When open data and data activism meet: An analysis of civic participation in Cape Town,South Africa

Municipal open data projects are motivated by a desire to democratize data access and knowledge production, strengthen transparency, and advance cities socially and economically. However, their effects and implications are insufficiently analyzed. This paper examines civic engagement in open data in Cape Town, South Africa, the continent's first municipal-level open data initiative. Findings reveal how local civil society organizations have been driving engagement with municipal open data as part of their recent turn towards technology and data-driven forms of public engagement and activism. This analysis highlights the important role of the “smart civil society organization”—occupying a position between the smart city and smart citizen—that is developing significant capacity to produce and share data about the city's informal settlements with stakeholders in government, the private sector, and wider society. Minimal engagement with or recognition of civil society efforts illustrates the limits to the city's philosophy of data openness, which is largely restricted to releasing selected government datasets to the public. The notion of “bi-directional open data” is developed here to characterize emerging possibilities for data openness between governments and the public. This may be particularly relevant for cities like Cape Town with a highly active, capable, and data-literate civil society.     

Evolving technology,shifting expectations: cultivating pedagogy for a rapidly changing GIS landscape

As humans and natural processes continuously reshape the surface of the Earth, there is an unceasing need to document and analyze them through the use of Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The public is gaining more access to spatial technologies that were once only available to highly trained professionals. With technological evolution comes a requirement to transition traditional GIS training for the next generation of GIS professionals. Traditional GIS combined with non-traditional GIS (i.e. mobile and location media) and CyberGIS educational materials could attract new and diverse students into Geography departments while informing the next generation of geospatial tool builders and users. Here we pose an applied pedagogical framework for teaching cutting-edge GIS material to diverse student populations with varying levels of technological experience and professional goals. The framework was developed as part of the National Science Foundation (NSF) CyberGIS Fellows program and was applied as a course template at the University of Washington Tacoma’s Master’s of Science in Geospatial Technologies. We chart how the framework developed into a cyclical structure from our original conceptualization as a hierarchy. This changed the epistemological orientation accommodating the shifting technological terrain of the GIS landscape to improve the skills of those driving the machines.     

?konomie in der EG-Wasserrahmenrichtlinie Erfolgskonzept oder unn?tige Herausforderung?

Die Integration ?konomischer Aspekte in die europ?ische Wasserpolitik und -bewirtschaftung gewann mit der EG-Wasserrahmenrichtlinie (WRRL) einen bedeutenden Impuls. Es ist die erste umweltpolitische Richtlinie auf europ?ischer Ebene, die explizit auf ?konomische Prinzipien – etwa das Verursacherprinzip –, Methoden wie die Kosteneffizienzanalyse und Instrumente wie beispielsweise die Wasserpreise zurückgreift, um ihre Ziele zu erreichen. Der Beitrag zieht eine erste Bilanz: Haben die ?konomischen Elemente der Richtlinie ihr Potenzial zur F?rderung eines effizienten Umsetzungsprozesses entfaltet oder sind sie (bislang) hinter den Erwartungen zurückgeblieben?