The website shows its mission statement as, "to bring in visibility and transparency into urban local governance and enable data-based decision making in cities." They aim to solve the 'Urban Data Problem' - the lack of granular data about city life due to data not being collected in a systematic manner.
The data presented is collated, scraped, RTI-sourced and crowdsourced. The journalism, the data gathering, and civic engagement is supported by grants and reader funding only.
While the reach of OpenCity is limited to Bengaluru, it reflects civic problems and government red-taping in any other city. As a city grows, problems like poor quality of roads, garbage not being picked up, lack of dependable piped water supply, the traffic, schooling, challenges of opening a small business arise and they are not endemic in Bengaluru. Analysis of problem-solution/reaction in one city can help develop resources adaptive to any other city.
OpenCity works on core principles of citizen-science, with the society contributing to the information presented and consuming the same information on governance to be more proactive.
OpenCity.in was started in 2016 as a collaboration between Oorvani Foundation and DataMeet. Oorvani Foundation is an independent, nonprofit media organization focussing on governance, data and citizen empowerment, DataMeet is a community of open data enthusiasts.
OpenCity.in is a repository of urban data on Bengaluru, collected from government sources through RTI and community-driven open-data processes. The aim of the project is to solve the 'Urban Data Problem" - the lack of granular data about city life due to data not being collected in a systematic manner.