How we do it

OpenUp services our civic technology roots through a variety of projects that seek to bring government and citizens closer together through data, technology and innovative-thinking. The advancement of active citizenship must consider the real conditions of the citizens and South African residents whose rights we hope to advance. OpenUp views user-centred design as not just a method for creating more effective technologies, but also as a method for empowering the communities we work with within the technology development process itself.

OpenUp services our civic technology roots through a variety of projects that seek to bring government and citizens closer together through data, technology and innovative-thinking.

Open budget information

OpenUp drives two significant South African Projects, which advance budget and financial management data and information. Vulekamali is a collaborative project with the National Treasury and Imali Yethu, which makes government budget data and processes accessible to all. Munimoney is a collaborative project with the National Treasury and Imali Yethu, which makes municipal-level budget and financial management data and processes accessible to all. The unique government-civil society collaborations constitute essential open data infrastructure in the South African landscape.

Vulekamali was even awarded the 17th Public Sector Innovation Award of 2019, under the Innovations Enhancing 4IR Solutions Category. We believe this award highlights Vulekamali as a flagship exercise demonstrating the advancement of SDG 17.17, as an effective public, public-private and civil society partnership for the advancement of transparency.

Vulekamali was even awarded the 17th Public Sector Innovation Award of 2019, under the Innovations Enhancing 4IR Solutions Category.

Forwarding our transparency agenda, we also have multiple Application Programming Interfaces on our data products, which are actively used by civil society and the private sector (and we also have 196 Github repositories). Our Vulekamali open data store hosts over 2400 datasets. Munimoney’s API provides access to over 78 384 572 “facts”!

Youth activism

The youth are of course a large, essential corpus of our democratic actors. To advance active citizenship, you must advance active youth citizenship. During the year, we continued to use the Codebridge Youth programme as a key programme for our advancing youth-driven vision. We held several youth engagements and events, and it was a significant area of investment for the organisation. Importantly, a Namibia footprint - in the Rosh Pinah Codebridge Youth community - continued.

We held several youth engagements and events, and it was a significant area of investment for the organisation.

We drive youth work both through our own programmes, but also through our support of other organisation’s youth programmes. There is our collaboration for providing centralised youth data to better inform youth-related policy through Youth Explorer, You can also view our support of the Basic Package of Support Case Management System, in collaboration again with the Southern Africa Labour and Development Research Unit, which allows youth coaches to track their support to young South African job seekers. In the last 28 days the system may have only had 16 frequent users, but these users have participated in over 15000 individual events through the system.

How we do it

OpenUp’s expertise is in open-data powered, responsible innovation, which we leverage to help advance the positive impacts of a range of civil society partners. As part of our growth strategy (both economic, but also in terms of influence), we have also begun great collaborations with like-minded private sector entities like the SIOC Community Development Trust and Impact Amplifier.

Housing

Advancing housing - and housing security - are vital for the advancement of South Africa’s Constitutional goals, as well as an advancement of the SDG 11 to “Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”. OpenUp have collaborated with a number of civil society groups to construct Evictions Guide, South Africa’s only easily accessible, digital guide to navigating evictions processes for the advancement of human rights. We saw a dramatic surge in the use of the site after lockdown, and the ensuing economic instability this wrought, which has led to a continued relevance for a wide range of actors.

In the reporting period, we also began collaborating with Ndifuna Ukwazi on the People’s Land Map which provides an interactive map demonstrating public land availability in the City of Cape Town.

Health

Data and technology have significant potential to help advance health and the SDG Goal 3 to “Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”. In the reporting year, we conducted a seminal collaborative project with the Witzenberg Justice Coalition. After conducting data workshops with the community in Witzenberg, they self-selected an interest in health data from the community. We then capacitated the community itself to collect data on health services - which was then used by the community to conduct advocacy with health authorities of relevance to the region. This revolutionary form of bottom-up data collection has great lessons for broader data governance discussions on trust and responsible data.

After conducting data workshops with the community in Witzenberg, they self-selected an interest in health data from the community.

Climate change

The climate crisis makes the advancement of climate justice a moral imperative, and is an important component of the sustainable development agenda (see for instance SDG 13 to “[t]ake urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”). In the reporting period, OpenUp elected to focus a number of activities within our partnership in the Africa Data Hub to drive climate focused initiatives, such as our development of the Climate Observer and our initiation of work on a climate justice interactive story.

We also continued to invest into collaborations around Water Wazi. Our collaborations with GroundUp and CCIJ led to the “Rivers of Sewage” data story, which was in fact shortlisted for a Sigma Journalism Award in 2023 and a Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism, 2022.

Advancing transparency

Advancing access to data and information is a vital component of the advancement of active citizenship, but also democracy more broadly. A number of our partners recognise this vital intersection. We partnered with My Vote Counts, for instance, to make an interactive dashboard for exploring political party funding data.

We have continued to partner with the Parliamentary Monitoring Group (a partnership which has been going in various forms since 2013) to design and host both the main parliamentary website - the Parliamentary Monitoring Group - and its sister site on elected officials - People’s Assembly. 

The Medicines Pricing Registry remains a historical flagship OpenUp product, which simply and effectively provides users with regulated medicines pricing in South Africa in order to empower individual health decisions.

The Medicines Pricing Registry remains a historical flagship OpenUp product, which simply and effectively provides users with regulated medicines pricing in South Africa in order to empower individual health decisions.

Our National Lotteries Tool remains an excellent example not just of the potential of open data for accountability, but also the nuance of impact (as well as delays in the impact of tools over time). Beginning in 2019, the tool was built in collaboration with investigative journalist Raymond Joseph to help make information about Lottery grants more transparent and keyword searchable. All the information in the tool is from publicly available NLC annual reports. The tool demonstrates how the “number of users” may not always be sufficient for understanding the true scale of impact. Our National Lotteries tool may have only had 200 or so users in the reporting period, but who has used it has been dramatically impactful. The tool drove Ray’s  concerted investigations into fraud in our National Lotteries Board. This reporting not only won him the Taco Kuiper Award for Investigative Journalism, but also directly contributed to the Special Investigating Unit launching an investigation into the Lotteries Board - which has resulted in a preservation order recovering millions of rands. Impacts like these directly contribute to advancing SDG 16.6 - helping to develop effective, accountable and transparent institutions at all levels, and SDG 16.5 - substantially reducing corruption and bribery in all their forms.

Geo-spatial data and Wazimap

We officially launched our product site for Wazimap Next generation in the reporting period, which can be viewed here. We are waiting on tenterhooks for the census data 2022 to be uploaded across our instances. Our clients are wide-ranging, providing a comprehensive GIS and data analysis tool for local governments, civil society organisations, research entities, and corporate social responsibility programmes.

How we do it

A significant focus of aims to build up the data capacities of both our government and civil society partners was expressed during the year in the development of data dashboards. We believe that data and technology are a potential source of empowerment, but in addition the incorporation of innovation methods like agile project management, and user-centred design, are also a necessary focus.

Datafying organisations

Investing in datafication empowers civil society and social impact organisations to enhance transparency, streamline operations, and demonstrate tangible outcomes. By harnessing the power of data, these organisations can optimise decision-making, amplify their impact, and foster a culture of accountability in pursuit of their mission. We have helped organisations SIOC Community Development Trust develop impact data dashboards, and the SALDRU Basic Package of Support Case Management System is an example of digitising existing processes for beneficial data gains.

Civic tech ecosystem building

For technology-driven impact to flourish in the region, we need a vibrant and sustainable civic tech ecosystem. To contribute to this ecosystem, OpenUp regularly engages in conference and presentation activities, like:

We also began collaborating with the Civic Tech Innovation Network on a comprehensive guide on funding and financing strategies to help create sustainable civic technology organisations. The project is to be completed in the next financial year.

Building knowledge

OpenUp has been developing our Knowledge Works as a programmatic vehicle for both our TrainUp (our training programme) and research-related materials for helping build knowledge in the responsible social impact technology ecosystem.

The TrainUp programme is becoming increasingly active, and we are diversifying our training offerings. Whilst we have comprehensive data journalism and data storytelling offerings, we also now offer options on agile development processes, responsible community data collection, technology for impact, and responsible data practices for social impact. 

We have begun moving to collaborate increasingly with researchers and other knowledge makers to help influence important narrative from a responsible social impact technology perspective. We believe practice and research must align. A specific collaboration of note in the area is our support and development of the African Observatory on Responsible Artificial Intelligence’s highly interactive website.

Operations

OpenUp continues our professionalisation goals. A significant policy win in the year was the completion and implementation of our Funding Strategy for 2022-2024.The three pillars of the Strategy focus on Sustainability, Performance and Capacity.

Staffing and Staff Development

We had a significantly larger team this year than in previous years in relation to ful-time and part-time employees, with 18. Most of this growth has been directed to drive our Citizen Engagement Programme activities. 

We continued with our remote-first policy, whilst maintaining our Cape Town office. We are beginning to experience some of the challenges in this model - including higher organisational costs for collaboration, but also challenges in project management and team morale. 

Our team building this year started at a very (unrelaxed) Total Ninja outing in Cape Town, and ended with a (very relaxed) lunch at Mykonos Greek Restaurant in Claremont.

Software Development

We generally adopt a low tech approach; technology is a tool, and as such must be context specific. This means actively choosing interventions that prioritise usability over stack preference — for instance, we have significantly benefited from the use of webflow.io for helping to implement highly responsive, simple websites, rather than pursuing on phone applications requiring software (unless necessary). You can read about our preferred tech stack here. 

Our development philosophy is fundamentally open (and open source). This contributes not just to transparency and re-use, but also to sustainability for public service development (it means we avoid vendor lock-in, in particular). As part of this too, we are proud of our Github contributions, which can be reviewed here: https://github.com/OpenUpSA. This is in itself an indication of our contribution to the development of a capacitated and socially focused civic technology community, where we have almost 200 repositories with multiple forks and a few hundred stargazers.

This year has seen a significant increase in the data dashboard support we provide to civil society and government partners.

Financial Summary

OpenUp has put in place a Funding Strategy to help guide our targets, and help move us toward the building of an operational reserve.

In 2022-2023, OpenUp’s general total income R13 903 303 - a 24% increase in income, which was 6% above our target growth rate. However, the income was heavily weighted to grant income, and deviated from our target of grant: project income at 4:3.

Our employee and contractor costs remain the bulk of our expenditure, but we see a 140% growth in expenditure on software and hosting costs, largely as a result of our technical skills diversifying - leading to a reliance on more software products (most of which are subscription based).

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