Ward Ledgers and the Open Street Atlas
On 18 May 2023 municipal open-data leads and civic mappers sat with a simple object: a ward ledger that a resident could read without a GIS licence. The session asked why so many South African city portals still hide the street behind a file format nobody opens on a phone.
Speakers walked through parcel layers, taxi-route traces, and the quiet work of keeping a street name aligned with the name painted on the kerb. They borrowed the festival's 2020 insistence that a map is a civic argument, not a decoration for a slide deck.
The room ended with a short atlas exercise: pick one ward, list three ledgers a clinic, a school, and a civic hall would actually use, then say which of those ledgers is public today. The notes stay on this URL so later programme pages can point here without a query-string page dump.