A new era for DataMade and Forest

Published on Jan 17, 2025

The DataMade team. From the left: Forest Gregg, Hayley Owens, Monkruman St. Jules, Derek Eder, Hannah Cushman Garland, and Xavier Medrano

Over the past twelve years, it has been my great privilege to help DataMade grow to an established, successful company and an important actor in Chicago’s civil society. At the end of January 2025, I will be leaving this mighty and hearty company.

DataMade is and has always been a vehicle for learning about the roles that technology can play to help bring about a more just and beautiful world, and I am eager and confident to see the powerful experiments that Derek and Hannah continue to pursue.

When I started at DataMade, we were excited about the new opportunities presented by large volumes of machine-readable, government data, open source software, and the web as an inexpensive platform for complex applications. We built a bunch of fun public-facing applications like ClearStreets that showed which streets had been plowed of snow in real-time, IsThereSewageInTheChicagoRiver.com which dramatized pollution of Chicago’s rivers, and IllinoisSunshine, a site that made it much easier to find information about campaign finance in Illinois.

We found that these public apps can be really effective as part of a media campaign, but most public-facing civic apps are not really for the broader public, at least not after a couple of months. The people who are interested, week after week, in campaign finance, local ordinances, or public salaries are not typical members of the public. They are professionals or uniquely engaged community activists. If we wanted our work to have better impact, we needed to have an ecosystem understanding of civic life and social change, and understand where in that web of relationships our tools would have the most value.

Our work shifted, and we started building more tools to help organizations and the people within them to do their work more effectively. Two projects exemplify that approach for me: Large Lots and The Circuit.

Large Lots was a project that Demond Drummer from Resident Association of Greater Englewood (RAGE) brought us into. Through working with RAGE, LISC Chicago, and other community organizations, the City of Chicago had developed a program that would let residents on a block buy city-owned land for $1. The initial version of the site we built was independent of the city, and made it easy to see which properties were eligible and explained how to apply in simple terms.

After the first round we were able to work directly with the City of Chicago’s Department of Planning and Development and built a backend system that facilitated Department staff being able to handle the very large volume of community applications. While there was still a public-facing website component, it was the backend systems that we built that really allowed the program to scale. This work has evolved and continues today with ChiBlockBuilder.

The Circuit was a journalistic collaboration of Injustice Watch, the Chicago Reporter, and the Better Government Association that DataMade helped organize and served as the technical partner. We scraped millions of records about criminal cases, and built a unique database to allow for unprecedented systematic analysis of the court system in Cook County. While DataMade did build a public-facing visualisation, the most impactful work we did on that project was to train half a dozen journalists on how to use this data and support them in their own data journalism, which produced many pieces of award winning reporting.

DataMade has found that the most reliable role for technology to support a better world is to find the organizations and people that are already doing their work and then build tools to make their work more effective and faster. This is the lesson that I am taking with me, as I join the labor movement. Starting in February, I’ll be working for a large union to build data systems and tools to support new labor organizing. More details about all that soon!

I am deeply grateful to the clients who have trusted us to build with them, to our staff for their creativity and labor, and to Derek and Hannah for their friendship and partnership and vision.

– Forest Gregg