Blog

Derek Eder

Civic Tech Builder

I use data, build tools, and organize people in Chicago to democratize power. Read more »

DataMade
Founder and Partner

Chi Hack Night
Co-Founder and President Emeritus

Wanna talk? Email me.

Note: I only post here occasionally. I do most of my writing on the DataMade blog and on Chi Hack Night blog.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #5: EV Road Trippin’

Published on Aug 28, 2024
In August 2024, our family took our first multi-day road trip with our electric car: 1,200 miles from Oak Park, Illinois, to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. We had to do some research for this trip to be a success, so I’m sharing what we learned with you!

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #4: One Year In

Published on Jun 29, 2024
A little over a year ago in April of 2023, we completed the electrification of our house. Since then, I’ve received a lot of interest in this project, was awarded a Green Award by the Village of Oak Park, and was even featured in the Chicago Tribune! While the blog posts I’ve written have been useful to reference and point people to, there’s one outstanding question still to address: How much money are these electrification changes saving us, and how long until the upgrades pay for themselves?

Policy Memo: Opportunities for Expanding Chicago Digital

Published on Oct 9, 2023
As 2023 budget season gets underway in the City of Chicago, I was contacted by the Chicago City Council Committee on Ethics and Government Oversight to provide background information on the state of and opportunities for digital services in Chicago. This is the memo I wrote for them, which I have now made public.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #3: Appliances

Published on Aug 22, 2023
We’ve made the switch to being fully electric in our 100-year-old home! I’ll explain the final steps we took to electrify our home by replacing our stove, hot water heater, clothes dryer and car with electric equivalents. These upgrades allowed us to fully cut our gas usage and eliminate the last ~20% of emissions from our home.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #2: Heat Pumps

Published on May 6, 2023
We’ve made the switch from gas heating to heat pumps in our 100 year old home, and you can too. We’ll explain how we took a big step in fighting climate change while also lowering our utility bills and increasing the comfort of our home in the process.

Electrifying Our Old Oak Park Home #1: Going Solar

Published on Nov 1, 2022
We are in the process of electrifying our Oak Park home and completely eliminating all our household emissions. This post is an attempt to document our process as we go, with the hopes that it will inspire our neighbors to do the same and learn from our efforts.

Policy Memo: Questions and Concerns on Chicago’s proposed merger of the Departments of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) and Fleet and Facility Management (2FM)

Published on Oct 29, 2019
In 2019, Mayor Lightfoot merged the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) with Fleet and Facility Management (2FM) in an attempt to save $1M in the 2019 Chicago City Budget. I, along with 9 current and former municipal CIOs, CDOs and civic technologists, raised concerns and questions about the negative potential impact of this merger. In Mayor Brandon Johnson's 2024 budget, this merger was proposed to be undone.

Policy Memo: Chicago Digital Service Delivery

Published on Apr 23, 2019
In April 2019, I joined Mayor-Elect Lightfoot's Transition Team on Good Governance. As part of the transition, each member was invited to draft a policy memo with recommendations for the incoming administration. This is my memo.

Keeping Tabs on Your Local City Council with Councilmatic

Published on Jun 24, 2013
City councils shape nearly every aspect of city life, from what kind of canopy you can have on a storefront, to how much we pay in taxes, to the number of cops on the street. There's now an app for viewing all this legislative information: Councilmatic.

Preparing for the Google Fusion Tables SQL API Deprecation

Published on Jan 12, 2013
On January 14, 2013, Google will deprecate the SQL API for their Fusion Tables platform. This post is here to help developers prepare for it (or more likely, fix things after they break).

How Chicago Public Schools Succeeded with Open Source Software

Published on Nov 14, 2012
On August 17, 2012, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) launched a new version of their School Locator - an online map that helps parents find public schools for their kids. Unlike the map that came before it, this one is intuitive, easy to use, and took half the time to build. How was CPS able to accomplish this? By doing it in-house and using open source software.