the union leadership that was Blago’s biggest supporter and whose president was completely enmeshed in the controversy over Rod’s attempt to sell this Senate seat. (He even appears on the infamous Blagojevich wiretap!)

You can bet Giannoulias will sit silently on the dais and smile broadly as he receives the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) leadership, just as he did when the Blagojevich controversy first surfaced. He doesn’t rock the boat, and he’s no doubt excited about stepping up to the same trough that netted Blagojevich more than a million dollars in campaign cash.

It’s not the janitors, health care workers, security personnel and other hard-working SEIU members who are the problem. It’s not even the idea that the SEIU endorses candidates and puts its political power to use. We support the rank-and-file and their agenda for social justice. We take issue with the SEIU leadership– the same leadership who once stood next to and endorsed Blagojevich as his strongest champions– the same leader who was allegedly captured on a Federal wiretap having behind-the-scenes discussions with the Governor about his cynical and outrageous attempt to leverage this very Senate seat (the one he called “[bleeping] golden”) for his own personal and political advantage.

This kind of merry-go-round involving the same cozy insiders doing the same political dance is what’s wrong with Illinois politics. This is why David Hoffman– a true independent corruption-fighter with no ties to the scandals of the past– is running to be our senator. We deserve better. The SEIU members deserve better. David stands with them.

The National Republicans who are looking to take the President’s Senate seat next year are going to have a good morning with this endorsement.  But come February 2, the people of Illinois will have a choice between more politics as usual and turning the page.  As the Democratic nominee for this Senate seat, David Hoffman will take the corruption issue and Rod Blagojevich’s dirty dealings off the table.  Then, the Republicans will have to run on the issues – and that’s a contest they can’t win.

The Projects section typically has a project name with supporting documents linked beneath. Document types include:

Redevelopment Agreements

These are often simply copies of the relevant pages from the City Council Journal of Proceedings on the day the agreements were approved. They can be very repetitive, sometimes containing three complete copies of the document in each PDF. The key bits in these documents are the budgets, project descriptions, and sources of financing. Again, they lack useful detail. Example: Schedule C of the CNA Financial Corporation Redevelopment Agreement notes $24,204,899 in “TIF-FUNDED IMPROVEMENTS” to cover “costs for rehabilitation, reconstruction, or repair or remodeling of existing public or private buildings.” That’s a lot of money for so little specificity.

Community Development Commission Staff Report

These are pretty beefy documents with tons of research about a particular issue. For instance, this one covers the problem of excess leasing space in the CNA building. Apparently CNA had threatened to relocate out of town, and this document lays out the case for giving CNA money to redevelop and lease the property. Again, some plain-language summary would be appropriate here. Instead of just posting these documents and letting people guess what happened after the money was spent, it would be nice to pull the story together. For instance, the Chicago Housing Authority ended up being a major tenant of this building, but you have to go somewhere else to figure that out.

Economic Disclosure Statement

These are some Holy Grail documents right here — they lay out the roles and relationships of key people associated with a TIF redevelopment agreement. They also happen to be the most difficult documents to feed into an OCR scanner in the hopes of getting usable text. The documents are images of photocopies of form documents with the answers (names, companies, relationships, etc.) hand-typed with typewriters. (If anyone is interested in doing a reverse-Facebook on these people, mapping relationships, that might be worthwhile.)

Certificate of Completion

These are documents — not very useful ones — certifying that the project is “complete” from a legal point of view. In the future, it might be worthwhile to ask certain questions of the CDC (what goal did the project achieve, who got paid how much for what, etc.) once a document like this hits the site.

Statement of Daniel X. O’Neil in support of the proposed City asset lease agreements disclosure ordinance.Monday, June 1, 2009. 11:30 a.m., Council ChambersMy name is Dan O’Neil, and I am one of the co-founders of EveryBlock.com, a neighborhood news site serving 11 cities, including Chicago, where we are based.I ask you to support this ordinance, which calls for the City Comptroller to publish “ City asset lease agreements and accounting information” in the general course of business.My job at EveryBlock is to work with city governments to uncover new data and to make it available in the most useful formats as possible. I’ve worked with city leaders– department heads, council members, technology developers, policy makers, and so on, in each of the 11 cities we cover.One of the things I’ve discovered is that there is a great desire on the part of municipal leaders to share data, but they often don’t realize that the information they see every day as a part of their work– exactly the types of documents that we’re talking about today– actually contain valuable data that allows citizens to understand what the city is doing for them. There is a wide and growing array of tools that allow civic-minded Web developers to make data more searchable and ultimately more valuable in deciding what we want to do collectively as a city.The idea of a publishing a “single accounting document, updated quarterly, that details the appropriations, investments, interest income earned, and future budget year distributions of City asset lease agreements”, goes a long way toward this goal.This is sound policy, and I urge you to make it law.

And the Chicago Sun-Times references specific, detailed pothole numbers:

“The city had a daily average of 300 to 400 potholes in the days before Christmas, but the number jumped to more than 1,100 Monday, city officials said.”

These quotes indicate that the city has relatively sophisticated technology for managing street defects. They are able to track the location of potholes from the data in their 311 system. With GPS on city trucks and in city worker cell phones, they can track equipment and personnel. As workers report back on filled potholes, the city has real-time data on the exact location of street defects.

Restaurant Inspections *and* Results of Hearings Should be Published Online: highlighting a fundamental unfairness in the selective publication of government data.

There was a ton of good stuff in this article about the current state of inspections across the country. One issue is that raw inspection reports are widely available all over the Web, but the results of hearings– which is where the restaurant owner has a chance to respond to any violations– are not. As you can imagine, that rubs restaurant owners the wrong way, as they indictment is always public, but their side of the story is not.

NY Attorney General Should Practice Transparency He Preaches: pointing out that Andrew Cuomo’s own office does not meet the standards he expects from others.

We published the available data for expired items found within the city limits, and I spent weeks attempting to get a complete list of the 500 pharmacies that the Attorney General claims he sent his investigators. His office has refused to fulfill our request.

Here in March 2009 United States of America, it seems to be the simplest political shibboleth to proclaim one’s support for transparency and accountability. But I’ve also noticed that actually living up to that is often less of a priority.