The Open Government Partnership is a multilateral initiative that aims to secure concrete commitments from national and sub-national governments to promote open government, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance.
To this effect, South Africa became a part of the Open Government Partnership in the year 2015, led through the Department of Public Service and Administration with various commitments including open data. Since then, projects such as National Treasury’s Vulekamali budget data portal, the South African Air Quality Information System, National Spatial Data Repository, Open Up South Africa’s data platforms, etc. have helped accelerate the local data ecosystem.
Open data is data that is openly accessible, exploitable, editable and shared by anyone for any purpose, even commercially. Open data is licensed under an open licence.
On 15 October 2022, the University of Limpopo Developer Society and the Geekulcha Student Society at the University of Limpopo whosted an Open Dataquest event which challenges participants to work with data in helping understand and build solutions for common societal issues.
The dataquest was in partnership and supported by the University of Limpopo's Technology Transfer Office and the Human Science Research Council who hosted sessions and provided mentorhip throughout the event.
During the event, participants were provided with datasets (focused on Limpopo province); then analyse the data, come up with story angles; supplement / integrate datasets; draw/depict insights through visualisations;
Participants of the dataquest did not need to be technical but basic digital literacy skills were required and at the end, everyone attained data literacy skills with a certificate of participation.
