“People still think hacking is getting people’s credit-card numbers from J.C. Penney,” said Daniel X. O’Neil, executive director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, a nonprofit using technology to improve city life. “Now we work pretty closely with the city and the state.”
Last year, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel signed an executive order mandating the city make available all data not protected by privacy laws. Today, the city has nearly 950 data sets publicly available, the most of any U.S. city, according to Code for America, a nonprofit that promotes openness in government.
Opening up data for hackers to turn into useful programs stretches scarce tax dollars. “As a city IT department, we’re never going to be able to build all the apps the people of Chicago could want,” said Brenna Berman, of the city’s Department of Innovation and Technology.
At a recent hacker meeting on the 12th floor of a building overlooking the Chicago River, volunteers showed statisticians, programmers and policy experts how to take data from the city’s new bike-share program and create maps that show stations with unused bikes. The group started chattering about all the tools they might be able to build based on the bike data, such as which routes are most popular or which stations see the most broken bikes, and use that to improve service.
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