Cape Town – Free and useable municipal information about everything from budgets to bus routes is now available on the City of Cape Town’s open data portal.
The portal, which allows residents to access and share local government information via their cellphones and computers, will also “take transparency to the next level”, said mayor Patricia de Lille.
Cape Town is the first African city to make its information available in this way.
Speaking at the launch of the portal this week, De Lille said: “We want citizens to hold government to account and to do so they need information.”
The project was started last year as part of the city’s World Design Capital 2014 programme and is based largely on Helsinki’s open data model.
“In today’s knowledge economy, access to data is instrumental to becoming competitive,” said De Lille.
The city has already set up a nine-member steering committee to approve the data sets that will be uploaded onto the portal. Two public representatives will be included on this committee.
Xanthea Limberg, the city’s mayoral committee member for corporate services, said 25 data sets have been added to the portal, which is now live. These include information about city budgets, community parks and MyCiTi bus routes. Tender information is also available.
“We have made every effort to ensure that the data is available in various formats,” she said.
Users can download data which can be used with external applications, such as Google Earth. This means, for example, that a user can create an interactive map of subcouncil wards and MyCiTi routes.
But De Lille emphasised that this project was a work in progress and she urged residents to tell the city what information they wanted to access.
The open data portal homepage therefore invites users to give input on the type of information they would like to access.
De Lille also extended the invite to the media to suggest data sets that would make it easier for them to cover municipal news.
While the portal would aid in holding local government accountable, it would also add to the city’s investment appeal, said De Lille. Investors listed internet connectivity among their priorities when looking for business opportunities.
Already the city’s significant investment in its 350km of fibre optic cable was beginning to pay off, she said. The city was able to sell connectivity to the private sector, and to improve bandwidth speed considerably at government buildings. Internet access was much better than five years ago and residents had access to free wi-fi at city libraries and other facilities.