Civic Tech Q&A: SmartCape’s Thurlo Cicero
This ambitious project aims to bring Cape Town’s citizenry online and promote digital literacy
How do you extend online access and promote digital literacy in a deeply unequal society?
This is the mammoth task Cape Town’s SmartCape initiative set themselves. Senior online producer for the City of Cape Town Thurlo Cicero takes us through their growth into one of Africa’s largest digital inclusion projects, and the lessons they learnt along the way.
Q. Tell us about the start of SmartCape and how it has grown?
SmartCape started in 2002 with a pilot project in just six municipal libraries. We knew that we needed to give citizens access to the internet, and this was the seed of the idea. In 2003 we applied for and won funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that allowed us to scale up the operation. Today we now provide limited daily internet access from PCs across all of the City’s 104 libraries. Several of the locations also have WiFi zones too. This has evolved into a broader digital inclusion project that is part of the City and Mayor’s vision for Cape Town. SmartCape is the platform through which we are up-skilling people and promoting e-literacy. It is also a means to accessing the City’s e-services. Today there are over 450 000 registered users who can get 45-min free internet use per session per day, across 670 computers. The users of the wifi spots can access up to 500 MB a month.
Q. What data do you collect from your users and how do you inform them of this data usage?
We collect a lot of demographic information through the sign up process — all the typical stuff. We also provide the privacy policy during the registration. Users can also access this at any point from the footer menu at the bottom of our website. In addition, we also capture where people log on from, what kinds of applications they use. Our privacy policy was approved by the City’s legal department and we believe it is PoPI-compliant, and promotes informed consent.
Q. What are the patterns of application usage you see?
Because it is a public service, we do filter the services people can access somewhat. Having said that, we have also evolved with the times. Today the majority of our users stream video through Youtube and Facebook, and a large portion of users access government services and information on things like public health services through our connected PCs. Typical users are looking for work — writing CVs, applying for jobs — and we also have a large portion of school children using the service to research their reports. SmartCape used to have its own portal where we wrote original content aimed at digital literacy and related educational topics. That has now been taken over by the City. Our page now sits within the City site, so that makes accessing City services easier. Our users are typically lower LSM people, and that does inform their usage trends. We have things like CV-templates and typing tutors. Several small businesses also got their start from SmartCape. We hear great stories about people finding jobs, reconnecting with their families, and event finding love online through this project.
Q. How do you engage citizens and users?
We ran an online survey recently, but the team also does site visits. We try to visit the entire network of libraries frequently. It’s a mammoth task. On site, we engage with the users — just quickly to check in with them but not to waste their time during their session. We also speak to the librarians as they are the closest to the user side of the service.
Q. What kinds of feedback to you get from your users?
Understandably, they want more connected PCs, more wifi zones and more time. They want to be able to surf on their phones while they wait for the PCs to become available. There is a lot of competition for the computers, with a lot of the places — especially our flagship facility City library — having queues for PCs. In that location, we’ve even implemented a “buzzer system”, so they can browse books while you wait and get a notification when a terminal becomes available.
Eventually we will be able to accommodate more users, but this is dependent to a degree on the roll out of the City’s broadband. As a city, our main priority has to be the provision of basic services first, so sometimes “extra” projects take a back seat to that.
Q. Do you have a process for documenting learning in your organisation?
We do have an innovation team that incorporates several projects. We meet once a month and we also produce reports that capture or document learnings. These are then fed up the hierarchy chain of the City. All of these things tie in together. We are constantly looking for solutions to better what we do. The vision and strategy of the City is there to guide us.
Q. What could you do better?
I think any municipality has its challenges, but having said that I do believe that we — this project — is a forerunner at the moment. There is no other service that does what we do. The Western Cape government came to us to help them with their digital projects, to help them with public access. We also consulted to the City of Joburg and eThekweni in Kwazulu Natal.
Q. What do you wish you had known when you started? Or what advice would you give to a similar project starting out?
You need to have a funding mandate, rather than relying on “excess money” when it becomes available. We also grew faster as we moved from a project basis to one of the operational concerns of the City. I think we could also have engaged better with corporates. For example, the City already spends over $20 million on licensing software for staff. We cannot carry the cost of rolling this out to citizen users too, but people want brand name software rather than the open source alternatives we provide. It would be fantastic to partner with someone like Microsoft so we could offer their Office suite.
Q. What other services do you promote or offer?
One popular option is a gaming extension that we have. Here we partnered with the recreation and parks department and offered gaming to learners during the holidays. We teach people how to play games, teach them about eSports. It’s a form of social intervention that has been used to keep at risk kids out of gangs. It’s part of our evolution from a public access project to one of holistic digital inclusion.
