### 🎯 Theme: What transparency builds trust and better solutions
**This page outlines how cities can implement transparent governance practices through public roadmaps, show-and-tells, and weeknotes to build trust, enable collaboration, and ensure accountability in data projects.**
Working in the open is a form of governance. Because modern agile ways of working are organised around iterative delivery and incremental change, governance processes need to be too. It also means that people working on data projects in different parts of the municipality and beyond can find each other without having to navigate management hierarchies.
Transparency is essential to building trust and fostering collaboration. A city must adopt open practices, such as:
- **Public Roadmaps**: A product roadmap is intended to show how a product/service will evolve over time - over months, quarters and years. How features in the backlog will be prioritised. Teams will share their goals and timelines in publicly accessible formats, allowing stakeholders to track progress and align their own plans.
- **Show-and-Tells**: Regularly scheduled sessions where teams demonstrate their work, share lessons learned, and invite feedback outside of the user space. Show-and-tells can also work as great leverage tools to showcase how incremental delivery is helping users, getting wider support to assist other teams.
- **Weeknotes**: Weeknotes are a concise way to document your team’s progress, share updates, and communicate next steps to stakeholders or team members. They serve as a regular touchpoint in your project’s governance process, promoting transparency, accountability, and alignment. Furthermore, they can help gather excitement around the
work, especially for people who don’t work on the projects daily. They keep stakeholders and other departments connected to the progress,
fostering interest and support.
For open data efforts to truly benefit all communities, transparency must extend beyond simply publishing datasets—it must include co-designing data policies with affected groups. eThekwini will establish regular public engagement sessions, where community representatives can review and challenge municipal data practices, ensuring that data use is transparent, accountable, and
beneficial to historically excluded communities.
These practices ensure that work remains visible, encourages accountability, and enables cross-departmental collaboration. By sharing successes and challenges openly, teams create opportunities to learn from one another and build a culture of continuous improvement.
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