Idea Lab

Inaccessible Pothole Data in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

Recently in Chicago, as the weather warmed inordinately from a deep freeze, with a 70-degree swing in temperature, the attention of the media and the municipal workers turned to potholes. The two daily newspapers sent writers to a press conference at the city's "Pothole Command Center," where Commissioner of the Chicago Department of Transportation (CDOT), Tom Byrne, and his top spokesman, Brian Steele held forth on the problem of holes in the street. From the Chicago Tribune story: "Byrne said a computerized map that tracks work crews and unfilled potholes will speed the patching process and added that an estimated...

• January 12, 2009
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The Includer
Episode 9
Africans Want to Chat With You

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

Our scheduled chats are how we bridge single tasking and multitasking. ... Fred Kayiwa of Uganda staffs our chat room on Saturdays thanks to a $100 gift from St.Benedict the African's choir. We're taking our first steps to link Chicago and Africa with our chat room.

• November 5, 2008
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The Includer
Episode 3
The Chain of Angels

by Andrius Kulikauskas
2008 Knight News Challenge Winner

The Includer is a tool for a solitary thinker.  When we center our world on the solitary thinker, then we'll all be one, in life and death, in our evergrowth - our choice to grow forever, to live forever. Let's connect the scattered dots. David Ellison-Bey and I are still up.  The police are still searching outside.  They have the measuring tape out.  A couple of hours ago we heard a crackly crackle of what I thought was fireworks, but David understood was a gunfight.  I went outside when David alerted me to the police lights. I thought, I must...

• October 7, 2008
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Independent Government Observers Task Force Non-Conference, August 4 - 5 in Chicago

by Daniel X. O'Neil
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

I wrote earlier about the IGOTF, a "non-conference structured around three sets of working group activities": 1. Case Law (Working Group Chair: Carl Malamud, carl at media dot org). This working group brings together individuals groups involved in the day-to-day work of putting the courts on-line. Topics that will be considered include markup of citations in cases, "universal resolvers" for mapping citations to URLs, recycling of PACER and other documents, and other subjects as appropriate. 2. Municipal Governments (Working Group Chair: Daniel X. O'Neil, danx at everyblock dot com). This group will focus on issues involved in citizens attempting to...

• July 7, 2008
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EveryBlock Does Special Report on Corruption Case

by Adrian Holovaty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

We've launched our first EveryBlock "special report" -- an analysis of Chicago addresses mentioned in the recent federal investigation "Operation Crooked Code." As explained on our about page, an overall goal of EveryBlock is to point you to news near your block. We've been working hard to do a good job of this so far by accumulating public records, cataloging newspaper stories and pulling together various other geographic information from the Web. However, over the past few months as we've been building the site, we've come across a number of types of information that don't exactly fit the EveryBlock mold....

• June 3, 2008
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Finding Stories

by Geoff Dougherty
2007 Knight News Challenge Winner

One of the funny things about citizen journalism is the notion that most people are walking around with a thousand story ideas in their head that they would gladly write if given the opportunity. It's not true. As we build our network of citizen journalists, we're finding that some folks have a good feel for what's newsworthy in their neighborhoods. But most don't, and so we need to help them. But how? We can't know what's going on in every neighborhood in Chicago, a city of three million people with a southern boundary that's more than 10 miles away from...

• October 15, 2007
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