Begrudgingly, it seems, the city of Chicago made public a new TIF website, per the new ordinance passed back in April. Of course, it sucks. How do we know? Well, besides the fact that they were too embarrassed to link to it in their own press release, Progress Illinois government transparency enthusiast-hackers Dan O'Neil and Max Brooks went through page-by-page and evaluated its strengths (the information is, technically, there) and its weaknesses. They say (and we agree) that the site is a hard-to-use, poorly organized conglomeration of information at this stage in its development. We hope this first-ever attempt to put Chicago's public documents online in this way is in beta. more ›