Pocket Reporter, your personal “news editor in your pocket”, has been given a makeover that includes lots of new election reporting templates and resources, just in time for South Africa’s General Election.
By understanding how complex legal processes play out in the real world (not just in a textbook) we can design tools and systems that empower ordinary people to access justice in our courts.
Learning how to use pivot tables is a milestone in your ability to wrangle data. It is a key tool for basic analysis of data. What happens if your data has already been pivoted and you want to unpivot? This brief tutorial shows you how using OpenRefine.
I continue to learn more about how to use OpenRefine in new and interesting ways. In this tutorial explain how to emulate the SQL grouping functions.
OpenUp has partnered with Cape Agulhas Municipality to put the municipality's by-laws online, helping to make them easier to find, read and share.
We need more technologists to enter the world of civic tech but beware that your tech skills will only get you so far. Social issues cannot be solved from behind a keyboard.
What we did when we realised that frustration and confusion in the organisation was caused by lack of understanding of our chosen project management methodology.
How to use feature detection to ensure that styling from the frontiers of front-end development do not break older browsers.
Scary, crazy, upside-down truths for the insecure and perfectionistic, found in the practice of Lean UX.
What we learnt collaborating with Romania and Poland on civic tech for open legislation.
A non-technical solution for populating and duplicating application forms.
A key ability for anyone who wants to communicate insights through data storytelling is to be able to find, extract and transform relevant data into machine readable format.
As part of our open intake, we've concluded our training in Johannesburg. Hear what participants had to say about their experience of learning how to begin telling stories with data.
It's the civic that decides whether and how the tech will work.
Dates confirmed for Introduction to Data Storytelling in Durban & Applications close today for Johannesburg Intake!
As we wrap up our work in corporate, we decided to reflect on a few of the lessons learnt along the way.
As part of OpenUp's Transparent Corporates project, we've got some tips on how to investigate private entities using open data.
OpenUp's short training courses teach Learners the value and impact numbers have, once contextualised in the situations that affect our daily living
The enormous impact of cloud computing on the pace of business innovation over the last ten years bears an important lesson for the law and the government: the significant value of shared, re-usable resources.
When it comes to open data we have learnt that data just being open, available and accessible is not enough. Whilst we don’t have all the answers, we do have some learnings to share.
Youth Explorer is an indispensible tool for youth-oriented municipalities, government departments and civil society organisations.
OpenUp re-structures short course training offering
Open Up is working to create active, engaged citizens through a focus on transparency and data literacy.
How does the Corporate Tax Income rate affects the average taxpayer and what are the ways in which we can start to curb tax evasion?
In this next article we look at beneficial ownership and the need for global improved transparency, as well as a registry here in South Africa.
In this next article we’re going back to the beginning and will look at why we’re branching out to corporate data.
In 2016, 29 municipalities in South Africa were created and 40 were disestablished. At OpenUp, we handle these changes by following the principle of “making the common easy, and making the not-so-common possible”.
Wazimap now has 2016 Municipal Election results and uses the municipalities and ward boundaries used for the elections.
Unpacking the joy of doing live customer support at OpenUp
Dear friends, I want to share an important announcement with you.
For Open Data Day 2017, we asked the OpenUp staff to weigh in on why Open Data is important and what it means to them.
What is tax evasion and what does it actually mean to call somewhere a tax haven?
The state of transparency within company ownership and how the law facilitates access to this type of information.
The most innocuous dataset can tell such interesting stories by leaking information that you never expected it held.
A data-driven journey through the medical profession using age, gender, and education.
Code for South Africa and SAFLII need your help to build the largest digital collection of freely available gazettes.
We don’t know enough about who owns what in corporates, which allows corruption, theft and dodgy dealings to happen. That’s why we’re going after the data.
The Western Cape Youth Explorer provides data on demographics, education, unemployment, health, access to basic services and more, down to ward level, for youth across the Western Cape.
Announcing MunicipalMoney.gov.za, a website that makes municipal financial performance and budgets more transparent.
By building a series of programs used to source, scrape and index government gazettes, we now have a growing collection of over 20,000 free and searchable publications.
Meet Pocket Reporter, a new Android app for journalists, activists and anyone interested in storytelling that guides you through the newsgathering process.
Open Gazettes changes the way journalists use government gazettes to do stories, by allowing users to search and track important public information.
We've made official government gazettes available online and searchable, so you no longer have to sift through them to source important, public information.
We've posted population estimates for Police Districts around the country to make working with crime rates simpler.
In April, Code for South Africa was approached by Ndifuna Ukwazi to create an online map visualisation of Cape Town’s informal settlements.
This blog post will cover the technical side of creating an online map visualisation of Cape Town’s informal settlements.
Taking shortcuts and outright cheating is the hallmark of a great developer. I like creating graphics, both visualisations and pretty maps but I often don’t have the time to spend hours making one from scratch.
It's now much easier to build your own Wazimap and help more people find the story behind the data.
Hear Jason Norwood-Young talk about school pregnancies, unfair access to APIs and BeautifulSoup
The Department of Environmental Affairs maintain the South African Renewable Energy EIA Application Database which is updated quarterly for their web-based map viewer.
Sometimes the best story ideas come from a random discussion that sparks a light bulb moment.
All too often powerful, simple-to-use data tools for journalists are built and, after an initial buzz, they end up hardly being used by the very users they target.
OpenBylaws.org.za helps South Africans to find out what the law says about fireworks in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Imagine if you could trace 50 years of African migration to the four corners of the world? How many women and men left their homes heading for pastures anew in each decade?
This post is aimed at journalists and potential users of OpenRefine who have limited, or no experience at all, using it.
The Promotion of Access to Information Act (PAIA) enacts the constitutional right of access to state information, and it was through such a PAIA request to the City of Cape Town that Ndifuna Ukwazi, a Code for South Africa partner, received a “data dump” that contained a very interesting dataset.
Developing Open Data Resources for South African Women
The Indigo Legislation Platform now powers Open By-laws South Africa, a big jump forward for re-use, free access to law, and open source legislation software.
They say that love knows no age. Does the data agree? Have a look at a weird cross-section of our society as seen through the 2012 civil marriages dataset.
The surgeon general has been warning us for year. I took a look the at Causes of Death data from 2012. Yep - turns out that it's true.
In this day and age, gender should be completely irrelevant. But is it?
Speed traps often seem to be engineered to trick drivers instead of aiming to reduce road deaths. I decided to investigate whether municipalities are cynically using fines as an excuse to raise revenue
We’ve been making some opinionated choices about our deployment practices at Code for South Africa. Here’s what we’re doing and why.
What percentage of PAIA requests get answered by municipalities, and is this related to any specific municipality characteristic like size or population composition. Secondly, is how you ask for data important?
We've been waiting for this for a long time. Cape Town is the first government entity to embrace open data. It is time to rejoice? I don't think so.
Sometimes you can't anticipate how your work is going to be used. Here is a story that really motivates me to continue doing what we do.
Over 90 of South Africa’s open data experts from government, civic organisations and private enterprise met at the #OpenDataNow Unconference in Cape Town last week to take the first steps in creating an open data society
PoplusCon in Santiago, Chile, was a recent push to try and increase collaboration between the different civic-coding organizations around the world
People legally change their names all the time. Sometimes what they choose for themselves is very amusing. We read through the government gazette and found the top 10 most entertaining examples.
People legally change their names all the time. Sometimes what they choose for themselves is very amusing.
Open Data for the win! How to save on your medicines bill using open data.
February 22nd is International Open Data Day. Code for South Africa is hosting a data party. Come through and roll up your sleeves
Occasionally I wonder why our work matters. How does it make our lives easier and promote better engagement with government. I have a sad tale to tell about a garden that I planted which was subsequently destroyed by the council and how I plan to get to the bottom of it.
Many of us don't know our neighborhood, although the data exists. We hosted a mini-hackathon with the Open Democracy Advice centre to explore our hood.
Did you know that medicine prices are regulated in South Africa? Most people don't. We've built an application that makes price comparisons between branded medicines and their generic equivalents easier.
In a time where 'open' has become the new mantra of the socially conscious everywhere, the department of Basic Education is embracing 'closed'.
For poor and working class citizens, the public healthcare system in their countries is the only way that they are able to get medical treatment and medicines that can arrest diahrroea in their children, cure bacterial infections, and treat the scourge of hiv, tb and malaria.
OpenUp is proud to be a winner of the African News Innovation Challenge