Derek Eder, founder of Data Made, gave an interesting talk on Saturday about the Open Government movement in Chicago.

The goal of the open government movement, Derek told the audience, is to drive transparency by building technology tools on top of data released by the government.

Based on Derek's talk, I created a timeline of the Chicago open government movement.

2005 ChicagoCrime.org Adrian Holovaty kicked off the Chicago open government movement with ChicagoCrime.org (now Everyblock.com).

2009 Hacking the CTA API Harper Reed built the "Unofficial" CTA API by scraping the CTA bus tracker website.

2011 Mayor Emanuel Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of the City of Chicago. Emanuel hires Chicago's first CTO and CDO to release new city datasets.

2012 ChicagoLobbyists.org Open City developers built ChicagoLobbyists.org, which improves transparency around Chicago lobbying activities.

2012 ClearStreets.org Developers built a scraper on top of the city's Plow Tracker app that displays which city streets have been plowed.

2012 SecondCityZoning.org The Open City team built an interactive map of Chicago's zones.

2013 SchoolCuts.org SchoolCuts.org combines data from CPS, the Illinois State Board of Education, and the University of Chicago Urban Institute to help stakeholders understand data about Chicago school closings.

2014 Crime and Punishment in Chicago Crime and Punishment in Chicago provides an index of crime and prison data sources.

If you're interested in hacking on open data—whether you're a developer, designer, statistician, journalist, or public servant—you can go to the Open Gov Hack Night. The group meets every Tuesday at 6pm in the IMSA room of 1871 in Merchandise Mart.