2023-2024
2022-2023
The Cook County Assessor’s Office determines the value of properties in Cook County for the purpose of setting the appropriate tax value. TechTeam is in the process of making a website that takes in a property as input and explains the property’s assessment breakdown and the dollar amount of each contribution. The Assessor’s Office uses a machine learning model to generate its property breakdowns. While the bulk of work is in web development, students who are interested in working with ML models are also encouraged to apply. Please note that this project is continuing on from Winter Quarter and has fewer open spots for new project members.
Bright Endeavors offers a comprehensive and paid job training program to new moms where they can gain career skills, a professional network. As part of the job training program, they create candles which are sold to support the continuation of the program. TechTeam will help set up their ambassador program, where ambassadors can gain rewards for participating in various activities including referring BE to friends and family, purchasing products, and sharing on social media. They would like a page to keep track of customer referrals and incorporate a way to reward participants.
Advance Illinois is a non-profit organization advocating for equitable access to high-quality education for all students. As part of their work tackling inequities across Illinois 850+ school districts, they create one-pagers for every legislator in the state that provide custom data on funding for each school district within their legislative district. Currently they are created manually, with researchers copy-pasting the tables generated for each legislator in their back page. TechTeam will deliver a tool to automate the creation of these one-pagers that support new datasets and updated written contents. In order to suit the skills of their team members, the project may transition to using tools such as R or Tableau
First Repair is a non-profit organization working to educate and equip those who are advancing local reparation policies that seek to remedy historic and ongoing anti-Black practices. It was founded by Robin Rue Simmons, a current IOP Pritzker fellow who was the chief architect behind the nation’s first government-funded reparations program in Evanston, IL. TechTeam will create an interactive map showing legislative actions taken by municipalities around the country regarding reparations, with map markers leading to news, meeting minutes, or legislation in that city. This project will also include some preliminary research of legislative actions taken throughout the country, complementing data provided to us through First Repair.
The American Library Association aims to extend and expand library services in America and around the world. They are currently in the process of redesigning their website and have asked TechTeam to provide an assessment of the current Single Sign-On (SSO) authentication methodology, as well as potential next-steps recommendations. The deliverable is a detailed report of their current implementation and recommendations for a more flexible, scalable solution.
Climate Ark is building an open-source app that will provide information about climate change and steps individuals can take to limit their carbon footprint as well as a community discussion forum. As part of this project, members used Flutter to build a frontend architecture that compiles to both Android and iOS (and also Web) and Firebase to create an easy-to-use backend framework.
2020 - 2021
OneGoal’s partnerships Wiki Page serves as a resource for high school leaders (e.g. School Principal, Counseling Team Lead, CPS network specialist, etc.) to answer FAQs about the OneGoal school partnership while reporting progress to school leaders and influencers about their students. TechTeam will perform web analytics on the wiki to help assess its impact and optimize its future useful. Also, we will complete preliminary research to help OneGoal prepare a student-to-student advising portal as a resource for the students during the summer between high school and college.
The Musical Arts Institute is a non-profit providing high-quality music lessons to underserved populations on Chicago’s South Side. TechTeam will the institute in improvement in their administrative web infrastructure to support the coordination of lesson scheduling online. We will tackle this issue via a redesign of the backend Institute’s Wix-based webpage, implementing features that enable such diverse stakeholders as students, parents, staff, and board members to log in and view pertinent administrative information.
Love Fridge Chicago is a mutual aid network that places community-run fridges around the city to support those struggling with food insecurity. TechTeam worked with Love Fridge to analyze food scarcity and waste in Chicago with the goal of creating a compelling and informative visualization to raise awareness and attract donations. Additionally, we enhanced the visualization with an interactive component.
The Chicago Tool Library is a tool bank and community maker space that provides Chicagoans with access to tools and resources to learn, share, and create. TechTeam helped redesign and update the Library’s Resource Index page to assist visitors in find tool-related resources around the city. Additionally, we added an interactive map to ease locating resource physically and a resource submission feature.
2019 - 2020
Blackstone Bicycle Works is a community bike shop and youth education program of the Experimental Station. Blackstone is structured as a retail, full-service bike shop that offers an "earn and learn," hands-on bicycle mechanics curriculum to its participants. TechTeam worked to create a web app that would allow students to check-in/check-out when they volunteer their time, an easier hour-tracking method than paper logs. This web app also included the tracking of the youths' skills and achievement levels.
Student Counseling Service (SCS) is committed to promoting the mental health and well-being of UChicago undergraduate and graduate students by providing accessible, high-quality, culturally sensitive mental health services. TechTeam redesigned their website and built an interactive chatbot to improve navigation of the resources SCS has to offer, providing extra outreach and consultation to the University community.
She Votes Illinois is a statewide political action committee aimed at highlighting the importance of women’s voices in elections, government, and policymaking. TechTeam helped redesign the She Votes Illinois website, adding different functions (e.g. drop down menus, options to donate, an events calendar, etc). Additional tasks for this project included identifying a server, resolving other backend issues, and redesigning the interface to make the website more clear and dynamic.
In2It is an organization whose mission is to make it easier for people to be civically involved in their communities. TechTeam helped In2It with their goal of matching people and opportunities. The goal of this project was to give users the ability to sort events by “type” or “category” to help them make decisions about which event to attend; this was done by building a machine learning categorization model which parsed an event and returned a category that the event belonged to.
TechTeam worked with UChicago’s Student Government to help redesign their Health and Wellness website. The project involved creating an interactive tool for students to navigate a database of mental/physical health resources on and off campus, and making recommendations to the user about which resource is most applicable to them.
2018 - 2019
The Experimental Station is working to build independent cultural infrastructure on the South Side of Chicago by fostering a dynamic ecology of innovative educational and cultural programs, small business enterprises and community initiatives. TechTeam implemented a series of optimizations on Experimental Station's website to increase visibility and web traffic from paid (using Google AdWords) and unpaid (search engine) results.
Lincoln Park Conservatory is a nonprofit organization that identifies, preserves and enhances the natural, historical and cultural assets of Lincoln Park. TechTeam used ArcGIS to digitize the floor plan and location of plants in the conservatory building. The product is used for internal staff usage, and helps improve the process of updating records during plant exhibit relocation within the conservatory.
TechTeam worked on creating a directory of job listings from different companies and organizations through the web scraping of websites given by UChicago Career Advancement. Using Beautiful Soup, a Python library, our team was able to extract specific information from each page and compile it in a spreadsheet to be passed on at the end of the quarter.
As a continuation from last year, TechTeam built an app using React Native for the Chicago Department of Public Health. This app would provide Chicago-based medical providers a means of quickly looking up conditions for diseases, 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.
To aid in Greater Bronzeville Neighborhood Network’s mission to reduce poverty and violence by sharing necessary resources for members of the Greater Bronzeville Community, TechTeam created a website that hosts information on a variety of opportunities for employment and services for interested community members.
Maroon Tutor Match is a program that provides affordable one-on-one tutoring for local K-12 students. Using Python, TechTeam automated the matching process between students and tutors.
2017 - 2018
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
2016 - 2017
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.
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.
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.
2015 - 2016
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.
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.
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.
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.
2014 - 2015
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.
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.
2013 - 2014
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.
We worked with Illinois House of Representatives Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie to revamp her social media presence. We increased her Twitter followers by 34% and her Facebook engagement by 42%. We also launched a section on her website to provide visitors with access to Chicago city services.