Here’s a blog post about Smart Chicago from the website of the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at the Harvard Kennedy School. Their research focus is “the intersection of government and data, ranging from open data and predictive analytics to civic engagement technology”.
Here’s the post: The Smart Chicago Collaborative: A New Model for Civic Innovation in Cities. And a snip:
In Chicago, that jumble is coming together to become one of the country’s strongest civic innovation centers, and it hasn’t been by accident. The Smart Chicago Collaborative (Smart Chicago), a small civic organization that’s dedicated to improving the lives of people through technology, is working at the center of Chicago’s civic innovation scene. Through its unique leadership, structure, and strategies, Smart Chicago has been able to develop and align key networks of people with policies and programs in order to produce results. The organization is a model for cities to capture civic innovation’s energy and use it in new ways to improve urban life.