Time to phone MLTDRIVES at 0216833310 for a renewable energy solar system !

Great initiative. There are already similar small experiments ‘liberating data’ elsewhere in South Africa, and further north. I’m personally working on something similar, in Mpumalanga, with a bit of seed funding to create a repository for PAIA data, leaked info, and crowdsourced supplementary evidence supplied by citizens + my own investigative newsroom at AENS. We’ve already aggregated a large amount of original source info (some of which stretches back to 1994, detailing the source evidence in many of Mpumalanga’s most outrageous scandals & political murders). We have started building the online repository, with tech support from similar projects in the Global North. We’ve also spent the past six months building a coalition of local civil society & hacktivists / activists, who are helping us cast the net even wider.

So, it would be great to link our initiatives out here in our region with your campaign.

But, we’re not the only ones active in this field. Fellow travellers include the Open Democracy Advice Center (down in Cape Town), the SA Historical Archives (@ Wits University), the Southern African Legal Information Institute (in Jo’burg), and Black Sash (also in Cape Town), who are all doing similar things in their parts of the civic ecosystem. In fact, ODAC & SAHA have just started collaborating on building a centralised PAIA portal, that will give citizens templates, tips, and step-by-step guidelines for tabling requests, that then tracks the process of submitted requests, & that stores the resulting information in a central databank of “liberated” public information. The envisioned portal will also give resources / guidelines / support for whistleblowers, & will help citizens who are stonewalled by putting them in contact with legal aid centers or case workers at ODAC & elsewhere for advice & possible assistance / representation.

What is very important, is that SAHA’s involvement means that professional archival methodology will be applied to managing the “liberated” info, so that it remains a meaningful resource long into the future.

So, my suggestion is: rather than duplicating efforts, or even worse, working at counter-purposes, let’s rather pull together all these diverse projects into a single, coherent, properly resourced campaign (similar to how we built Right2Know).

By doing so, we’ll ensure that we’ve build in some longer term sustainability as well, because organisations such as ODAC, SAHA or SAFLII could serve as the custodians & curators of what is effectively the repository of all our ‘civic knowledge’.

Cheers,
Justin

below are some links I found useful…

I’d love to see the original document: if you scratch it, does it smell like crap?

1. Andrew, you haven’t factored in the number of subscribers who will stop paying somewhere along the line. Whether it’s no funds available or the person move or gets a new credit card and never updates their info, anything offered on credit needs a lot of thought around the numbers behind recovering bad debts and writing bad debts off.

2. Who are these 20,000 people? If they’re he affluent forward thinkers The Daily Maverick is targeting here, wouldn’t they already have an iPad? And if not, maybe they don’t want one. And if they do want one, they can afford to buy one at R6k cash/card, not R9k over two years via subscription. And if only 1600 foward thinking switched on types ‘like’ Daily Maverick’s Facebook page, where are these other 19,000 people?

3. What happens if only 4 people sign up by the time the first issue comes out in August? Is there sufficient funding to make this a sustainable venture? Because increased content costs run monthly whether there are 18 subscribers or 18,000.

It can work but it’s not going to be an overnight profit and investors need to have deep enough pockets to outlast the risks. Though depending on the saturation point, it may just not add up the way you have it above.

There may be a few other positives for him …
- You’re assuming he’s paying full price for the iPad2 – he could possibly get them at a bulk discount (or don’t Apple or Core work that way?)
- If he has clever accountants he might be able to claim depreciation on the iPads so that might give him savings (ie would he be able to describe them as leased-out assets even though in reality he’s giving them away? I don’t know, I’m not an accountant either)
- Also, in the FAQs, Maverick confirm the application would eventually be optimised for other tablets. If so, and assuming that alternatives to the iPad get cheaper and more accessible, it does potentially grow the pool of potential subscribers (although I agree that there are limitations to iPad ownership at the current price)
- I think the dual web-app platform model (I think Branko compares it to MNet open time) has huge potential. If nothing else the web gives him a place for ongoing marketing and conversion.

On the negative side, I think you might be severely under-estimating some of the other overheads. Sure, the journalism is probably the biggest cost but unless he runs it almost entirely with freelancers, a lot of his revenue might be eaten up with support services, rent etc.