In order to increase transparency and empower parents, the City of Chicago is partnering with the Smart Chicago Collaborative and the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Lab (UEL) to develop a comprehensive early childhood education web portal. The portal serves as a one-stop-shop for finding early learning programs, assessing program quality, and tracking data about Chicago’s early childhood systems.
The portal is currently deployed to http://chicagoearlylearning.org
http://chicago.cbslocal.com/2012/11/29/city-offers-early-learning-info-online/ (video)
- Zoom, pan, and other map manipulation features
- Click on a location and display attribute information
- Compare information about two different locations, side-by-side
- Geographic search (address and radius) and category filters
- Uses the GoogleMaps base map and geocoding API
- Provides Transit directions by leveraging GoogleMaps Transit capabilities
- Embedded Google Analytics to support usage tracking
- All components are open source
- Printable map
- URL for each resource in order to support bookmarking and sharing
- Responsive user interface design that adapts to tablet and web browser (smart phone support is pending)
- Supports SMS search interface
- User can text a zip code and receive a list of all facilities in it
- User can get details about a specific facility
- Tested and support on IE8+, Firefox 12+, and Chrome 19+
This web application is designed to be installed on a fresh copy of Ubuntu Server 12.04.
After installation of Ubuntu Server 12.04, run the following commands from the terminal:
- sudo apt-get install -y git
- git clone git://github.com/smartchicago/early-childhood-portal.git
- sudo ./install.sh
The installer will go through the process of:
- Setting up the installation directory
- Setup nginx (webserver)
- Setup gunicorn (appserver)
- Start nginx
- Start gunicorn
- Setup postgis
- Create a django local_settings.py file
After running ./install.sh, the database will need to be initialized for use by django with:
cd python/ecep
python manage.py syncdb
- Use the Django admin forms to modify/add questions as necessary
- Run './manage.py dumpdata faq.Question > portal/fixtures/question.json'
- Commit the modified json file
Please log any bugs or errors with the issue tracker on github.