Apparently, the traditional 10-year anniversary gift is tin. I looked it up, and I have to admit this was somewhat anticlimactic (I was expecting a bronze or myrrh situation at least). It's hard to conceptualise what an immensely significant milestone this ten years is for an organisation. I can explain how long ago ten years is, though: Miley Cyrus’ “Wrecking Ball” was streaming at the top of the Billboard charts at the time. That feels like a time when we were all very different people.
OpenUp began, really, as a scrappy little working group that morphed into an organisation. Adi Eyal and I first met at an Open Knowledge Foundation meetup, and started collaborating on all manner of transparency and information things.
And Adi was already working with Jason Norwood-Young. We established a working group called the Open Data & Democracy Initiative to try and coalesce what we saw as people with shared interests in transparency and open data. Eventually, though, we realised volunteers will only ever get you so far - and the three of us became the founding members of OpenUp (which was then called Code for South Africa). You can read a bit more about our history here, but I think it is worth highlighting how our very foundations were rooted in shared values, and kinship. And so began the journey: driven by our wonderful former Executive Director, Adi Eyal.
In our ten years, we have done some amazing things; and it's all been to empower people and government, through data, technology and innovative-thinking, to become active agents in creating positive social change. We spearheaded the collaborative development of Vulekamali, which remains a key component of South Africa’s essential open data infrastructure (and stay tuned for exciting developments still to come on where we’ll be taking Munimoney!). We have over 16 active tools just within our Citizen Engagement Programme (CEP), and an additional 9 active Wazimap profiles - which is becoming an incredible product for simple data interpretation. In only the last 3 months of 2023, a combination of just 18 of these tools had seen around 400 000 users, and almost 3, 2 million events.
But the number of users may not always be sufficient for understanding the true scale of the impact of our work: our National Lotteries tool was built in collaboration with Raymond Joseph, who used it to drive his 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 Board - which has resulted in a preservation order recovering millions of rands.
And we work constructively across actors; our CEP has also launched 7 collaborative local government tools directly in collaboration with Municipalities since 2018, and hosted 62 in-community CEP events which have driven capacity-building for over 2000 direct beneficiaries. We also contribute directly to the data and knowledge pool for South Africa, with 196 Github repositories. We have multiple APIs on data products, which are actively used by civil society and the private sector - consider just the Vulekamali open data store, which hosts over 2400 datasets, or Munimoney’s API, which provides access to over 78 384 572 “facts”!
But we define our success just as much from the success within our team, as much as through our outputs. OpenUp has a decades long history of amazing employees, and amazing associates. A decade gives you a real opportunity to witness growth: we’ve seen many staff buy first houses, have children (including mine), get married and simply get happy. We have been able to touch so many lives, and OpenUp is an amalgam of thousands and thousands wonderful interpersonal experiences.
It hasn’t all been roses and cuddles though. We have been through several pivots - downsizing and upsizing, not always comfortably. We should have expected this though. Discussing developmental milestones Aliza Pressman, PhD explained: "Ten-year-olds are emerging adolescents. Their bodies and brains are going through these tremendous changes." So true. I have been constructing a “Project Graveyard” for us recently of all our failed and abandoned projects (which we will share with the world soon), and I must admit, it delights me. It delights me to see how hard we try. It delights to see how quickly we learn, as well. It's a testament to our courage, and our creativity - to traits which are really core to the OpenUp spirit.
As we look to our future, I am so excited for us. We have spent the last two years reflecting on our skills and our rich value add to a world which needs all the help it can get, and we are taking some real and brave steps to centring these values better. And there’s more good news to turning 10: 10 years old is the legal working age in Bolivia. We’re only just getting started.
