Just from an economic perspective. This open public data conundrum in South Africa is costing us a lot of money as citizens. It is also costing money when it comes to innovation. Lets look at a few examples.

Let's use example of public safety information. SAPS do not make available data at incident level (not aggregated) by neighbourhood etc. But insurance companies buy this data 3rd parties [e.g. security companies]. You pay for this data through your taxes first, then your premiums

Let's go back to health. Not having updated [daily] and open health facility data means we have to then use 3rd parties to manage health system data collation. If you are in the private sector, you pay for this. In public our taxes being wasted.

Municipal systems have data that should be public that keeps being purchased over and over. again. Sometimes even within the same municipality but different departments. Utility information, public transport, etc. We all pay through rates and taxes.

The data not been available publicly and/or with permissive open licenses means that innovation is stifled. Red tape to get data or very large cost just to even see what's inside. How do you innovate? Develop new systems for the public?

Private companies fill these gaps by finding ways to recreate it or obtain it and then use it as a revenue source and resell it. You ultimately pay again because whatever service is connected to obtaining that data, will have a premium. But you have paid for it with taxes already

And do not take this as a dig at private companies. They are looking at a problem and looking at solving it in a way that also keeps them moving. But we must not surrender public goods to private hands and then treat the private hands a public good.

From OGP
By opening up data, and making it sharable and reusable government can enable informed debate, better decision making, and the development of innovative new services.
https://www.opengovpartnership.org/policy-area/open-data

You can also read about the 8 Principles of Open Government Data here https://opengovdata.io/2014/8-principles/

And yes, we likely have to do the calculations to qualify my first tweet in the thread. Any takers on doing a back of the envelope calc?

And maybe at the moment, I am jaded as I am now trying to estimate the number of hours that have been put into the covid19za projects with all the wonderful volunteers, scientists etc. It should not be this hard
Data -> https://github.com/dsfsi/covid19za 

Also for some clarity, going back to the public safety example. You should make requests to SAPS, it might take a while, but we must improve the ways these systems work. We cannot sit idly by. We must also get the basics right and make them accessible and open.