Chicago Justice Project has been scraping and geocoding news articles for any mention of crime in Chicago for years. They now aim to compare this data with actual crime data so viewers can assess the accuracy of crime reporting in Chicago. To help with this process, TechTeam created a website with two interactive maps; the choropleth map contains geocoded crime data and the other geocoded news articles, while the other map gives the ability to select specific types of crime. There is also functionality to generate additional data visualizations to display below the maps.
Read MoreHourVoice
HourVoice is a civically focused for-profit company that helps hourly workers rate their employers, find better ones, and more. While HourVoice already has an app, TechTeam worked on creating a proof of concept for an “Advocate Workbench” app for analytics. Our team collected data about hourly employers from external sources (such as the city of Chicago), disambiguated employers across different databases, and made a visualization platform to see this data. TechTeam also briefly worked on strategies to combat fake users on the HourVoice platform and wrote a short proposal on this topic.
Read MoreNorthwest Side Housing Center
Northwest Side Housing Center is a nonprofit that provides housing counseling, financial education, and supportive services to the community. Using spatial data analysis and visualization, TechTeam created and presented an analysis of house purchases and financial impact across the city. This involved modifying first-time homebuyer data for spatial conversion, analyzing financial impact over time and across geography, and creating plots and maps of the data for electronic and paper use by the client.
Read MoreThinkTank
ThinkTank is the research, communications and writing branch of TechTeam. Members worked on independent projects which included creating resources for nonprofit organizations, writing pieces on TechTeam's work, data journalism, and promoting civic tech.
Read MoreIllinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council
The Illinois Sentencing Policy Advisory Council (SPAC) was created to “collect, analyze and present data from all relevant sources to more accurately determine the consequences of sentencing policy decisions and to review the effectiveness and efficiency of current sentencing policies and practices.” We built an interactive tool that will allow legislators and the public to simulate shortening sentence lengths and reducing admissions and note the resulting change in the prison population.
Read MoreChicago Department of Public Health
Our task was to build a basic app for the Chicago Department of Public Health that would allow Chicago-based medical providers to quickly look up conditions/diseases. Providers would be able to select a disease and find the time frame for reporting, the numbers for who to call, and guidance on whether they need to submit an isolate to the lab.
Read MoreMid South Business Association and Resource Center
Mid South Business Association and Resource Center (MSBARC) is a nonprofit based in Bronzeville that is focused on attracting investment in Bronzeville and providing consulting for business owners. Through data analysis and visualization using R, economics and statistical theory, TechTeam created reports to support consulting between MSBARC and business owners and meetings with politicians.
Read MoreLatin United Community Housing Association
Latin United Community Housing Organization (LUCHA) is an advocate for tenants’ rights, focusing on Chicago’s Latino and Spanish-speaking communities. It provides access to equitable and sustainable housing through building housing developments, and also seeks to promote the health and wellness of their residents. To help promote the health, wellness, and safety of their residents, LUCHA compiled a list of health-related resources in Humboldt Park. Our task was to build an interactive front-end to this directory of resources, focusing on accessibility and ease of use for users, and simplicity of maintenance and updating for LUCHA.
Read MoreNorth Lawndale Sesquicentennial Committee
The North Lawndale Sesquicentennial Committee is dedicated to fostering community pride by maximizing community participation in the 2019 celebration of North Lawndale’s 150 years of rich history and diverse cultures, while building toward its future. We helped NLSC by building an easily updatable website with oral history videos and an events calendar.
Read MoreHyde Park School of Dance
Hyde Park School of Dance is a nonprofit organization providing opportunities for students of all ages to study, perform, and create classical and contemporary dance, regardless of income. We helped HPSD come up with a way to automatically transfer data from their online student intake form to their internal database system. Previously, this data was transferred manually.
Read MoreBridges From School To Work
TechTeam partnered with the Marriott Foundation’s Bridges from School to Work to create a mobile app. Each year, Bridges helps more than a thousand young people — most of whom are transitioning out of high school special education — prepare for the workplace and find a job with an employer in need of qualified, entry-level applicants. The app is intended to function as a digital assistant to help the students excel in their competitive jobs by providing answers to work-related questions in a timely, accessible manner and helping to prepare them for the workforce and navigating the workplace.
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The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance
The Illinois Safe Schools Alliance is an organization focused on supporting and protecting the safety of LGBTQ youth throughout Illinois. We redesigned their website and taught them how to integrate social media into their digital strategy. Their target audience is high school and younger youth.
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Sprouting Leaders
Sprouting Leaders pairs college leaders with students in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade to build peer-to-peer mentorship bonds over a college semester. We updated their WordPress website by restructuring the layout and organization of the pages. Additionally, we added the capability of including multilingual content, specifically for Spanish speakers, and better incorporated their social media accounts.
Read MoreNetwork 9 Community Resource Directory
We worked with Chicago Public Schools/Public Allies to create the an interactive site displaying resources for schools, students, and families on the South Side of Chicago. We used Derek Eder's Searchable Map Template to implement the map and it's features. The goal of the project was to create a simple and easy-to-use interface that would make the data publicly accessible.
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Illinois Sunshine
Illinois Sunshine is an organization which collects and makes data available on political contributions in the state of Illinois. We worked with them on compiling and presenting this data in graphic form. To do this we used CartoDB and GitHub and in the end we created around twenty maps including a variety of time series and heat maps.
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Fair Elections Illinois
Fair Elections Illinois is a campaign seeking to implement a small donor match program. Already active in New York, this campaign seeks to increase the impact of each individual vote and combat big money here in Chicago. Common Cause, one of the leading contributors to this campaign, enlisted our help to design and maintain an easy to use and interactive website. In addition to building the website, we helped Fair Elections develop a Social Media strategy.
Read MoreGreen Star Movement
Green Star Movement is a Chicago non-profit that works with communities to create public art around the city to revitalize urban neighborhoods. We created a new website that featured a minimalist design in order to showcase the photographs of the colorful and intricate mosaics from the completed projects. Additionally, we streamlined the application process for volunteers and the registration process for classes.
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Office of Illinois State Representative Christian Mitchell
Illinois State Representative Christian Mitchell is a lifelong Chicagoan and a UChicago grad serving the 26th District in the the General Assembly. The 26th District of Illinois stretches along the Lakefront from the Gold Coast to 91st Street. It includes some parts of communities such as the Near North Side’s Streeterville area, some parts of the Loop, Bronzeville, Hyde Park, South Shore and South Chicago area. TechTeam worked with Representative Mitchell's Office to make his web platform (no longer active) a productive hub for discussion and community-building in the 26th District.
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We the People Media
Non-profit organization We the People Media was founded to support the work of Residents' Journal and the Urban Youth International Journalism Program, programs that began in 1996 in association with the Chicago Housing Authority. Residents' Journal is a publication for public housing residents, by public housing residents that produces a wide array of journalism, from investigative reporting to community news. TechTeam updated their website developed an online archive for Residents’ Journal to make journalism more accessible to the community and redesigned the site for a cleaner feel.
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S.I.S.T.E.R.S. Inc. Leadership Program
We worked with S.I.S.T.E.R.S. Inc. Leadership Program, a Chicago-area nonprofit aimed at providing young women with leadership skills, to revamp their social media presence and website. We successfully increased their Twitter followers by 23% and launched a feature that allowed for donation directly from their website.
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