As you can see by the tagline for Cape Gateway, our primary aim has been to make access to government information and services easy for citizens. This has driven everything we do: the site structure, its design, the way the content is written, and Cape Gateway's multi-channel approach to giving citizens access.
To touch briefly on this last point: remember that proportionately few of our citizens have access to the Internet - but with the Cape Gateway contact centre, anyone can have access to this information, online or offline.
The first thing we did in trying to give citizens easy access to government information and services, was to remove the need for people to understand government structures in order to find the information they need. For instance - say I am a tavern owner wanting to apply for a liquor license. Where do I go? The local municipality? Do I write to the Department of Arts and Culture as that kind of seems like where liquor would fit in...?
On Cape Gateway we've organised information by areas of interest - so all information relevant to liquor licensing is gathered in one place.
Another example is small business - we've gathered a range of government services for small business in one place, as well as relevant publications and links to other websites.
Another advantage of grouping information by areas of interest, is that citizens can get a more integrated view of government - often multiple departments provide services in a particular area. To illustrate: let's look at Your Life>Birth.
An important emphasis for Cape Gateway has been language. Cape Gateway is available in all three official languages of the Western Cape. We've hit some exciting firsts here - the first Afrikaans government site that we know of, and the first Xhosa website on the Internet.
To illustrate, here's the section on mental health.
Where an item doesn't exist in the user's language of choice, they can email us - the email address is at the bottom of each page.
Another important aspect of language has been the use of plain writing, moving away from long-winded government-speak. Complicated language excludes people, and leads to confusion.
To illustrate, here's a service "Training Programme for Young Professionals". Laid out, in plain language, is what the programme is, and importantly, how you can access it. This info, on how to access services, has been some of the most important information we've gathered - it's all very well telling citizens that certain services exist; you also have to tell them how to get them.
Going a step further, we've included contact information for the public officials involved. This is an important step in opening up government to citizens.
The next section of the site I'm going to show you is the publications section. I'm excited about this section as it illustrates the opportunities for information-sharing - I'll show you what I mean.
Putting these documents up on the Internet makes it that much easier to share them. It's such a waste to have them locked up in a dusty file somewhere in an old cabinet in a government office.
Having this information on the Internet is also a plus for empowerment of citizens. Civil society should know what government's policy is on admission to schools, or school fees. An NGO should have easy access to the treatment guidelines for children that have been abused.
For the Press, there are specific News and Speeches sections, with archives.
A breakthrough for the Provincial Government has been the Services section. We now have, in one place, a list of all provincial government services. It's ironic that government is all about service delivery, but has been traditionally hard-put to articulate what those services are. If it's any consolation, it took the Bavarian government four years to get that information together for its citizens.
The facilities section is worth noting - we have over 2,000 government facilities in our database. Police stations were a particular challenge - we were unable to find a consolidated list of police stations for the Western Cape. This list was compiled and checked a few months ago, with a staff member calling every police station on the list. An anecdote about compiling this list - when a number of the police stations were called, they were unable to give their street address - the officer answering the call had to walk out into the road to look for a street sign in order to give the address.
The Your Government section has provided a platform for provincial government departments to publish on the Internet in a standardised way. Most of them are migrating their current websites to Cape Gateway. We are also able to provide a free publishing platform for local governments to have their own website within Cape Gateway.
By using Cape Gatewayas their publishing platform, departments create a presence on the Internet, and contribute to a bigger whole - the portal. In the end this benefits our users - consolidating the information in one place makes it that much easier to find.
We hope that with the Tenders section of the site, Cape Gateway is setting the standard for how government tender ads should be published online. Currently it's only possible to view tenders in pdf format on the Web - an electronic version of this paper here. Cape Gateway provides a fully searchable database of government tenders:
- You can view by category.
- Search by keyword (e.g. A supplier in Laingsburg could call the Cape Gateway contact centre and ask the operator to search for any tenders with the word Laingsburg in them)
- Importantly the user can see all currently open tenders. With the current tender bulletin format, you'd have to go through the last say four issues of the bulletin to get a complete picture of all the open tenders. Some tenders stay open for two months - with Cape Gateway you get, at a glance, all the tenders currently open.
- The closed tenders section provides an archive of tenders.
- We're moving towards having the awarded tenders information on the site - this is information that has traditionally been hard for suppliers to get.
- In broadening access to info, we're broadening access to procurement opportunities.
- For instance, Tender Advice Centres with connectivity will have continual access to the latest tenders.
- People don't have to trek in to Cape Town to get the Tender Bulletin.
I've shown you how to browse through the site. There's a whole other way to find what you need: our site search.
Our standard was Google - for Internet geeks, it's the ultimate search engine as it returns intelligent results. We think we've built the Google of government information searches.
You'll see there's an email address at the bottom of each page: questions@capegateway.gov.za. If you can't find what you want, just email. Behind that email address is the contact centre. Emails are tracked, so they don't disappear into a black hole.
We also get reports of emailed requests, so we can gauge what information people need.
Allied to this is our stats engine. We can see what information is popular by users' clicks. This will help us to respond to user needs. It's a demand-driven approach to developing the site.
What I've shown you here is a beginning. We've created a platform to be used by government to communicate and interact with citizens: through the Cape Gateway portal, the contact centre, and the walk-in centre.
