Tech Month Chicago starts a break out group at Chi Hack Night every Tuesday! Join us!

After giving a talk about the mission and purpose of Tech Month Chicago and Chi Hack Night on Jan. 15th, 2019, Tech Month Chicago has now created a weekly presence at Chi Hack Night, a well attended local networking event to invite the community to participate in building a technology awareness month for the city of Chicago.

Anyone who wants to volunteer to help build a technology awareness month for the city of Chicago is cordially invited to join Tech Month Chicago in the hacking portions of the Chi Hack Night events. The events take place weekly every Tuesday at 6:00 pm at the Braintree Office. The events are free but an RSVP is required

About Tech Month Chicago:

Tech Month Chicago is a month of technology awareness for the Chicagoland area showcasing the depth and diversity of our local tech culture featuring community events in technology, engineering, math, and science in Chicago and the surrounding area during the month of September.

By elevating, promoting, and celebrating local tech events, our aim is to engage new audiences for technology in the Chicago area and to raise awareness for the great tech-related culture happening throughout Chicago’s diverse neighborhoods. Unlike many tech industry focused events, Tech Month Chicago is geared toward all city residents from senior citizens, kids, parents, and all people of the city of Chicago to share how technology shapes our culture and encourage participation from those outside the industry.

Events range from coding for kids to educational forums and invention showcases, startup pitches, tech activities for families, companies opening their doors to the public, job training, meetups, and festive tech celebrations. Presenters include tech organizations, large-scale technology-related companies based in Chicago, non-profit organizations, schools, tech experts, education groups, and other organizations throughout the city.

About Chi Hack Night:

Chi Hack Night is a free, weekly event in Chicago to build, share and learn about tools to create, support, and serve the public good.

Our mission is to inspire and promote civic engagement and technology.

We are a group of thousands of designers, academic researchers, data journalists, activists, policy wonks, web developers and curious citizens who want to make our city more just, equitable, transparent and delightful to live in through data, design and technology.

Chi Hack Night's values

• Diversity, equity & inclusion
• A fun, welcoming, open-minded community empowering individuals
• Practicing and promoting transparency and accountability
• Commitment to supporting our community
• Exploration and experimentation
• Fulfilling our civic responsibility
• Sharing knowledge, data, and open source code
• Justice and positive social change

What happens at a hack night?

Chi Hack Night starts every Tuesday at 6pm. We meet in the Braintree office on the 8th floor of the Merchandise Mart in downtown Chicago. The event is free, and the invitation is open to anyone, especially folks who aren’t programmers.

Here's what happens at Chi Hack Night every week:

6:00pm – Socializing and food

As people arrive, we gather in the Braintree auditorium.

Because we’re meeting during the dinner hour, food is always provided, usually pizza or empanadas. We want to make sure people are happy and fed, and eating together is a great way to break the ice and bond with other attendees.

6:15pm – Welcome and introductions

We get started around 6:15pm with a brief welcome and introduction to the event and then kick off the introductions.

Everyone in the room introduces themselves and tells the group why they’re here. We’ve done this since the beginning when there were 4 of us. We still do it when there are 150 of us. As with the food, our goal is to break the ice and get people to start talking.

Introductions at Chi Hack Night

6:30pm - Announcements

Next, we hold an open floor for announcements for civic tech and open government related things. This could be plugging other events, mentioning newsworthy articles and more recently, job announcements in the government and civic tech space.

We record these announcements in our weekly meeting notes and agenda Google Doc. Here’s an example from Chi Hack Night #180: Covering schools through public records and data.

6:45pm – Presentation with Q&A

Just about every week, we have a feature presentation that lasts about 15 minutes, with an open question & answer (Q&A) session after.

Presenters can be any government agency, non-profit, company or group who’ve made use of open government data or built a civic technology application. Anyone can propose a talk, and I often reach out to presenters who would be a good fit. For every speaker, we provide some clear speaker guidelines.

7:30pm – 9:30pm - “And now for the civic hacking portion of the evening”

Once the presentation wraps up, the format of the event switches up to what I’d describe as a mini-hackathon. People are invited to break off into groups and work on projects.

As we’ve grown from just 4 attendees to 100, we’ve had to add a bit more structure to this. Anyone is welcome to start a breakout group. The only requirement is that you take ownership of the group and make an honest attempt to keep showing up every week.

Breakout groups that last more than a few weeks are listed on the ChiHackNight.org website, and are divided into two tracks: learning groups and working groups.

• Learning Groups - Learning groups are for new folks (about 30% of attendees on any given week are new), those who want to learn technology skills, and discuss or refine their civic app ideas.
• Working Groups - Topic-specific working groups led by facilitators to guide conversations, answer questions, and build teams for civic apps.

When 9:30pm rolls around, we all head home and do it all over again next week.

Everyone is welcome!

Not a techie? That's ok! We encourage non-technical folks to pair up and learn from our community's designers and developers. We've seen time and time again, the best civic projects come from teams with a diverse background.

Remember, there's much more to making a great app than just coding.

How are you organized?

Chi Hack Night is organized by Derek Eder, Emily Drevets and Katie O'Shea. You can contact them here. Juan-Pablo Velez and Christopher Whitaker are former organizers.

Leadership Council

Every month, we hold an open Leadership Council Meeting to discuss new ideas and ways to make the hack night better. Anyone is welcome to join! More info ?

Finances

Chi Hack Night is hosted at Braintree and supported by our amazing sponsors. DataMade is our fiscal sponsor and handles all of our financial transactions.