Open By-laws South Africa is a project to help South Africans be more informed about the legislation that governs them.

By-laws are local laws created by the municipality you live in. They determine many aspects of your day-to-day life in South Africa, such as how your municipality can charge your for water, what you can do in your local parks, and how many pets you can own.

It's often hard to find your municipal by-laws. They can be in difficult to read PDF files, or may not reflect recent changes. Open By-laws South Africa is changing that.

We believe all our legislation should be freely available and easy to read and share. We aim to make all of South Africa's by-laws available in open formats that encourage readibility and re-use.

To this end, the by-laws that we make available are:

• easy to link to, including directly to parts, chapters and sections
• easy to read as HTML webpages
• available as machine-friendly XML in the open Akoma Ntoso format
• freely available from our Indigo API
• licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

According to the license, you are free to share and reuse the by-laws, even for commercial purposes, provided that you mention that you got them from openbylaws.org.za.