March Roundup

We’ve head One quarter of the year gone - here’s is our March roundup.

Tax Clock

Tax Clock, the sexier cousin of the Vote for the Budget tool, shows you where your taxes are going. Punch in your monthly salary and it will tell you how how much of your work day goes towards paying for education or defence and even repayment of the national debt. It also comes with a nifty calendar that you can install which will remind you everyday when you have started working for the state and you start earning money for yourself.

The tool was published as an embeddable widget. As a result, we found it on a variety of websites, ranging from the sidebar of the Business Day to a article page on GQ.

Some of the publishers:

Lenina Rassool is now coming into her own as our new spokeperson. See her in a CNBC interview here

Data journalism academy

Some of the articles published by the residents:

The exodus of teachers from SA is not slowing down

The numbers of teachers leaving South Africa is shocking. Khulekani Magubane explores the data.

In 2015, one of our partners, Ndifuna Ukwazi, made a freedom information request to the City of Cape Town. Accidentally included in documents release was a geocoded list of all the public toilets in informal settlements. Our data wrangler extraordinaire Julia Renouprez, in a superhuman effort, created a database of informal settlements, inferred from the location of toilets. Using this data, the Weekend Argus identified a number of settlements that were not counted in the census. This led to the publication of the following two stories:

The people forgotten by the government

Los Angeles: the story of a Cape settlement

Open Government Partnership

As a directive from the highest office in the land, we were asked to put together a proposal around how can we scale out a national open data strategy. The proposal focuses on 3 main activities:

Ongoing development and support of the national open data portal to serve as the backbone of the open data programme
Building communities across the country in order to grow usage of open data at a local level
Making a case for the economic potential of open data in three focus areas:
- Agriculture
- Water
- Environment

Open data portal for National Treasury

Here is an exercept from the Finance Minister’s budget speech in February:

This year brings our fourth fully democratic local government elections. In recognition
of this, the National Treasury will launch a data portal to provide all stakeholders with
comparable, verified information on municipal financial and non-financial
performance. I hope this will further stimulate citizen involvement in local
governance. 

Code for South Africa is the implementing partner for this project. Not only are we developing an API to make this availabe as well as a municipal scorecard, we are also running a series of accountability stack and data quest events to explore how civil society and media can use this data to make government more accountable.

Hack4Water

South Africa is currently experience its worst drought in a 100 years. Along with the Department of Public Service and Administration, Department of Water and Sanitation, Microsoft and the Gauteng Innovation Lab, we launch the Hack4Water campaign which calls out to citizens to
This is just strange - our hack4water hackathons appeared on the Stanford University LiberationTech calender.
We hosted Hack for Water hackathons in Cape Town and Durban https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJeY3CLG-QE&feature=youtu.be