The City of Cape Town yesterday approved an open data policy, as part of the World Design Capital initiative, which aims to showcase how design can be utilised to make cities and governments more transparent.
The World Design Capital is a city promotion project - run by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design - which recognises achievements in the field of industrial design by cities around the world. The biennial designation is awarded to a city that uses design to revitalise urban areas and promote design innovation.
According to the Cape Town city council, the policy was approved as part of its commitment to ensuring transparent, accountable and accessible government. Recommendations in the Cape Town design model - built by an IBM design team last year - include how the city can use data optimally, apply change management, manage its social assets better and apply design thinking.
"The city generates a significant amount of data that is potentially useful to residents. In the Information Age, making public sector data available allows us, as government, to tap into the creativity and innovative thinking of business and society," says councillor Xanthea Limberg, mayoral committee member for corporate services.
Through the open data policy, the city says it will establish and incrementally populate a single online open data portal with information and data that would be free and accessible to members of the public.
"The open data portal will also create a new opportunity for information technology developers and private sector companies to use the data to create cellphone applications, Web sites and programs. This enables these stakeholders to use the data in their own creative way," says the council.
The portal will be established within the next three months and the categories of information for release will be considered in terms of their applicability to service delivery, while being matched against current legislation, including privacy laws.
A steering committee - which will include members of the public - will monitor the implementation of the policy, as well as approve requests for additional data sets. Information that is determined to be inappropriate by the committee will not be made available on the portal, says the city.
"While we are committed to being open and transparent in this process, we need to be mindful of certain data that cannot be placed in the public domain. This will include copyrighted third-party data, information that infringes on the privacy of individual citizens, information the city cannot legally disclose, and information that is deemed to be confidential," explains Limberg.
The city of Torino, in Italy, was designated as the first World Design Capital in 2008, followed by Seoul, in South Korea, in 2010, and Helsinki, Finland, in 2012.
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