The original note, as written at the time
An app to help Ugandans follow up on government publications so that they never miss a thing, and can pay less than the standard subscription fee.
Ongoing development
An app that helps Ugandans follow government publications, so that they never miss a thing, and pay less than the standard subscription fee.
The second clause is the one that makes it a business rather than a civic project, and it reveals the actual problem. Government information in most countries is technically public and practically inaccessible: a notice in a newspaper, a PDF on a ministry site, a gazette that requires a fee. The state has published it and no citizen can find it.
An aggregator that watches the sources and pushes what matters is doing work that the state should be doing, and it can charge less than the official subscription because it is not printing anything.
The design question is what to push. Everything is noise and nothing is useless. The answer is that a person subscribes to subjects rather than to a feed: tenders, land notices, licensing, tax deadlines, their own district. Four choices, and the app is suddenly relevant.
There is a commercial version and a civic version and they should be the same product. A business that needs to know about tenders will pay; a citizen who needs to know about a land notice will not. Charge the business and let the citizen ride, which is also the honest distribution of who benefits from transparency.
The risk is accuracy. An aggregator that misreports a deadline is worse than no aggregator, so every item must link to the source, unedited.
Publish what the state published, and make it findable.