How one piece of code empowered hundreds of thousands voters in the South African Local Government Elections 2021
The founder of Open Cities Lab (OCL), Richard Gevers, was all over the South African press recently talking about mycandidate.opencitieslab.org — the tool that tells you who you can vote for in the Local Government Elections (LGE). It was only possible because the open data community made it happen. The portal is a collaboration between […]
What have your experiences been leading up to the South African Local Government Elections 2021?
Abigail Kemper from Open Cities lab interviews mother-daughter duo, Liz and Sarah, about the lead-up to the South African 2021 local municipal elections and their experiences using the MyCandidate.opencitieslab.org tool to find the candidates contesting in their ward. Before now, there was no easy way of knowing who you could possibly vote for. For most […]
What is Civic Tech?
“So, what do you do?” is a question that has become a frequent conversation starter in this period of my life. I take a quick glance around the room to check that no one I have had this conversation with before is within earshot. If the coast is clear I race through a phrase that […]
The State of Public Procurement in South Africa is Not Transparent
The ability to “follow the money” is only possible if transactions are recorded and published, (or if the data is leaked). In partnership with Corruption Watch, we at Open Cities Lab, are interested in our government’s process for recording and publishing all tenders in every stage of the procurement process. The Open Contracting Data Standards […]
A convention of air quality citizen scientists on Open Data Day
Open Data Day was an opportunity for Open Cities lab to gather our collective of community scientists in one room to work on our air quality monitoring project. This project endeavours to create an open data platform on air quality in the city of Durban. Our data collection method has involved building low cost particulate […]
Durban Answers Brain’s Trust Training
A few weeks ago, we held our first training session with the Durban Answers Brain’s Trust. The purpose of this training was to introduce some of the more technical aspects of the Durban Answers project and to pick their brains on ways to identify specific user groups and develop specialized content for these groups. Here […]
Durban Answers Brain’s Trust
A few weeks ago, we hosted a breakfast with some of the most dedicated, long-serving and influential civil servants and ex-civil servants in the city. We endearingly are calling this group the “Brain’s Trust” for lack of a better title, although I have a feeling this working title will be difficult to compete with should […]
The Question of Traffic Fines | Durban Answers
This past February, I got a ticket from Metro Police for not having a current license on my car. Due to the manic nature of life currently, I completely forgot about it. Within 30 days (as is apparently the standard) I received a letter in the post telling me that I had until the 7th […]
Co-creating Durban Answers
We’ve been running our #AskDurban campaign for about 2 weeks now, and we’ve gotten quite a few interesting submissions of “how-do-I” questions about Durban. But while we’ve gotten a number of submissions, there are many of you who have absolutely no idea why we are asking people to submit questions and an even larger number […]