Chi Hack Night Events

Online: UChicago Justice Project

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

Jul, 21 2026 7:00pm

Description coming soon.

Online: Open Hack

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

Jul, 14 2026 7:00pm

There will be no presentation this week. Instead, we’re going to have an Open Hack.

Join our 7pm open Zoom call at bit.ly/chi-hack-night. Here’s the agenda:

Welcome and introductions
Socializing to meet and get to know your fellow hack night-ers
Announcements from Chi Hack Night and attendees
Breakout group pitches

In-person and Online: National Association of Government Web Professionals

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0500 by

Jun, 30 2026 6:00pm

Chi Hack Night will be at i.c.stars, a non-profit tech training & placement program, will be hosting us at their office at 750 N Orleans Suite 500, Chicago.

Description coming soon.

This event will be in person, but you can also tune in via livestream. Doors open at 6pm. The livestream and announcements will start around 6:30pm CDT.

In-person: i.c.stars, 750 N Orleans, Suite 500 (5th floor), Chicago IL.

For more information on our in-person events, please see our COVID Policy.

RSVP In-person attendees should RSVP beforehand. As occupancy limits permit, walk-ins will be allowed to enter.

There will be food! We will be serving Costa Rican empanadas, chicken casado and rice from Irazu!

Online: Open Hack

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

Jun, 23 2026 7:00pm

There will be no presentation this week. Instead, we’re going to have an Open Hack.

Join our 7pm open Zoom call at bit.ly/chi-hack-night. Here’s the agenda:

Welcome and introductions
Socializing to meet and get to know your fellow hack night-ers
Announcements from Chi Hack Night and attendees
Breakout group pitches

Online: Achieving Accessibility - Making IT Work for People with Disabilities

Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

Jun, 16 2026 7:00pm

Join Mike Scott, Chief Information Accessibility Officer for the State of Illinois, to learn what’s new in the world of information accessibility, including what you can do to help make sure your IT works for people with disabilities.

Online: Open Hack

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

Jun, 09 2026 7:00pm

There will be no presentation this week. Instead, we’re going to have an Open Hack.

Join our 7pm open Zoom call at bit.ly/chi-hack-night. Here’s the agenda:

Welcome and introductions
Socializing to meet and get to know your fellow hack night-ers
Announcements from Chi Hack Night and attendees
Breakout group pitches

In-person and Online: Fighting to Fund our Schools: Organizing with Data (Chicago Teachers Union)

Tue, 02 Jun 2026 18:00:00 -0500 by

Jun, 02 2026 6:00pm

Chi Hack Night will be at i.c.stars, a non-profit tech training & placement program, will be hosting us at their office at 750 N Orleans Suite 500, Chicago.

Presenter: Fighting to Fund our Schools: Organizing with Data (Chicago Teachers Union)

Pavlyn Jankov and Chris Poulos’ talk will focus on the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Research Department’s use of Python’s Streamlit library to create flexible organizing tools that provide CTU staff and members with easy access to data, talking points, and education on campaigns to tax the rich and fully fund schools. Their talk will provide a brief context of CTU’s and the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) tax the rich and fully funding education campaigns, our use of data tools to augment the internal and external organizing of these campaigns, and some challenges in using these tools.

The CTU and the IFT—representing over 100,000 educators and school staff across Illinois—have made fully funding education from pre-K through higher education and progressive revenue key strategic priorities. While fully funding schools and taxing the rich and corporations have consistently shown strong public support, turning that support into policy is another matter. Public finance policy is obscured by vested interests who use ideologies that protect their wealth and power. A clear example is Illinois billionaire Michael Sacks and others who assembled and spent over $10 million in the matter of weeks in order to defeat a modest tax on Chicago corporations.

CTU’s Research Department has been using data tools as a means to cut past these ideologies and provide staff and members with easy to access data, talking points, and political education to strengthen our advocacy efforts. We will walk through a few examples, including our ProtectingChicagoSchools.com look up tool to show the impact of tax increment financing revenue on schools; our more recent https://cps-budget-calculator.streamlit.app/ that shows how State legislators can prevent budget cuts in CPS by supporting current legislation to fully funding our K-12 schools; and a tool that calculates property tax expenditures created by a megaproject subsidy bill. There are benefits in using Streamlit, such as flexibility and user accessibility, as well as challenges, such as assembling and preparing data and maintaining best practices with “bespoke” development.

This event will be in person, but you can also tune in via livestream. Doors open at 6pm. The livestream and announcements will start around 6:30pm CDT.

In-person: i.c.stars, 750 N Orleans, Suite 500 (5th floor), Chicago IL.

For more information on our in-person events, please see our COVID Policy.

RSVP In-person attendees should RSVP beforehand. As occupancy limits permit, walk-ins will be allowed to enter.

There will be food! We will be serving Costa Rican empanadas, chicken casado and rice from Irazu!

Online: Building an Artemis Tracker

Tue, 26 May 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

May, 26 2026 7:00pm

On April 2nd, 2026, the Artemis II mission sent the first humans to orbit the moon since the Apollo missions. In a sea of constantly changing, polarizing and attention grabbing headlines, the four astronauts that went up captured the world’s attention for several days on their way to and from the moon.

Millions of people watched the live streams around the web, but the system designed to share live position and tracking information for the mission, Artemis Realtime Orbit Website (AROW), failed to reliably show information to at least some of those interested.

In this talk, Ian will discuss how he found the failing tracking website and built a replacement using the same data to show progress during the mission. It turns out several other people ran into this problem, too, and we’ll explore their similar tools.

Online: How Chicago Fought Back Against 'Midway Blitz'

Tue, 19 May 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

May, 19 2026 7:00pm

Presenter: Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights

Chicago has been a primary target of immigration enforcement activity under the current federal administration. Last fall thousands of Homeland Security agents ran roughshod over our neighborhoods, seeking to intimidate us into “self-deporting” and giving up the legal protections we fought for. Instead, we fought back.

The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights was at the forefront of resistance to the DHS escalation. ICIRR senior policy counsel Fred Tsao will discuss what we endured over the past year, what tools we used to protect and empower our neighbors, and what we can all do to get involved.

Online: Open Hack

Tue, 12 May 2026 19:00:00 -0500 by

May, 12 2026 7:00pm

There will be no presentation this week. Instead, we’re going to have an Open Hack.

Join our 7pm open Zoom call at bit.ly/chi-hack-night. Here’s the agenda:

Welcome and introductions
Socializing to meet and get to know your fellow hack night-ers
Announcements from Chi Hack Night and attendees
Breakout group pitches