The City of Cape Town is making datasets available for analysis via their Open Data portal and over time, analysts predict, it will result in a more responsive, adaptive and agile administration, among other benefits writes Alan Cameron.

1. Transparency leads to investment

Making state information freely accessible to the public creates business confidence, as transparency from effective open data practices is interpreted as a display of good governance. The move "is important to South Africa because transparency and accountability are critical dimensions for foreign aid and business investment," states Kelsey Wiens, public lead for Creative Commons in South Africa. A global NGO, Creative Commons enables the open sharing of creativity and knowledge through several public copyright licenses.

The adoption of open policies can maximise the return on public investments in gathering this information, Kelsey goes on to site examples such as Code4SA. A local NGO that works with individuals and organisations, Code4SA turns data into readable and usable formats that in turn support transparent, effective decision making.

This joint problem-solving encourages a government that is collaborative, creative and responsive – elements considered when assessing a potential investment destination, says Jodi Allemeier, a programme facilitator at the Western Cape Economic Development Partnership (WCEDP) involved in the Open Data Working Group that is creating an online environment that allows users to join the dots between data sets themselves.

"A ready example of how open data can be used is the City of Cape Town's ECAMP, where access to detailed information about a city can provide intelligence about market opportunities," said Jodi. Another is the Cape Town budget project, on which Code4SA and Ndifuna Ukwazi collaborated to shows what projects municipal budgets are spent on.

2. Transparency fuels economic development

The opportunity for collaborative and effective decision-making motivated the creation of the City of Cape Town's portal.

Launched in January 2015 – just three months after the Open Data Policy was approved – the portal will "increase the efficiencies and effectiveness" of the City, said Cape Town Mayor Patricia de Lille who hopes the information benefits the City by allowing it "to benefit from the creativity of the public and private sector".

The data sets on the portal are free to use, and these could well create efficiencies within the City's systems, or applications that contribute to the public good in some way (such as plotting household income, race and language using South Africa's 2011 census data), Jodi agrees.

Adrian Firth's dot map showing 2011 census data of home language prevalence in Cape Town. Click on the image to load the original.

The GoMetro app is one such application, showing domestic train schedules in an accessible way, it targets Cape Town's 250 000 daily train commuters. Adrian Firth's mapping of household income, race and language using South Africa's 2011 census data is another.

3. Transparency enables effective cooperation, not division

But what happens when this open data is used to criticise city authorities? De Lille welcomes this, saying open data is intended to "empower citizens to hold city government to account".

This accountability can be a key tool in rebuilding trust between government and other sectors because, Jodi says, the City is opening itself up not only to critique, but to "potentially invaluable new investment, perspectives, analyses that may prove age-old criticisms wrong, or contribute to a more fact-based dialogue about key issues facing Cape Town".

"The City's Open Data Portal is a promising start in achieving transparency, openness and accountability," agrees Axolile Notywala a project manager for the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), which among other things, advocates, for access to clean and safe sanitation in the greater Cape Town area in publications like their "Wasteful Expenditure" report that audited refuse removal and area cleaning in Khayelitsha.

However, Axolile goes on: "There are important types of information still missing from the Open Data Portal such as Service Delivery Agreements (SDAs) for basic services that the City offers through private service providers."

This type of dialogue is important, states Jodi: "Through proactive engagement between the City and users of the portal, the data made available will hopefully be applied to projects and discussions that boost collaborative problem solving, rather than used to further fracture our city."

4. Transparent data needs details

The Open Data portal allows the public to suggest sets of data to be made public, for example, the city budgets or open tenders worth more than R200 000.

All data requests are considered and, if successful, approved in quarterly meetings by a nine-member Open Data Steering Committee. After approval, it is gathered, packaged and released in a user-friendly format and remain accessible on the portal. This incremental approach is necessary to devote the type of resources required to supply user-friendly datasets, explained De Lille.

"I don't really mind if data is released before it is fully clean as long as there is an internal process to clean it up," says Code4SA director Adi Eyal. I noticed that some of the data is not properly machine readable – for instance the budgets, while in spreadsheet format, needs a lot of cleaning and reshaping before it can be automatically analysed. I'd also prefer the data to be more specific, it would be useful for proper linkages between datasets. For instance, a park should have a unique identifier so that it can be linked to expenditure listed in the budget – this is a nice-to-have though, as I would imagine that a lot of work would be needed in order to do this."

A visualisation of the work Code4SA and the Parliamentary Monitoring Group is busy with. Image courtesy Code4SA.

Besides their work on budget transparency, Code4SA's work includes efforts to simply display the evolution and discussion around parliamentary bills and provide an effective channel of communication between the City and residents of Red Hill informal settlement. They also offer opportunities for the public to learn how to find and interpret data.

"The Open Data portal is a really positive move," says Adi, although it still has a long way to go. "Hopefully it will encourage other government bodies to do the same."

5. Public access for the public good

The Open Data Portal can be accessed in public libraries for free on the City's SmartCape network.

"This is very promising for opportunities for entrepreneurship and job creation, particularly among a younger population who are increasingly tech-savvy and mobilised by new media," says Jodi.

"People are increasingly expecting fast responses from both business and government: we want to be able to get a response to a tweeted complaint; or use our phones to make orders or suggestions. By opening up its datasets, the City of Cape Town is increasing the chance that, through the creativity of individuals, businesses and other organisations, it can take governance into the digital era."

6. Transparency enables a virtuous cycle of improvements

Jodi continues: "The implications for government, and for the lived experience of an ordinary citizen, are potentially large – from incremental improvements in trust and engagement, right through to the fundamentals of how government operates, where and why it allocates resources.

"International precedent shows that open data systems need to form a part of a larger partnership between government and broader society: a partnership that see's citizens more deeply engaged in the actions of government; and see's government more responsive, adaptive and agile to inputs that emerge from these engagements. While there are many ideas and lessons to be garnered from other cities (see how Helsinki and New York are doing it), there's no doubt that Cape Town's open data story will be our own. To support this, the WCEDP convenes the Open Data Forum as a platform to support meaningful uses of this data."

Main image from GovTech.com