A data-driven blog on Regional policy, Government 2.0, Inter-agency collaboration, ICT statistics

The map of EU Structural Funds Transparency at regional level - October 2011

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 12:48:09 +0100

According to the current 2007-13 regulation, all regional and national agencies responsible for managing one of the 434 Operational Programmes funded by the 2007-13 Structural Funds must publish on the web a list of businesses or public authorities that have received public funding and the amount of funding received. But the way they do this varies greatly across Europe.
The second output of the evaluation activity of the availability and quality of open data on European Structural Funds is now being published. It’s a benchmarking report (in Italian only, at least for now) that I prepared with the help of my colleague Chiara Ricci for the DG Regional Policy of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development.
I had the chance to present it at the Annual Meeting between the European Commission and the Italian Managing Authorities of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), held on October 27-28, 2011 in Rome. It was an extraordinary opportunity to talk about the benefits of open government data in front of a number of high-level representatives of all regional and central institutions involved in the implementation of Regional Policy in Italy (here is my presentation).
The report features brand new data on detail, accessibility, formats, and other characteristics of the datasets on the recipients and the projects funded by European Regional Policy (“lists of beneficiaries”). It’s a new wave of data collected in October 2011, exactly one year after the first web-based survey. A total of 32 characteristics are taken into account in the evaluation process, including the presence of search masks and visualization systems.
The map of Structural Funds transparency reported below shows a core component of this research, that is the format of the data published by each region. The map shows the average score of all the regional and multi-regional programmes that have an impact of that specific territory. A very low score is attributed to PDFs and to HTML reports that split the data into multiple tables or pages (regions in red or orange) . Higher scores are assigned to the XLS format, which is machine-processable (in yellow). The highest scores are attributed to the few regions in Europe that publish data in an open format such as CSV (in green), since no data is currently published in XML or JSON or RDF (see the report for the details about the construction of the index). You can also find the link to the datasets by clicking on each region. The link to the Regional Programme is displayed where there is more than one dataset available.
One year after the first survey, the level of openness has not improved. About two-thirds of EU Operational Programmes still publish their data in PDF, while only 2% use open formats. A radical change is necessary to meet the requirements of new 2014-2020 regulation, as proposed a few weeks ago by the European Commission, which include the use of CSV or XML format.

Ex-ante conditionalities for Regional Innovation Policies

Mon, 10 Oct 2011 10:22:30 +0200

As I reported last week, the European Commission has presented the proposals for the new 2014-2020 EU Regional Policy regulations, and the EU regions are currently discussing the future of the policy at the Open Days 2011. Although these drafts need to be definitively adopted by the end of 2012 by the Council and the European Parliament, this step is going to represent a milestone in a long process. On the one hand, it is the final product of a two-years-long discussion started in the high-level group reflecting on future Cohesion Policy, a support working group composed by representatives of the Commission and the Member States. On the other hand, it represents the beginning of the 2014-2020 programming phase.
A new principle is introduced. Regional Policy will not finance a Member State Programme until a set of ex-ante conditionalities, that is specific conditions and pre-requisites at the national level, are fulfilled. Ex-ante conditionalities were first envisioned by the European Commission in the framework of the debate on the reinforcement of economic governance [pdf]. Then they were reaffirmed in the Fifth Cohesion Report and further developed in a high level group document [pdf] proposed by the Commission in December 2010.
A list of the conditionalities proposed can be found in the general regulation. As for research and innovation (R&I), the conditionality is as follows: “the existence of a national and/or regional innovation strategy for smart specialisation in line with the National Reform Program, to leverage private R&I expenditure, which complies with the features of well-performing national or regional research and innovation systems”.
The focus of the conditionality is in fact only on the strategic level, that is on the existence of policy documents that, based on tools such as the technological forecasting, select a limited number of policy priorities and industry sectors to support. In particular, the proposal of the EU Commission states that Member States must:
• define an innovation strategy for smart specialisation that is based on a SWOT analysis to concentrate resources on a limited set of R&I priorities, outlines measures to stimulate private RTD investment and contains a monitoring and review system.
• adopt a framework outlining available budgetary resources for R&D;
• adopt a multi-annual plan for budgeting and prioritization of investments linked to EU priorities (ESFRI).
The need for a strategic view of regional policies in general and of innovation policies in particular (see for example the much-needed smart specialization approach) is evident. But is such a strategy-focused approach enough to ensure a better policy and a better use of public money?
First, given the essential nature of R&I policy, the answer should be “no”. As stated in one the underlying papers of the Barca Report on the future of Cohesion Policy, “Putting money into a strategic R&D plan may not always lead to a new technology, or even less to the adoption of that technology”. In other words, identifying regional strengths and comparative advantages is correct, but will may not lead to the desired results.
Secondly, a strategic document that is compliant with the Commission’s requests is easy to be obtained for a regional government. For example, the regional strategy could be written by a consultancy and adopted without an active involvement of regional and local agencies, and, even worse, of stakeholders. I don’t mean that this is the usual way to define a regional strategy, but it happens.
Thirdly, a strategy defines policy objectives, priorities, targets, indicators, but does not describe exhaustively how these objectives are going to be reached. And we know that devil is in the details.
So this is why other kinds of ex-ante conditionalities should be taken into account, specifically those related to policy implementation. For example, one conditionality could focus on the specific content and characteristics of the criteria for projects selection included in the Operational Programmes. Since Operational Programmes are generally set up after the definition of the “contract” between the Member State and the European Union, this solution may be more difficult to implement - because Member States should first approve the Operational Programmes and the selection criteria and than wait for the EU money - but will ensure a tremendous improvement in the quality of selected interventions.
For example, a conditionality could be applied to the selection criteria by making sure they incorporate the results of ex-post evaluation of past interventions and learning from policy failures. The conditionality could also be leveraged to systematically introduce a multi-stage approach in funding projects. In this case, a project-level conditionality is applied both on final and intermediate results through in itinere and ex-post evaluations.

Structural Funds 2014-2020 open up to open data

Thu, 6 Oct 2011 21:35:12 +0200

This is very good news for the open data movement. Earlier today Commissioners Hahn and Andor presented the European Commission proposals for the new Structural Funds regulations for the period 2014-2020. The new general regulation includes an article that force EU countries and regions to open up their data on projects and beneficiaries of Regional Policy. EU Regional Policy (or Cohesion Policy) is worth € 376 billion, more than a third of the entire budget of the Union.
In the last few months, technical and policy recommendations on how to improve the rules of this policy concerning transparency were provided by two studies (one commissioned by the European Parliament and the other by the DG Regional Policy [pdf]) and one independent web-based survey. Plus, organizations such as Transparency International advocated better rules and practices, such as the creation of a centralized website that contains all EU funds beneficiaries and that publishes the data respecting the 8 principles of Open Government Data.
The good news is that most of these recommendations have been incorporated in the drafts of the new regulations. In particular, Art. 105 (Chapter II, Information and Communication) states that EU countries “shall in order to ensure transparency in the support of the Funds maintain a list of operations by operational programme and by Fund in CSV or XML format which shall be accessible through the single website or the single website portal providing a list and summary of all operational programmes in that Member State”. It has been demostrated that the presence of a single website covering all data from the local institutions will likely improve the performance of the country in terms of transparency.
The minimum set of information to be provided - currently limited to three items - has been extended to cover new interesting data such as postcodes of beneficiaries. The data fields that must be included are listed in Annex V:
• Beneficiary name (only legal entities; no natural persons shall be named);
• Operation name;
• Operation summary;
• Operation start date;
• Operation end date (expected date for physical completion or full implementation of the operation);
• Total eligible expenditure allocated to the operation;
• EU co-financing rate (as per priority axis);
• Operation postcode;
• Country;
• Name of category of intervention for the operation;
• Date of last update of the list of operations.
• The headings of the data fields and the names of the operations shall be also provided in at least one other official language of the European Union.

In my opinion, this proposal is probably a good compromise between the need to introduce new, more transparent ways to publish data and the current level of technical and administrative capacity of EU regions. However, a few important features characterizing real open data are still missing. For example the data should be released in a linked-data formats such as the RDF. Plus, a clear indication of the license under which the data are released should be provided. Introducing these features now - even though the RDF format seems now pretty advanced - is particularly important seeing that it is rather difficult to modify a multi-annual regulation once it is approved.
Obviously it will be crucial to monitor the actual implementation of these rules across the European Union. Luckily, official regulations have demonstrated to be a powerful tool, far more persuasive than other initiatives, such as the European Transparency Initiative, undertaken by the Commission after the approval of the official regulations. As already demonstrated, the level of compliance with regulations among EU agencies is extremely high, given that the Commission has the power to stop the flow of money from the EU to the Regions if these rules are broken.

A holistic view for Public e-Services diffusion and impact: Introducing project T.A.I.P.S.

Sun, 2 Oct 2011 16:34:03 +0200

One of my first posts on the Regional Innovation Policies blog was about “traditional” public e-services - as opposed to Government 2.0 new applications - and their still slow diffusion in many countries in Europe and in the world. My point there was that low take-up of public e-services, which is considered by some the main reason of the digital government failure, was probably simply due to a shortage of... public e-services.
While most critics of EU e-government policy point only to the lack of interest of households and enterprises in expensive and unsustainable digital public services, I think we should also consider that today a significant number of public agencies, especially in the lagging regions of the world - fail to deliver their most useful basic public services on line. Considering e-government services, though most of them were pushed by national governments in the first years of the new millennium and are already available on the web with an acceptable level of sophistication (see for example the list of CapGemini twenty basic public services in latest benchmarking report), the situation is very different at the local level, where small agencies are struggling to provide services with less money and face complex coordination issues with scarce skills.
Moreover, if we zoom out and consider advanced services from other recently-developed domains of digital government such as e-health, e-procurement, e-education, infomobility, “smart” cities, etc, the supply-related issues are manifest.
In other words, measuring the progress of digital government requires a holistic view to include the wide spectrum of public e-services in different policy domains (health, transportation, education, etc.) and the different aspects of service provision (not just e-readiness or web interactivity, but also multi-channel availability and take-up).
Providing this view is the main goal of TAIPS (Technology Adoption and Innovation In Public Services), a research project carried out by the Department of Economics, Society and Politics (DESP), University of Urbino (Italy) and funded by the European Investment Bank (EIB), which aims at exploring the determinants and impact of public e-services diffusion from the point of view of the Economics of Innovation. The project is lead by Professor Antonello Zanfei, an industrial economist whose interests range from innovation diffusion to industrial dynamics and economics of multinational enterprises.
A few weeks ago the first outputs were released. One paper is entitled What do we know from the literature on public e-services? and provides quantitative evidence that ICT research, as it happens in policy making, still considers the various policy domains as separate silos. The next step of TAIPS will be to unify those views. A benchmarking the progress of Italian regions with a joint, e-services pilot methodology is under way. This exercise is to be eventually extended to selected EU Countries.
Plus, TAIPS staff is organizing an International Conference in Urbino, Italy on April 19-20, 2012. Here you can download the outline. The deadline for abstract submission is pretty soon (on Wednesday, October 5), but will probably be extended a little bit. The conference will be interesting since many invited speakers - leading scholars in the field of Economics of Innovation and Information Technology - have already confirmed their participation. I will report again on this in the next few weeks, so please stay tuned!

Open Budget and Open Data on Public Policies

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 08:56:08 +0200

Transparency of public budgets and public policy are key elements to get an effective and accountable government. Access to information on the use of public money is crucial to ensure an effective participation, and to generate trust, credibility of public choices - even in hard times - and the effectiveness of the interventions.
It’s interesting to compare two composite indicators on openness and transparency of public funding in Europe:
- the Open Budget index (OBI), released by the International Budget Partnership (IBP) every year, analyzes budget transparency in 94 countries all around the world (here is the full report 2010). The index is composed by two pillars (“Availability of Budget Documents” and “Executive’s Budget Proposal”) and 92 qualitative variables that are aggregated by using a simple mean. The data are collected through a questionnaire by a network of independent organizations.
- the index of transparency of EU Regional Policy (Structural Funds) that I put forward in this paper published in the last issue of the European Journal of ePractice. It measures the openness and transparency of the data on the beneficiaries of the European funds that all regions and member states acting as Managing Authority of the policy must publish on the web. The evaluation is based on the Eight principles of Open Government Data
While the Structural Funds transparency index is calculated for all Europe, the OBI index is available for only 14 European countries, which include almost all main member states.
The first thing to note is that there is no correlation between the two indicators, at all. The best-performing countries in one index are the worst-performing countries in the other. France is maybe an exception, with very good results in open budget and a quite good score in Structural Funds transparency (mainly due to a centralized platform that provides information about all beneficiaries of regional programmes across the country). This non-correlation can be explained by taking into consideration the different phenomena that the two indicators aim to describe. OBI methodology mainly focuses on quantity and detail of information disclosed, while the index on transparency of EU policy mainly considers the quality and the format of the data.
Secondly, at least two groups of countries seem to emerge. A first group (in green) is located at the top left of the graph and includes UK, France and Sweden. All the other countries (in red) show lower values of OBI index and quite similar values of the Structural Funds indicator, with the exception of Czech Republic and Slovakia that got very high scores. While the green group has a pretty long tradition of being open and accountable, the very good performances of the newcomers Eastern Europe countries are probably due to the positive role that the European Commission is playing in that region to push transparency of the programmes funded by EU policies.

Open Data to the next level: WHY and HOW to involve the private sector

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 22:57:38 +0200

While the open data movement is spreading within public sector - with very interesting initiatives both at local and international level - the attention of civil society and policy makers has turned to an uncharted land, that is the open data from the private sector. The need to involve businesses in the open data movement emerged quite clearly at the first European Digital Agenda Assembly, held in Brussels on 16-17 June 2011. In particular, the European Commission aims at stimulating more private participation in the open data initiatives, and is considering specific actions to promote the re-use of big datasets held by large private sector organizations.
Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a member of the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, outlines the benefits of an open data strategy in an article published in Think Quarterly. “Open data offers the prospect of instant connectivity between partners, as in open supply chains, where businesses source from places they might never have considered or even suspected could be a source. Open data can reduce integration costs, improve transparency and harness the innovation of others. If you release your data then others will develop applications that make best use of it – providing new services that benefit you directly, like all of those free travel apps that the travel companies didn’t have to write, but which nevertheless drive people onto the transportation network”.
Following the example of other companies such as SimpleGEO from the US, Enel - Italy’s largest power company and a key player in the European market - is now opening up a first set of datasets. The company, which originally launched an open data portal on 23 August under Creative Commons BY NC ND license disallowing commercial re-use, earlier today changed the license to a CC BY, merely requiring re-users to mention Enel as the source of data. Datasets include economic and financial information about the company and “sustainability data”, which comprise data on generation, distribution and sale of electricity and gas.
Raffaele Cirullo, head of New Media unit at Enel, reports on Enel strategies to the Spaghetti Open Data (SOD) mailing list. As a first step, an initiative entitled Enel Sharing was launched in 2008 to harness the power of social media to promote the brand amongst stakeholders and disseminate the cultural initiatives of the company. Then the unit focused on emerging innovations in the field of new media as a way to introduce a new culture of sharing within the group. Open data is of course one of the most interesting paradigm shifts, with major marketing impact within the private sector. These are the main goals of Enel Open Data initiative:
1. improve the market by fostering competition
2. increase transparency by increasing participation
3. favor technological innovation by encouraging the development and spreading of new applications, mash-ups and data visualization systems.
Personally, I very much share the opinion of Lorenzo Benussi - researcher at NEXA Center for Internet & Society of Politecnico di Torino - who jumped in the discussion with a message to the SOD mailing list on the eventual advantages of the diffusion of the open data model in the private sector. First, open financial data on corporate accounting may lead to a more effective control of global markets. Secondly, information on businesses assets, processes and activities is of great interest to the public and can be mashed-up with governmental data on the matter. Some examples: information about natural resources provided by the oil industry, power and communication grids, ships logistics, etc.

Open Data up for adoption

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 15:10:19 +0200

An interesting initiative, with an unusual marketing approach, was launched last week by FormezPA, an agency of the Italian Government: Linea Amica - the official integrated contact center of Italian Public Administration - is giving the data up for adoption. This is the message displayed on the webpages of RubricaPA, a specific service that allows users to find and locate a public agency by searching among thousands of national, regional and local authorities. The service is now letting the users modify the underlying data by submitting more accurate or updated information on an agency location, telephone number or certified email.
The process is simple. You modify of a set of data through a form, then your suggestion is evaluated by the staff, and, if accepted... you have now adopted that specific data. This means that the staff at the ministry considers yourself somehow responsible of that data and its change over time. Something that may (or may not) create a sort of a personal bond with the data itself. Or even an act of love, quoting from Alberto Cottica’s definition of social network.
RubricaPA started to publish open data on public agencies addresses, fiscal codes and certified emails in October 2010 under the Italian Open Data License v1.0 (which is built on Open Data Commons and Creative Commons BY-SA), a step forward of national government towards open data. But the dataset, created through a matching of data from different sources (official statistics, central registers, old similar projects), is flawed by data quality issues and missing values. Some information is outdated or inaccurate, sometimes conflicting. That is why a little help from the crowd may become crucial. In fact, this is the first time that a central and official service sponsored by the Ministry of Public Administration resorts to crowdsourcing techniques to face major data quality issues.
The question is: who should be interested in helping “Linea Amica” improve its information services? The promoters hope to actively involve local public servants and citizens who care about their local community and want a major state-wide service such as Linea Amica help line to use the correct information. “This is my data, I should care”.
We will see if this kind of love is enough to get the right level of participation.

A strategic balance for open government data publication

Wed, 7 Sep 2011 15:20:51 +0200

The debate on how to publish open government data is dividing public servants, open government advocates and researchers into - at least - two main groups.
There’s a first group of civic hackers organizations and - not surprisingly - academic literature that is focusing on the “invisible hand” of private sector or civil society organizations which is able to reuse PSI and to mash up this information with other sources to create new innovative services. In this case the government should only publish hi-quality data in an open, machine-readable format and let the others do all the rest.
Others are pointing to the risks of the so-called “data divide” or, from a public value perspective, think that government should consider different users needs and adopt a more pro-active approach e.g. by elaborating its data on governmental websites:
• Interesting points on “data divide” or, more generally speaking, on “open data inclusion” for example are raised in Michael Gurstein blog. Moreover, in the comments of this World Bank blog post, Tim Davies highlights the importance of the skills to access, work with and interpret data widely amongst policy makers and local communities.
• The public value perspective is introduced in this paper from the Center for Technology in Government (CTG), Albany, NY. Basically, this approach suggests that government should consider different users needs and the impact of a set of value generators on different groups of users.

So, what should public agencies do to ensure data inclusion and public value generation?
I recently presented a paper at EGOV 2011 conference entitled “Information strategies for Open Government in Europe: EU Regions opening up the data on Structural Funds”. In the paper I identified three groups of European Public Agencies publishing the data on the beneficiaries of EU Regional Policy:
1. Agencies that publish the data in PDF with little information and detail on projects and financial data
2. Agencies that focus on data quality, detail, accessibility and machine-readable formats
3. Agencies that focus on data visualization, maps, graphs and interactive search, but only a few of them let the user download the underlying raw data
It seems that the second group is following a good strategy from an “invisible hand” point of view, but is lacking actions to include non-technically oriented citizens. The third, even if it can be argued that is not pursuing even an “open” data approach, shows some interest in data inclusion since it’s presenting the data in a “easier” way (maps, etc.) and/or in an aggregated form, which are useful for non-technically oriented citizens.
One conclusion that can be drawn is that both the approaches are necessary. But is it really necessary that every agencies develop their own data visualization tools? How many tools are necessary for the same kind of data (e.g. beneficiaries of EU funding) in EU regions? What is the minimum set of information (metadata, notes from the public administration to suggest a correct interpretation, etc.) required for this kind of data?
For example, in the case of European Common Agricultural Policy: should each State develop geo-referencing tools and maps or let Farmsubsidy.org do all the work?

US and EU in search of an Open Government R&D agenda: my favorite research questions in 4 clusters

Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:45:01 +0200

Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and the US Open Government Directive of December 2009 profoundly changed the way governments of the whole world are conceiving the role of ICT in the Public Sector. Obama’s Directive, which directly (and almost immediately) influenced policy making in most OECD countries and also contributed to the growth of bottom-up initiatives, is now impacting the world of research.
Key questions such as the actual impact of open government data on citizens and enterprises remain largely unanswered. It is not just a matter of democratic principles and political messages, or transparency only. The diffusion of web 2.0 technologies and user-driven innovations in the public sector – along with the creation of new business opportunities coming from the re-use of government data by the private sector – is changing the perspective of interdisciplinary but actually quite separated research fields such as e-government (focused on the use of ICT in internal processes and in public services provision) and e-democracy (focused on citizen engagement through technologies such as on line polling and voting, deliberation, consultation). Teresa M. Harrison and her colleagues from the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) at the University of Albany SUNY made this clear in a paper published a few days ago: “Although e-democracy in political and e-government in administrative realms have historically been largely separated, it now appears Open Government brings these two spheres of activity together”.  On the one hand, the provision of e-government services not only requires technical expertise but also, inevitably, implies political choices. On the other hand, e-government implementation should take advantage of the “power of the crowd” and the opportunities that come from involving the citizen and the private sector in new forms of public-private collaboration.
As boundaries between research domains are blurring, time has come to define an Open Government holistic framework and a global Open Government R&D agenda.
In Europe, the CROSSROAD project, a Support Action funded by the European Commission, has produced a Research Roadmap for “ICT for governance and policy modeling”, as defined by the objective 7.3 of the EU Seventh Framework Programme (FP7) 2009-2010. A white paper published in December 2010 and edited by Fenareti Lampathaki, Sotiris Koussouris, Yannis Charalabidis and Dimitris Askounis (National Technical University of Athens) identifies five main research themes and a three-level taxonomy. As the point of view is the broader concept of ICT for governance and policy making, a set of useful tools and research domains that are not usually considered in the current debate on Open Government are included here. This is the case of public opinion mining tools, which could be used to find out, for example, what types of citizens care about which type of government information. Another examples are the technologies that the EU classifies into the “Future Internet” studies, some of which (e.g. the Internet of Services) are based on government linked data availability.
In the US, the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) highlighted the importance of establishing an R&D agenda for open government in a report issued in December 2010. The Open Government Research & Development Summit was hosted on March 21-22nd, 2011 by the Networking and Information Technology Research and Development (NITRD) Program. The summit brought together government leaders and researchers to explore the needs of the community, and was organized by the office of the U.S. Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra, while Beth Noveck - law professor at the New York Law School - was one of the prime movers on getting the meeting to happen. Building on this first event, a workshop organized by the Center for Technology in Government (CTG) in Albany, New York on April 27-28th gathered a number of academics, practitioners and, moreover, hundreds of research questions still unanswered. These questions were then clustered into omogeneous groups such as “the value / ecosystem of Open Government”, “What do citizens want?”, “Government capabilities”, etc. As a second step, research questions were considered by four lenses: 1) law and policy, 2) management, 3) technology and 4) cross-cutting. Professor Ines Mergel reported on this in her blog: day one and day two. Furthermore, a full list of all the questions is now available in a CTG report prepared by Meghan Cook and M. Alexander Jurkat, which also include an interesting list of the biggest challenges faced in Open Government as perceived by the participants.

EU CROSSROAD project and US CTG workshop came up with quite similar research themes and questions, with CTG themes mainly comprised in the first section of CROSSROAD taxonomy “Open government Information and Intelligence for transparency”. Other CROSSROAD areas partially in common with the US approach are, for example, “Social computing, citizen engagement and inclusion” and “Identity management and trust in governance”.
In the following table I try to combine some of the most interesting aspects of the CROSSROAD and CTG exercises, that is a robust identification of research clusters and the use of “lens” corresponding to different disciplines.
Questions and themes are grouped together on the basis of data and information flows from government to citizens and back from citizens and businesses to government. With reference to the figure:
1. Open / linked data “supply side”: how to foster meaningful and useful government data publication? What implications / impact within the government agencies?
2. Open / linked data “demand side”: how to meet citizen and businesses needs? How to support data use and re-use?
3. Social computing: How to involve the citizen in collaboration projects / activities?
4. Citizen engagement: How to involve the citizen in democracy?
For each combination of cluster / research theme vs. lens / research discipline I list some examples of questions and topics particularly interesting to me.
...Your comments are welcomed!!

Towards EU Benchmarking 2.0 - Transparency and Open Data on Structural Funds in Europe

Fri, 18 Mar 2011 11:29:56 +0100

Availability of Open Data on projects and beneficiaries of the European Cohesion Policy (or Regional Policy) - which is the second-biggest EU policy after agriculture with a budget of EUR 347 billion for the period 2007-13 - can surely help foster transparency in the use of public money in Europe.
The European Union lacks common initiatives such as the US Recovery.gov or USA spending.gov to track government spending and improve transparency of public policies. In particular, in the case of Structural Funds, there is no single point of access to the data, since each single EU Region and National agency acting as Managing Authority of the Funds is responsible for publishing data on the beneficiaries and the amount of public funding received. This implies that hundreds of Managing Authorities are following different paths and implementing different information strategies when opening up their data. Many databases (often simple PDF lists) are now uploaded to regional or national institutional websites, showing huge variation not only in the way they can be accessed (formats, search masks, data visualization etc.) but also in content and quality of data provided (detail level, granularity, description, etc.).
Last summer, after a first analysis on the prevailing formats, I started to design an independent web-based survey on the overall quality of data published by each Managing Authority responsible for the 434 Operational Programmes approved in July 2009. Data was collected in October 2010 by me and Chiara Assunta Ricci, a brilliant PhD student in Economics at La Sapienza University of Rome. We were inspired by what people at the fantastic project Farmsubsidy.org had been able to do with the data from the other big EU policy, the Common Agricultural Policy. While their greatest achievement is having gathered the PDF documents every State has to publish on line in one real database, they also provide an evaluation of the lists of projects they have used by a transparency composite indicator. The same exercise could be applied to Structural Funds.
The first output of the survey was published a few days ago in the European Journal of ePractice. Here you can download the paper and here the full issue "The Openness of Government". The paper is based on David Osimo's seminal proposal for a “Benchmarking 2.0” and represents a pilot of a measurement framework for comparing governments’ efforts to make data available.
This exercise could represent a first step for improving current ‘traditional’ EU e-Government benchmarking. In fact, the new edition “Digitizing Public Services in Europe: Putting ambition into action - 9th Benchmark Measurement” (page 19 and 137) confirms the importance of updating and expanding the scope of the analysis by including new metrics on “Transparent and Open Government” .
The evaluation scheme is based on the Eight principles of Open Government Data, which are considered as a key reference and a worldwide de facto standard. This scheme is meant to be flexible and could be applied to other kinds of Government Data. Gianfranco Andriola, one of the promoters of the Italian Open Data Licence, helped me define the methodological approach for the principles “format” and “licence”. I must also thank the “man behind the curtain” of Spaghetti Open Data initiative, Matteo Brunati aka Dagoneye, for his suggestions about open formats, and Sergio Scicchitano for his many advices and support.
Results can be summarized as follows:
• The European Cohesion Policy is only halfway to accomplishing a paradigm shift to open data, with differences in performance both between and – in some cases - within European countries. Best performing countries such as the Czech Republic and Finland obtain a score of 71%, while the worst performing Member State is Latvia with 25%. Countries from the eastern Europe often appear in the first half of the chart.
• Very low scores are attributed to the formats the authorities are choosing when publishing their data on the web, while other indicators such as the level of granularity are positively influenced by the requirements of current regulations.
• A considerable difference in performance is shown when comparing datasets that are shared and centralized at national level with those which are managed by a single regional authority. This variation is also statistically significant with regard to all the indicators examined, and is probably due to the fact that a centrally managed programme has the advantage that information flows are easier to manage and local actions are more easily coordinated.
• The use of open, machine-processable and linked-data formats have unexpected advantages in terms of transparency and re-use of the data by the public and private sector. The application of these technical principles does not need extra budget or major changes in government organization and information management; nor does it require the update of existing software and infrastructures. What is needed today is the promotion among national and local authorities of the culture of transparency and the raising of awareness of the benefits that could derive from opening up existing data and information in a re-usable way.

Regional Policy financing e-government in Southern Italy

Mon, 27 Dec 2010 17:46:24 +0100

The last issue of Italian magazine “eGov” includes an article on e-government projects co-funded by European Cohesion Policy which I wrote after the release of a number of official reports on the implementation of Regional Operative Programmes in Italy.
In this article - available in Italian only, sorry - I try to provide a clearer view of financial resources dedicated to e-government development and diffusion in Southern Italy in 2000-06 and 2007-13 programming periods, as well as of main co-funded projects. These are some of the conclusions I came to:
• financial resources dedicated to e-government and information society in Southern Italy are huge compared to its actual absorptive capacity;
• from a “governance” point of view, after a political phase dominated by a well-publicized “shared vision”, low investment from the national government increased the role of regional policies in the whole implementation of e-government in Italy. This caused, especially in the South, a stronger role of Regional Cohesion Policy in defining strategies and policy priorities.
• Since national government - for many reasons - can no longer play the role of coordination center of local actions, interregional coordination and collaboration is becoming essential. The DPS project I wrote about in the past is one possible and still experimental solution.

European regions financing public e-services: the case of structural funds

Wed, 15 Dec 2010 17:24:25 +0100

As reported in one of the papers underlying Barca Report on the future of European Cohesion Policy, “In the 2007-2013 planning period the share of Structural Funds of the European Union allocated to Research and Innovation received the largest increase, in absolute and relative terms. It is no exaggeration to claim that, for many countries, the entire Lisbon Agenda rests on Structural Funds”.
This is particularly true for the lagging regions of the “Convergence” objective, where structural funds are by far the main source of funding for innovation in general and for e-services in particular. A specific “category of expenditure” is in fact dedicated to public e-services such as e-health, e-government, e-learning, e-inclusion, etc. which are named “services and application for the citizen” (Regulation no. 1828/2006).
Using European Commission data on programmed resources for the 2007-13 period, it is possible to explore the amount of total resources dedicated to this topic by each single Operational Programme (OP).  The map above shows the amount of resources programmed by all types of OPs (regional, but also national and interregional), with regional disaggregation (NUTS2). Regions from Slovack Republic have planned high investments in e-services (more than 189 million euros); Campania (147,5 million euros), Andalucia (Spain) and Attiki (Greece) also belong to the cluster of Regions showing the highest absolute values.
Moreover, considering the percentage of the resources not only for e-services but also for the other categories of expenditure dedicated to Information Society, it is possible to analyze the strategy each region implemented when allocating public funds to public e-services, broadband, ICT diffusion among enterprises or infrastructural services. In the “Convergence” Regions, a specific “public e-services strategy” emerges. That means that Regions investing in public e-services tend to exclude the other matters; they concentrate available resources to e-government or e-health, and very low percentage of total funding is dedicated to the other categories such as broadband or infrastructural services. For example, while funds dedicated to ICT diffusion among enterprises are always accompanied by measures for broadband penetration, resources for e-services “stand alone”, and show low correlation with the other components of Information Society funding.  This fact, if confirmed, seems not really positive, since the development of e-services should come along with the diffusion of the necessary pre-conditions.
Another interesting question is: what determine this strategic choice? is it possible to isolate context-specific factors or the choice is based only on political criteria?
Preliminary results of this study are included in the presentation embedded below, which Sergio Scicchitano and I have prepared for the first public meeting of Technology Adoption and Innovation in Public Services (TAIPS) research project at University of Urbino, Italy. The project is funded by Eiburs – European Investment Bank University Research Sponsorship Programme. In the presentation you can find graphs and other figures showing the allocation of resources at national and regional level, and the details of the principal component analysis.

Open data italy: the bottom-up approach

Thu, 4 Nov 2010 12:44:31 +0100

Italy does not have a national open data portal yet. Some people believe that no one even plans to create it, though Mr. Renato Brunetta, Italian Minister for Innovation and Public Administration, in an interview with Wired Italy in June, promised that a “Data.gov.it” will be launched by the end of 2010 following the example of data.gov and data.gov.uk.
Evidently, Italian “civic hackers” did not believe him or simply could not wait. So yesterday they launched their own open data public portal with a tiny budget and lots of enthusiasm. Well, to be precise, not one but two different open government portals appeared on the web on exactly the same day.
The first, datagov.it, is promoted by the brand new Italian Association for Open Government, a small group mainly composed of independent consultants working for national agencies or institutions such as Formez (a public agency for training courses dedicated to central public administrations) or ForumPA (a leading company in organizing major events and exhibits for public administrations), or connected to the network InnovatoriPA (Italian Innovators in the Public Administration). Their main objective is to publish a manifesto for open government in Italy, the draft of which is now available for public consultation and will be finally released on November 30, 2010. The manifesto seems not to be linked to any particular action or event, as it was the Open Declaration on European Public Services, which was conceived to influence the Ministerial Declaration on e-government. This website also has a page containing a list of publicly available datasets - very small for now (only 8 listed), but growing.
The second website is ironically entitled “Spaghetti Open Data”. Rather than a declaration or a manifesto, the portal focuses on the available datasets by listing and classify them in a rigorous way. The group of volunteers behind this effort is composed of key civil servants and information holders in Italian Regional and National Government which were supported by a team of very efficient developers.
This is how Alberto Cottica, one of the promoters, commented on yesterday’s launch on his blog:
“We aggregated 32 databases; not bad when you consider that data.gov, with all the firepower of the Obama administration, had 47 at launch.
It’s only a small thing, but it feels right for various reasons.
Firstly, it is a concrete achievement. I have had enough of complaining about the idle government, the backwardness of Italian culture, the financial crisis, bad luck. I have precious little time to spare, and I would like to invest it on projects that pay me back by yielding some kind of result. The Spaghetti Open Data group has put in some work, and in a few weeks it produced something which is actually there, and it works. If you want to build something with Italian open data you can, right now, without having to wait for structural change or a new generation in government. All it took is some voluntary work and 41 euro for hosting.
Secondly, it is intellectually rigorous. We had to ask ourselves the same questions that I imagine confronted the people in charge of data.gov and data.gov.uk. Are statistic data open data? (Apparently not) Does it make sense for statistical and open data to be collected in the same place? (Apparently it does, so that citizens can correlate the ones with the others) How to organize metadata? (We went for compatibility with CKAN, as in data.gov.uk) we have mapped a possible way for Italian open data, and future legitimate websites of open data have an all-Italian benchmark that they can consider, or even copy.
Finally, it is the expression of a small community of about fifty bloggers and civil servants that worked together towards a common goal, across their considerable cultural differences, showing mutual respect along the way. I have also had enough of bashing bureaucrats as stupid or evil. Some are just that, others are wonderful people and great war buddies. Most are reasonably clever, well-meaning people who happen to be very different from me: collaborating requires investing a little time and effort to come to understand each other. It is almost always worth it”

That said, while the national open data portal is somehow being created, as always happens the best things are happening at regional level. Same thing with open data: good efforts to open up public data and to create open data portals are from the Regional Authorities. Above all:
• Piemonte Region is leading the way with its open data portal dati.piemonte.it, being active from May 2010.
• Toscana Region has set up a webpage full of datasets, and has provided itself with a regional law on the re-use of public information.

A chat with HAL VARIAN on Open Data and Gov 2.0

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:04:25 +0200

Professor Hal Varian is one of my personal idols. As a student, I studied microeconomics from his famous manual which is used in almost every University in the world. Recently, I used Microeconomic Analysis again in my own Economics course at La Sapienza University in Rome, and I rediscovered the clarity and rigor of this text. But my life literally changed after reading Information Rules, a groundbreaking book he wrote with Carl Shapiro in 1999. This book led me to study innovation and technology and to make the study of innovation a profession.
Many of you might know he is now Chief Economist at Google, and his job is analyzing economic trends by exploiting the potential of Google Trends and the tons of queries people make every day. A very exiting job indeed. He is certainly the master of web 2.0 data.
Professor Varian is now touring Europe for a series of meetings that will culminate with the WTO Forum in Geneva tomorrow. Last Thursday he was over in Rome to meet the Italian Minister of Labour Maurizio Sacconi at a public meeting organized by the lobbying and media company Reti entitled “Web Economy: Internet for economic development”.  How could I have passed up the opportunity of being there and asking him a couple of questions about open data and gov 2.0?

Professor Varian, what do you think about this kind of global fever for open data and Gov 2.0? Is it all hype or does have a future?
I think that this model is very attractive. You can think of the government as the wholesaler of data, that puts it up in bulk form. Then this data can be downloaded, refined and improved for retail and distribution. There are a lot of reasons to think that that model might be attractive, because the role that the Government would play would be quite specifically defined: make the raw data available. Then people can extract from that what they want, and polish it, beautify it, crack it and a lot of other things. So that is a model which I think could be attractive to Italy, the US and the other Countries. The problem of managing the data from end to end is that it’s very expensive and a very big challenge. The most important step is to make the data available even if it’s in a raw and unfinished form.
Two days ago, at Gov 2.0 Summit 2010 in Washington DC Ellen Miller of Sunlight Foundation strongly criticized the availability and quality of the data published on USAspending.gov and Data.gov. It seems that this revolution is actually not happening yet.
Well, I think that in the Obama administration, for example, they are making a lot of more patent data available, FCC (Federal Communications Commission) data available, and so on. So it is happening, it’s just not as rapid as one might think, because it’s a difficult problem. But I think there’s enough momentum behind this effort, and we will see progress. As they say "pazienza"! (he laughs).

Open data On Structural Funds at the european parliament - the long way towards transparency

Thu, 9 Sep 2010 16:34:14 +0200

As I wrote in one of my previous posts, European Cohesion Policy is well on its way towards greater transparency in managing Structural Funds. Member states and EU Regions are responsible for publishing data on the beneficiaries of the policy and the corresponding amount of public funding received.
Although the set of minimum information that the European Commission and Member States agreed on in the COCOF of 23rd April 2008 is still relatively small (it only includes the name of the beneficiary, the project and the amount of public funding), the European Transparency Initiative of the European Commission certainly represents a breakthrough innovation in the way most European Countries implement public policy. In the last few years the policy framework and strict regulation of Structural Funds have played a crucial role in pushing the transparency agenda in those areas of Europe where administrative culture and capacity is traditionally low.
A study on current availability of open data on Structural Funds was presented at the European Parliament during the public hearing Transparency in Structural Funds - recipients and beneficiaries held by the President of the Budget Control Committee, Luigi de Magistris (one of the aims of the hearing was to learn from the US website Recovery.gov, which was presented by Earl E. Devaney, Chairman of the US government’s Recovery Accountability and Transparency Board).
The report, entitled “The Data Transparency Initiative and its Impact on Cohesion Policy” (full report), evaluates the implementation of the European Transparency Initiative by providing some data and four case studies: Finland, Italy, the Netherlands and Poland. The study was carried out by the Centre for Industrial Studies (CSIL) in Milan, Italy and financed by the European Parliament's Committee on Regional Development.
As stated in the blog Space for Transparency, the situation reported in the study “results in incomparable, often not machine readable and in some countries almost unusable data in different EU languages and different currencies”.
The results of the study are indeed not so encouraging. Only 78% of the European Regions managing an ERDF Operational Programme provide the minimum information required. 19% provide a description of the operations, 41% a location of the projects, 27% the amount of national co-funding. Moreover, while 44% of EU Regions publish data on the total amount of funding, only 32% of available datasets specify the amount of public money actually paid out.  PDF is confirmed as the prevailing format in which data are released (52%), followed by XLS (27%) and HTML (21%); a situation that did not change one year later (March 2010). See the table I included in my post Open data and structural funds.
As expected, these different approaches seem to reflect differences both in administrative capacities and cultural administrative traditions. In addition, the report argues that centralization vs. decentralization issues play also a role. Obviously, a centrally managed Programme has the advantage that information flows are easier to manage and local actions are more easily coordinated.
The report draws some final recommendations:
• to provide additional essential information, such as contact details, localization, project summaries, description of project partners, etc.
• to make databases fully searchable and compatible, so as to make possible an EU-wide outlook of the data
• to describe the data in English and not only in the local language

Some personal remarks:
1) The study is the first attempt to evaluate the availability and quality of open data on Structural Funds provided by a diverse and complex set of National and Regional Authorities. The statistics provided are a useful starting point for any further research in the field. Moreover, the report provides a valuable contextualization and interpretation of results, along with a detailed description of the European Transparency Initiative.
2) The analysis dates back to March 2009 and should be updated. Since then the number of EU Regions providing at least a minimum set of information has grown and have now reached 100%, as reported in the map of InfoRegio website; though I guess the indicators on quality have not significantly improved.
3) The survey, which seems to be conducted starting from the links that were available on the InfoRegio map at the time, does not consider other important types of Operational Programmes such as the National Programmes and Interregional Programmes or the cross-border co-operation Programmes.
4) Data on quality of the open datasets are presented only in an aggregate way, so it is impossible to compare different nations or regions.

Co-designing regional innovation policies - a new project for multi-level, bottom-up coordination

Sat, 7 Aug 2010 17:54:24 +0200

The context: EU Regional Policy and Innovation
In many EU Countries, especially in the lagging areas of the East and the South of Europe, European Cohesion Policy is the main source of funding for Research and Innovation policies, and new Europe 2020 flagship initiative "Innovation Union" aims at strengthening and further developing the role of EU Structural Funds 2007-13 to support innovation. While the European Social Fund (ESF) is dedicated to the development of human capital, the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), as stated in the European Regulation No 1080/2006, contributes towards the financing of productive investment and infrastructures as well as the development of endogenous potential through measures which support regional and local development.
Each EU region inserts its policy objectives in its regional Operational Programmes or in a shared National or Interregional Programme. For each regional objective, the selection criteria of projects are set out by a dedicated Managing Authority.
In the case of Italy, with their ERFD regional Operational Programmes (OPs)
- all regions have programmed funding for research projects carried out by enterprises (in collaboration with research centres or other enterprises) and for innovation in enterprises; 13 OPs include actions for the creation of new businesses in the emerging sectors
- 19 regions intend to empower research infrastructures, equipment and instrumentation to support R&I supply, and to create clusters and structures for technological transfer (innovation poles, technological districts, competence centres)
The total amount of resources dedicated to Research, Innovation and Information Society by all Italian Operative Programmes 2007-2013 exceeds 20.7 billion Euros. 70% of these resources are concentrated in only 5 Regions of the South: Campania, Puglia, Sicilia, Calabria and Basilicata. This is the highest amount of money ever managed by those regional authorities for this particularly difficult kind of policy.

A specific action for inter-regional coordination in Italy
In 2008, the Department for Development and Cohesion Policies (DPS) of the Italian Ministry of Economic Development - responsible for Structural Funds in Italy - launched a technical assistance project dedicated to the Italian Regions of the Convergence objective (the five regions mentioned above) and aimed at sharing good practices of policy implementation in the field of Research and Innovation. In particular, academic support was offered to tackle critical issues, such as empowering strategic design capability and project selections, in itinere and ex post evaluation, the efficient use of conditionality and result-driven funding. Eight working groups were created, involving more than 100 representatives of regional administrations plus the central ministries and agencies responsible for national innovation policies.  I dedicated a post to some of the high-level conclusions the final report of the first phase of the project (2008-09), in which you can also find not only regional data on structural funds in Italy, but also methodological advice and examples of good practices.
A new phase of the project has just been launched: “Sostegno alle politiche di ricerca e innovazione delle Regioni” (“Support to regional Research and Innovation policies”). The new wave is promising more in-depth analysis of current trends of regional policy for Research and Innovation. Moreover, central and local policy-makers are actively involved in order to co-design policies, to share implementation practices and to draft policy documents and templates ready to be used in day-to-day activities. It’s up to a few thematic working groups to produce drafts of grants, strategies, evaluation studies, implementation processes, etc. in true ‘Gov 2.0’ style, e.g. through the use of tools for on line collaboration.
To date, four working groups, coordinated by high level experts and practitioners, have been focusing on at least six policy issues:
1. Technological foresight and regional policy
2. Selection and criteria for research projects
3. Conditionality and funding of projects
4. Pre-commercial Public procurement
5. In itinere evaluation indicators
6. Ex post evaluation indicators
You can download the powerpoint presentations of the project on the website of the National Agency for Innovation (Agenzia per la diffusione delle tecnologie per l’Innovazione), in Italian.

Innovation policy needs multi-level coordination
But the scope of these activities could not be limited to national boundaries. The ‘secret agenda’ of Andrea Bonaccorsi, professor of Economics at the University of Pisa and coordinator of the project, is to connect Italian regional authorities to the European regional network, and import innovative ideas from the most advanced EU regions.
The rationale is clear. From a regional point of view, it is useless and dangerous to let national or EU plans identify long-term regional policy goals and research priorities by simply ‘copying’ the most fashionable EU or national ideas into local strategies and plans. For example, it is evident that focusing on biotechnology, ICT or nanotechnology may not be the best strategy for all European regions; but this seems to be the case if you take a look at regional policy documents. Instead, Prof Bonaccorsi suggests to apply the ‘smart specialization’ approach to regional priority setting. The effort should be concentrated on specific sectors and niches of application by combining General Purpose Technologies such as ICT with locally generated competencies.  In other words, regions must find their true vocation, and the experience of other advanced European territories might prove fundamental. The increasing interest toward territory-based innovation policies is demonstrated by the growing regional percentage of public expenditure for Research and Innovation in most OECD countries, especially in those countries where regional governments have greater autonomy (see figure above).
The concept of smart specialization was first introduced by Dominique Foray, Paul A. David and Bronwyn Hall - experts of the Knowledge for Growth group (K4G) working for the President of the European Commission - and then embedded in Europe 2020 strategy. Regional specialization implies a multi-level governance to coordinate different, place-based policies at national and regional level. An on-going research project by the OECD and the European Commission identifies some of the main barriers to a seamless policy-making process at national level:
- low political and technical capabilities of local institutions,
- duplication of competencies and plans and
- the presence of policy gaps (policy areas not covered).

Towards a bottom-up approach to policy coordination
Now, how to realize multi-level coordination? While multi-level governance can be improved trough political agreements or the creation of dedicated agencies, the value of this kind of projects is to provide good examples of a bottom-up approach. People involved in policy implementation from different regions - along with national technical bodies - are given the chance to meet their peers and share knowledge, as happens in a true community of practice. I can’t wait to see the results.

From Gov 1.0 to Gov 2.0: A change in users, too

Thu, 10 Jun 2010 16:36:20 +0200

The figure below summarizes one of the main findings of the Report on Digital Divide among households in Italy commissioned by the Italian Parliament and co-funded by all the major telecom companies operating in the country (see this Abstract of Chapter 2 in English, or the full report in Italian). Using data from Eurostat (year 2008), the study classifies the users according to a number of Internet activities that they had performed in the last 3 months.  Users tend to cluster into three main groups:
• the first group (in light green) tends to carry out quite traditional web activities, such as on-line banking, information search or eGovernment
• the second (in darker green) tries out new technologies mainly devoted to communication and the web 2.0, i.e. blogging, social networks, on-line gaming, listening to streaming music, etc.
• the third (in red) is composed of occasional users who did not do any of the activities considered in the last 3 months
Looking at the personal characteristics of the people belonging to the various groups, the data shows that age still plays a very important role, following a pattern that could be thought of as a ‘digital circle of life’ (purple line). Internet users, while starting this virtual cycle among the occasional users when very young, tend to move to the innovation adopters group at 16 to 25 years old, and then join the traditional group once they reach middle age. The circle is eventually closed by virtue of the fact that senior people belong to the occasional users group. As expected, the level of education (blue line) is also positively correlated to the use of the Internet, but the arrows are pointing right to center of the web 1.0 cluster.

Today, who is Gov 2.0 for?
Once again data shows that, on average, digital natives seem to maintain the monopoly of web 2.0, while traditional and bureaucratic on line services are generally used by completely different people, namely well-educated persons in their 30s or 40s.
The difference from 1.0 and 2.0 users is even more dramatic considering e-government services. People who download public forms or use advanced on line services (“sending filled in forms”, in Eurostat vocabulary) are represented in the chart at the exact opposite of blogs creators. They are different users, having different habits and showing completely different ways to use the Internet. Gov 1.0 users do on-line banking, read newspapers on line, etc. Maybe they have responsibilities, have to pay taxes, find a new job and so on, but are probably not used to Twitter, Ning or Second Life. On the contrary, Web 2.0 people are younger and just want to communicate and play.
A tremendous change in service design is necessary to meet the needs of web 2.0 people without leaving traditional users behind; a change of paradigm in fact. New services have to be co-designed with 2.0 kind of users, and a hacker mentality has to be promoted to loose the boundaries between institutional bodies and society.
But today who is Gov 2.0 really for? David Osimo thinks that the existing initiatives are just for elitists - designed, he says quoting the New York Times, for Lisa Simpson, not for Bart - and that new tools are needed in order to involve him, i.e. to enable large-scale participation. Using the Simpsons to interpret the Eurostat data, Bart would be - well... he actually is! - a teenager probably just not interested in political participation and eGovernment services, or at least not yet. He would know how to use 2.0 tools to interact with Government, but he prefers to “play networked games with others” or to download illegal content on peer-to-peer networks. And Lisa, where is she in the chart? Data shows what is happening on average, and Lisa is therefore not considered. In fact, she is absolutely an exception: she is politically involved, she cares about policies (a policy wonk, someone said), while having the media literacy to be 2.0.
Time is probably going to help this. It is reasonable to expect that, as the digital natives get older and new commodities and tools such as the iPad spread, more Barts are going be turned into Lisas, and the hacker/wonk mentality will eventually become more widespread. In the meantime, as Alberto points out, it is better to be ruled by a few Lisas than by Mr. Burns.

e-government policies in search of coordination

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 18:18:23 +0200

Effective coordination and collaboration, both across different sectors (health care, transportation, education, etc.) and tiers of government (national or federal, regional, local), is widely recognized as one of the key requirements of advanced e-government implementation. At a back office level, coordination enables, for example, inter-agency data interoperability and sharing – including better-informed decision-making – and smarter public procurement through the aggregation of public ICT demand. At a front office level, information sharing allows the realization of so-called joined-up or seamless services, often delivered by local authorities, but linked to processes or data from higher levels of government. New flows of interoperable public data can also fuel government 2.0 initiatives, extending the sharing of information not only to other government organizations, but also to the public as active participants and services co-designer.
It is quite evident that policy design has a major role in supporting this process. E-government and ICT strategies should consider the coordination between central and local initiatives as the key factor preventing duplication of efforts and waste of public money, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity. A common policy framework is needed to ensure the compliance of local initiatives with national strategic objectives, to strengthen the structures dedicated to policy governance, to develop common standards, to exchange good practices and to support the weakest local administrations in managing technical and organizational change. Indeed, ensuring that no local agency is left behind is a worthwhile public goal both from an efficiency and equity point of view.
Clearly, coordination is particularly needed in presence of a highly fragmented government structure, which means complex governance. In this regard, Italy represents a good case. Italian agencies directly involved in the delivery of e-government services are more than 10 thousand: they include the ministries and other central public organizations and their local divisions, 21 regional governments, 109 provinces, more than 8,000 municipalities, plus hundreds of other local institutions such as local health care authorities, park authorities, etc.
In such a scenario, the regional level has usually been considered as the ideal scale for policy intervention on these topics (actually, the debate is always open and the matter quite complex). Furthermore, after the reform of the Italian Constitution in 2001, regional governments have experienced greater autonomy on various matters (e.g. health care), which were devolved from central government to regional administrations, and are now playing a central role in defining innovation policy priorities. Today the great majority of the ICT investments in Italy are funded by regional budgets. Nevertheless, the role of the national government remains pivotal because it can promote political commitment, common strategies, technical standards and a shared policy framework.

The following sections briefly examine the delicate interaction between national and regional e-government policies in Italy from the 1990s to the present day.

First phase, 1993-2000: ‘pioneering’
At the national level, from 1993 to 2000 the actors charged with decision-making on ICT and the public sector were the Authority for IT in the Public Administration (AIPA) and the Minister of Public Administration. The AIPA – transformed in CNIPA (National Centre for IT in the Public Administration) in 2003 and than in DigitPA in 2009 – is a technical body with autonomy and scrutiny independence that, together with the Ministry of Public Administration shared some early competences over strategies and technical support in the development of information systems within the central administration. In the late nineties the Ministry launched a series of reforms towards efficiency and transparency of the public administration, which started to consider the ICTs as a carrier of modernization.
At the local level, no formal regional plan were conceived until 1999. In the second half of the nineties the first ‘civic networks’ were created in medium-sized municipalities - traditionally the most innovative and efficient - by the pioneers of e-government, who often were just individual enthusiastic civil servants with a technological background.

Open data and structural funds

Tue, 2 Mar 2010 22:37:58 +0100

As the current debate on ‘government 2.0’ focuses on accessing public information as a way to foster open government and transparency, the availability of public data is becoming crucial for an effective delivery of new user-generated services. According to the last Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment, approved in November 2009, new demand-led information products and services enabled by the reuse of public sector information will support the transition of Europe to a knowledge-based economy.
In this regard, great importance is attributed to the formats in which this data is published. It is universally recognized that a web page (i.e. HTML code) or a PDF file is not enough. To allow mash-up or geo-referencing, data should be machine-readable, preferably in open, standard and reusable formats such as XML, RDF, CSV (see for example WC3 guidelines).

The European Cohesion Policy has always paid attention to the transparency issues related to the vast amount of public resources that have been assigned to the European Regions.
According to Article 69 of the Council Regulation (EC) No 1083/2006 of 11 July 2006 laying down general provisions on the European Regional Development Fund, the European Social Fund and the Cohesion Fund and repealing Regulation (EC) No 1260/1999, the Member States and the Managing Authority for the operational programme shall provide information on and publicise operations and co-financed programmes. The information shall be addressed to European Union citizens and beneficiaries with the aim of highlighting the role of the Community and ensuring that assistance from the Funds is transparent.
To fulfill Article 69 of the Council Regulation (EC) No 1083/2006, Managing Authorities of the programmes co-financed by Structural Funds have to draw up a Communication Plan aiming at:
• improving communication through the implementation of community actions more visible and close to citizens in order to increase the general consent on the future EU policies
• guaranteeing more transparency through more efficient, transparent and accessible European institutions open to public control
• closing the gap between EU institutions and citizens through the improvement of the dialogue and listening.
Consequently all direct beneficiaries (the public or private bodies or firms responsible for commissioning operations or, in cases of aid schemes, the bodies that grant the aid) must be published by the Managing Authorities under the rules governing the implementation of the 2007-2013 funds (EC No 1828/2006). The information must contain the name of the beneficiary, the names of the operations and the amount of public funding allocated to the operations.
From this page of Inforegio web site (DG Regio of European Commission) it is possible to access to the lists of projects and beneficiaries published in the web sites of the Regional Operative Programmes and of the Regional Managing Authorities.
As reported in the table below, currently most of these lists are provided in HTML tables or can be downloaded as PDF files, making them difficult to export to Excel or other applications and connect them to different databases for a more detailed analysis.

DON’T FORGET ‘TRADITIONAL’ E-GOVERNMENT

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 13:37:04 +0100

The Ministerial Declaration on eGovernment, approved in Malmö, Sweden, on 18th November 2009, defines policy priorities to be achieved by 2015:
1. to empower businesses and citizens through eGovernment services and better access to information
2. to facilitate mobility in the single market by seamless eGovernment services
3. to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of the Public Administration. 
The first objective in particular seems to meet some of the requests of web 2.0 enthusiasts, who are asking for a more active role in terms of co-designing public services and accessing public information; having in mind, for example, a European version of the American data.gov portal, they perceive open collaboration with government as a way to create new user-generated services and foster transparency (see for example the open declaration on the role of web 2.0 in public services). In this regard, a key passage of the document emphasizes the importance of the availability of public sector information for reuse: "New demand-led information products and services enabled by the reuse of public sector information will support the transition of Europe to a knowledge-based economy".
However, from a strict Government 2.0 point of view, the Declaration as a whole is still mainly dedicated to 'traditional' eGovernment and, rather than a revolution, it appears to be (frankly, as expected) the result of a compromise between the 'old' and the 'new' way of thinking about innovation in public services, or, perhaps in fairer terms, some sort of 'step-by-step' innovation strategy. As Andrea DiMaio pointed out in a recent post, this impression is somehow confirmed by the fact that “the publication of the most recent e-government benchmark, which is the first outcome of the renewed contract between EU and Capgemini, shows a disappointing continuity with the old e-government approach”.
Is this actually bad news for public sector innovators? Is this 'new' and fashionable view of eGovernment the defining solution to the many challenges that European Public Administrations are facing? Yes, in many ways it is; this 'new' approach is undoubtedly a step in the right direction and its role in the declaration could definitely have been more significant. Co-designing of public services and open government, in particular, could force the Government to bring innovation to the next level and even trigger further improvements in efficiency and the effectiveness of Public Administrations.
Obviously, however, this should not be the only solution, at least for Countries of the Eastern and Southern Europe that are still engaged in developing digital infrastructures and delivering most of the basic public services on line.
Italy is certainly part of this club. Far from delivering web 2.0-like services or sharing public databases on the web (with some exceptions, of course), Italian PAs, especially at the local level, still do not have the technological and organizational ability to complete the delivery of a mature e-government transformation even at a "1.0" level, mainly because the italian local administration is fragmented into thousands of independent agencies and there is no efficient national data exchange framework for inter-agency information flows.
The latest data collected at the EU level highlights this gap. According to the Eurostat chart published on 8th August 2009 in the European Commission Digital Competitiveness Report on i2010 strategy, Italy appears in 22nd position out of 27 Member States for take-up of advanced public services among both citizens and enterprises, i.e. those services that allow the final user to complete a transaction via the web, otherwise called ‘self-services’. Eurostat statistics show not only an alarmingly low e-readiness rate among Italian young people compared with their counterparts in the rest of Europe, but also specific difficulties when using advanced public services via the web.
While waiting for fun and interactive web 2.0 public services, it is obvious that no take-up is achievable if most Public Administrations fail to deliver their most useful basic services on line. Indeed, the principal determinants of this low take-up rate can be found not only in the demand-side aspects like low broadband penetration among households (steadily lower than the European average) or the high proportion of elderly people normally excluded from digital technologies, but also, even now, in the scarcity of the supply of on-line services. As stated in the last 2009 CapGemini Report, which has been measuring public services availability since 2005, in 4 years the position of Italy among the other Member States has dropped from 9th position in 2005 to 17th position out of the 27 EU Countries in terms of full on line availability. Those results could be even worse if the sample of the analyzed services were less biased toward those delivered by the central level and therefore easier to design and implement. The report measurement approach, having to deal with 27 different institutional organizations and therefore to choose only the services that all Member States have in common, includes only a few of those key services that in Italy are only offered at the local level by 8,100 different and independent municipalities, more than a hundred Provinces and 21 Regional Governments.
It is at this level that the situation becomes difficult. The latest results of the survey on ICT in the public sector by the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT) show that, in 2007, only 3% of the local public administrations were able to offer at least one transactional service out of dozens that would be expected.
In the above graph supply and demand of some of the key public on line services are compared. The data on availability of local e-government services is based on the results of the survey by CNIPA and DIT described in a previous post; the chart shows the percentage of individuals living in municipalities that are able to deliver the service on line at least as a downloadable form (stage 2 of the Capgemini classification). Take-up is described using the last available data by single service from the ISTAT survey on ICT usage among individuals, special module on e-government (2006). The reported usage refers to the number of individuals who have used the the service via the web in the last 3 months, expressed as a percentage of all Internet users over the same period.
It is quite clear that those services with higher take-up values tend to show high availability percentages. In particular, it seems that local Public Administrations need to deliver a service to more than 50% of individuals in order to obtain more than 5% of take-up. Moreover, the ISTAT data reveals that those services with the lowest availability rate show the highest values of potential use. More than 60% of the interviewees, for example, would like to be able to notify moving house if the service were actually available.
In conclusion, this simple exercise may be enough to prove that there is still much to be done in order to achieve full availability of local public eServices in Italy as well as in other less-advanced countries in this field. Those who are concerned about the low eGovernment take-up levels should therefore consider that these levels, in some cases, may be determined just by a scarce availability and quality of the basic on line services.
So the ‘old’ approach to ‘traditional’ eGovernment which is prevalent in the European Declaration might sound outdated but it is, at least in some countries, still a must.