Chicago Justice Project

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.

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HourVoice

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. 

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Northwest 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.

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ThinkTank

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.

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Illinois 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.

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Mid 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.

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Latin 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.

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North 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.

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Hyde 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.

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