Public schools + artist studios, music practice spaces and startup offices

Chicago is filled with grand neighborhood school architecture, but the infrastructure doesn’t always match up with current population demographics.  Schools may be closed due to low enrollment or converted to charter magnets, or if open, have large portions of the building unused.

Schools have space and Internet connections and are often only used during school hours. Schools could rent unused space at an affordable cost to artists needing studios, musicians needing practice space, or startups needing offices.  This tenancy would provide a new dimension of connection between public schools and their neighborhoods, particularly in the case of magnet cluster schools where the student body comes largely from outside the neighborhood.  Bringing more people into the schools on a regular basis offers the opportunity for resource sharing or leveraging the tenants for mentorship or cocurricular activities.  Though these relationships could be formalized, it would be an awesome experiment to see what kind of relationships evolve organically just from sharing space.

Beatbox

This was built by me and a few of the other Knight Scholars in my cohort at the Medill School at a hackathon sponsored by The Media Consortium. It’s an SMS alert system designed for block clubs.

The repo is on GitHub.

From the README:

BeatBox is a mobile application to help neighborhood watch groups in cities like Chicago share information about public safety incidents. Users sign up as part of a beat and send alerts via SMS or mobile web. A “beat leader” then receives the alert and can choose to forward it on to other users in the beat.

It was created over the course of one weekend at The Media Consortium’s Mobile Hackathon by Shane Shifflett, Steve Melendez, Geoff Hing and Chris Keller. Bernie Leung created a prototype for an Android app based on BeatBox.

Shane Shifflett came up with the idea after reporting about muggings in Chicago’s Chinatown neighborhood. He found that even though there was a community that was tightly knit and concerned about neighborhood safety but, because of language barriers, was unwilling to notify police, or waited hours to find an English speaker before reporting the incident. BeatBox lets neighbors share alerts in real time and saves documentation to show the police at beat meetings.

Some important features and design principles

  • Accessible technology: We want lots of different communities including lots of different people to be able to use this with the technology they have. Our initial prototype works through both SMS and mobile web.
  • Don’t freak out!: Too often neighborhood safety alerts create more gossip or fear instead of useful information or community. This app prioritizes small chunks of useful information and generates data as a starting point for conversations with neighbors, police, politicians and other community stakeholders. All alerts are moderated by a human to try use community judgment to decide which information is important to share in real time

Different communities

This app could be used both by communities with strong neighborhood watch groups and a working relationship with the police and communities that are less cohesive or have a different relationship with the police.

Communities who are concerned about safety but are worried about profiling or harassment could use the system for community-based responses to safety.

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Categorized as Projects

Curry Crawl

The Curry Crawl Uhaul, photo from the IDEO Labs blog

Last year, while working as a contractor for Food Genius, I got to build a mobile web app that consumed their new API of restaurant POIs and dish suggestions. The app tried to aggregate the ratings of Indian food dishes and make suggestions for the next dish as we drove around the Loop and West Town neighborhoods in a “reverse food truck”. Our collaborators at IDEO, where Food Genius had a residency, decked out a Uhaul like an Indian restaurant.

This was one of my first experiences writing a mobile web-app, dealing with OAuth and consuming an emerging API. I wrote the app using Python’s Flask framework and used Twitter’s Bootstrap (and its responsive features) to quickly prototype the UI. The biggest takeaway from the event was how delighted passersby were to experience the weirdness of people dining in the back of a truck. I also liked making a technology where individuals interacted with their personal devices to drive a collective experience. Often, interaction with devices, particularly around food and dining take people away from the collective experience, rather than feeding back into it.

The folks at IDEO wrote about the event on the IDEO labs blog.

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Categorized as Projects

Crowdsourced usage help and observations for data visualizations

This is my pitch for the Media Ideation Fellowship.

Project Description

This project would provide a platform for user-contributed usage instructions (“move the slider to the right to see the data for different years” or observations (“wow, DC has so many charter schools”) for web and print-based data visualizations. The project would help make data visualizations and their insights more accessible and provide a body of feedback for developers and journalists to create more usable visualizations. Through a public API for web applications and QR codes and short URLs for print, journalists and developers can integrate the platform into their visualizations.

What problem or issue are you trying to address with this project?

We live in a culture which increasingly fetishizes policy decisions that are “data-driven”.  From the future of publicly-funded education in Chicago to the disconnection of residents from city infrastructure in Detroit, data fills a prominent role in the discourse around issues that profoundly impact our lives. Certainly, data has always driven decision-making by policy makers and evaluation of proposals by the public, and it’s an important part of civic process. The danger is for data to take on a magical quality instead of being framed as a tool that can be used, and abused, in the service of civic problem solving. If publics are to leverage data, we must be empowered consumers of this information.

Background

While researching information about the Chicago teachers strike, I came upon this data visualization about the growth in charter schools, I came upon this visualization:

While a careful reading of the instructions could have told me that this was a map of the US and that moving the slider shows the change in the number of charter schools over time, I just wanted to dive in and was confused. Having more human instructions that say “Hey, this is a map of the US” or “move the slider” and observations like “look how charter schools grew in D.C.  That documentary Waiting for Superman talked a lot about that” seemed like something that should exist.

More Chicago teacher strike context

Why the U.S. is not Finland with regard to education policy:

http://blackagendareport.com/content/why-us-can%E2%80%99t-compete-educationally

Disconnect from wealthy funders of anti-teacher union candidates and largely low-income public school students:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/09/american-teachers.html#ixzz26iDsyahX

Culture of “teacher bashing”:

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/chicago_and_the_psychology_of_teacher_bashing

Infographic on growth of charter schools:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/sep/17/educating-tomorrow-k-12/

New metrics

A friend posted an image on Facebook related to the Chicago Teacher Strike that said:

Legislators want teachers to be paid according to their effectiveness as evaluated by student test scores.

How about paying legislators according to their effectiveness — as evaluated by job creation and economic growth?

To unpack this a little, I’d say that job creation and economic growth suck as metrics for whether governance is working as much as test scores work as metrics for thriving schools. The problem with the debate over teacher evaluation is both in tying pay to performance in a really punitive way, but in a larger sense, the very metrics used to gauge performance.

I like things working well. I like accountability for the foundational institutions of our culture. What I don’t like is a data-driven world where the metrics most directly reflect the needs of corporations and not working and middle class people. When we talk about test scores or jobs or GDP, we’re talking about numbers, not the livable reality that we actually want.

A job or economic growth could look like a private prison, or a deregulated industry devastating the environment where its workers live, or a crazy tax deal (at the expense of worker rights) for a corporation to attract them to a state. These are the moves that legislators are making now either in an earnest failure or a cynical charade to be accountable to their constituents.

I’m not anti-metric, but as people most affected by public schools or job creation, we need to think about the metrics we really want and not just accept the ones being offered to us. Off the top of my head, these are some ones that reflect measurable outcomes in a world I’d like to live in:

  • Number of high school students who vote or otherwise engage in some civic process
  • Average number of paid family sick days and vacation
  • Number of people with health insurance or other access to health care
  • Number of years a household is able to stay in the same dwelling
  • Racial and income dissimilarity index for a neighborhood

Chicago Teachers Strike Context

I’m trying to compile articles that describe why the teachers are striking because CPS and the mayor’s talking points tend to collapse those reasons and miss a lot of important reasons. As much as teachers are fighting to be able to make a living practicing their profession, they’re also fighting for a vision of education that’s a civic good and not controlled by corporations.

  • Training Teachers to Embrace Reform
    Other trajectories for relationships with unions than what we’re seeing in Chicago.
  • Teacher X: Why I’m striking, JCB

    When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids.

    When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there’s no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids.

    When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a “full school day” and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids.

    When you support Mayor Emanuel’s TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail.

    When you close and turnaround schools disrupting thousands of kids’ lives and educations and often plunging them into violence and have no data to support your practice, that hurts our kids.

  • Chicago teachers strike: In ’31, school board just stopped paying teachersI feel strongly that teachers feel like they need to stand their ground because of being undervalued in Chicago, and in the United States in general. This goes way back, apparently.

    If the Chicago teachers strike, now in its second day, seems contentious, perhaps it’s worth looking back to the summer of 1931.

    That’s when the school board stopped paying teachers in cash, defaulted on 24 payrolls and offered to pay teachers in scrip instead.