layout: blog
categories: 
  - blog
title: "The 2019 Chi Hack Night Black History Month Speaker Series"
description: "Chi Hack Night is proud to present our second annual Black History Month Speaker Series. This year's speaker series will consist of 3 Chi Hack Night presentations on Tuesday nights in February and a partnership event with the Chicago Chapter of The National Association of Black Journalists."
date: 2019-02-07
image: /images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_0.jpg
author: Monique Wingard
author_url: https://moniquewingard.com/
author_image: /images/people/monique_wingard.jpg
author_bio: "Monique is a digital media professional, advocate of women and youth in STEAM, and founder of The Civic Tech Collective–the premiere online community for social entrepreneurs."
author2: Derek Eder
author2_url: https://twitter.com/derekeder
author2_image: /images/people/derek_eder.jpg
author2_bio: "Derek is an entrepreneur, developer and one of the leaders of the civic technology community in Chicago. He is a co-founder and partner at DataMade and is the lead organizer for Chi Hack Night."

published: true
---

<p class="text-center"><img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_0.jpg" alt="The 2019 Chi Hack Night Black History Month Speaker Series" class='img-responsive' />
</p>

Chi Hack Night is proud to present our second annual Black History Month Speaker Series. After the success of [last year's series](https://chihacknight.org/blog/2018/02/02/introducing-black-history-month-speaker-series.html) with presentations from [Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx](https://chihacknight.org/events/2018/02/13/kim-foxx.html) and [BYP100 National Director Charlene Carruthers](https://chihacknight.org/events/2018/02/27/charlene-carruthers.html), we are excited to continue our tradition of bringing amazing and talented black men and women to share their work with our community.

This year's speaker series will consist of 3 Chi Hack Night presentations on Tuesday nights in February and a partnership event with the Chicago Chapter of [The National Association of Black Journalists](https://www.nabj.org).

We hope you will join us!

## The 2019 Black History Month Lineup

**February 5th - Darryl Holliday & Pat Sier - Launching Documenters.org**

<p>
    <img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_1.jpg" alt="Darryl Holliday" style='width: 200px;'/>
    <img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_2.jpg" alt="Pat Sier" style='width: 200px;'/>
</p>

Tuesday, Feb 5, 6pm<br />
Braintree<br />
222 W Merchandise Mart Plz, 8th Floor<br />
Chicago, IL 60654

Local government bodies hold thousands of public meetings every day, but the vast majority receive no media coverage and produce minimal records. And these important spaces for democracy go unwatched. Long story short, your city officials are making big decisions.[ Documenters.org](https://www.documenters.org/) makes it easy to keep tabs by[ scraping, standardizing and sharing](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wF3s_eOQsKo) information on public meetings at the city and county-level in Chicago and Detroit—all in one central location.

[Darryl Holliday](https://twitter.com/d_holli), City Bureau News Lab Director and Pat Sier, City Bureau Web Developer will present the new Documenters.org website and talk about how it complements [City Bureau](https://www.citybureau.org/)'s two-year-old Documenters program, which has been training and paying members of the public to document public governance meetings in Chicago since 2016.

**February 12th - Open Hack & Potluck**

<p class="text-center"><img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_3.png" alt="Chi Hack Night" class='img-responsive' style='width: 300px;'/>
</p>

Tuesday, Feb 12, 6pm<br />
Braintree<br />
222 W Merchandise Mart Plz, 8th Floor<br />
Chicago, IL 60654<br />
[RSVP](https://chihacknight.eventbrite.com/)

In keeping with our tradition of having an open hack & potluck session once a month, we will have no presentation on Feb 12. Please bring drinks, snacks or desserts if you can! We'll provide the usual empanadas too. While we eat, we'll build, share, and learn about civic tech!

**February 18th - The National Association of Black Journalists Talks Black History with Timuel Black**

<p class="text-center"><img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_4.jpg" alt="Timuel Black" class='img-responsive' style='width: 200px;'/>
</p>

Monday, Feb 18, 6pm<br />
Bar Louie<br />
47 W Polk St, Chicago, IL<br />
$5 entry fee

Chi Hack Night is proud to be partnering with and supporting the National Association of Black Journalists during Black History Month.

Timuel Black, elder statesman and griot of Chicago's black community, turned 100 on Dec. 7. The momentous birthday was accompanied by a weekend of Chicago celebrations for the historian, author, political and civil rights activist.

Black worked with activists Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois in the '40s and '50s; alongside Dr. Martin Luther King in the '60s. He was heavily involved in King's Chicago Freedom Movement, and helped organize Chicagoans' participation in the '63 March on Washington. Over the course of seven decades, he helped establish and was active in over 100 civil rights/labor organizations. And Black was instrumental in the election of Chicago's first black mayor, in 1983, as well as the election of the nation's first black president, in 2008. NABJ-Chicago will to host a fireside chat with this icon at our annual Black History Month Forum. 

**February 19th - Maudelyn Ihejirika, Chicago Sun Times Urban Affairs Reporter/Columnist**

<p class="text-center"><img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_5.jpg" alt="Maudelyn Ihejirika" class='img-responsive' style='width: 200px;'/>
</p>

Tuesday, Feb 19, 6pm<br />
Braintree<br />
222 W Merchandise Mart Plz, 8th Floor<br />
Chicago, IL 60654<br />
[RSVP](https://chihacknight.eventbrite.com/)

Maudlyne Ihejirika is an award winning, Chicago Sun-Times Urban Affairs Reporter/Columnist, with 30 years experience in Journalism, Public Relations and Government. She pens the Sun-Times "[Chicago Chronicles](https://chicago.suntimes.com/topic/chicago-chronicles/)" column on "people and places that make Chicago tick," and is author of "[Escape From Nigeria: A Memoir of Faith, Love and War](https://www.amazon.com/Escape-Nigeria-Memoir-Faith-Love/dp/156902488X)," a riveting tale of her family's survival of the brutal Nigerian-Biafran War.

In 25 years with the Sun-Times, she has served as assistant city editor and covered beats from crime and the inner city to housing and education, politics and philanthropy. She is president of both the Chicago Journalists Association and the National Association of Black Journalists Chicago Chapter.

Maudlyne will talk about her experience as a reporter and columnist in Chicago over the past 30 years.

**February 26th - Steven C. Philpott, Sr. - The Array of Opportunity**

<p class="text-center"><img src="/images/blog/2019-02-07-black-history-month/image_6.jpg" alt="Steven C. Philpott, Sr." class='img-responsive' style='width: 200px;'/>
</p>

Tuesday, Feb 26, 6pm<br />
Braintree<br />
222 W Merchandise Mart Plz, 8th Floor<br />
Chicago, IL 60654<br />
[RSVP](https://chihacknight.eventbrite.com/)

[Steven Philpott](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sphilpott/) is the Sr. Managing Director of Colony 5, a not-for-profit organization accelerating the redevelopment of distressed retail corridors via tech entrepreneurship. At Chi Hack Night, Steven will share his work on the Array of Opportunity, a pilot collaboration between the research community and innovators to develop prototypes for social impact and commercial implications in a concentrated geolocation. The endgame of this project is to demonstrate how Opportunity Zones can be future-forward, more responsive and attractive to investment by exposing edge-tech initiatives within these communities. Join this session that introduces the Array of Opportunity premise, pilot community, and collaborative approach.

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We hope you will join us in February. And stay tuned for our upcoming 2019 Women in Tech Speaker Series in March!

