Technology is not our focus, but rather something we use to achieve in order to achieve our goals. Keep reading if you're interested in the ways we use technology to empower people to improve their lives and their communities. You might also be interested in our code on GitHub.
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.
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.
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.
It's the civic that decides whether and how the tech will work.
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.
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”.
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.
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 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.
PoplusCon in Santiago, Chile, was a recent push to try and increase collaboration between the different civic-coding organizations around the world
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.
In a time where 'open' has become the new mantra of the socially conscious everywhere, the department of Basic Education is embracing 'closed'.
