Crafting digital interventions in crisis? Examining the piecing together of a dashboard in the public health sector in Cape Town

During the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, the Western Cape Government produced a provincial dashboard that reported on confirmed cases across the region. As a public-facing digital tool, the dashboard functioned as both a symbolic and practical expression of state responsiveness, while also communicating timely and authoritative data to a wide audience. As a result, dashboards are increasingly popular tools for governance in South African contexts. And yet the production of dashboards is overlooked and underexamined. Dashboards are not neutral or automatic representations of reality; they are carefully constructed artefacts that mask the complexity behind their creation. Drawing on literature that employs the metaphor of “crafting” to interrogate the labour, creativity, and decision-making involved in digital governance, this paper examines the often-invisible work that enabled the dashboard's existence. We highlight the actors, logics, and tensions involved in assembling disparate sources of data – old and new, public and private, anonymised and identifiable – and consider what this reveals about the state's socio-technical practices in moments of crisis.