From the Green Street Project:

Chicago Mayor Daley's office and the nonprofit Green Street Project launched a collaborative "Community Building Initiative" to help make Chicago an even better city. The Initiative convenes community, civic, business and philanthropic leaders through regular Town Hall Meetings at City Hall and in neighborhoods across Chicago. The purpose of the Initiative is to connect community goals and resources through relationships.

For its first action to connect civic-minded individuals and organizations with one another, the Initiative has endorsed the development of a user-generated website called CitizenPowered.org, with an expected release in summer 2007.

In April 2007, over 50 technology companies attended a Town Hall Meeting to discuss how the site should be built and how corporations could support its development. ChicagoTech.org and PixelGateMedia.com are designing the site. Tilted.com will host the site. A Technology Task Force, numbering over 20 companies is being launched to advise on the site’s ongoing development.

The site will feature user-generated content focused on community building. Users, both individuals or organizations, will be able to connect with one another, compare assets and needs, collaborate towards shared goals, post event dates, write stories, classify one another’s postings, etc. The site’s user-generated content will be syndicated through media alliances, which will spread information and drive a critical mass of users to the site. For example, local media will be able to access a repository of user-generated public service announcements that are vetted by user ratings.

We will be handling architecture, implementation, and deployment of the new CitizenPowered.org site, using the design by PixelGate. This is a very cool project and we're thrilled to be involved! Check back for updates as we get closer to launch.

The above article was posted in August 2007. CTC served as a pro bono technical consultant on the project and developed a beta implementation over the subsequent two months.