Sorry, this post in Italian only. The gist is that open data only empower citizens if there is a critical mass of data literate citizens that can give rise to competing interpretations. Otherwise, they risk toxyfying further the political debate, and governments are party right to be wary of just putting everything out there without a context.

Non mi sento quasi mai a mio agio nel discutere di politica. Il modo in cui decidiamo sul nostro futuro comune mi sembra qualche volta completamente fuori centro: si parla delle personalità dei leaders invece che delle loro politiche. Le stesse politiche sembrano assumere connotati molto diversi a seconda di chi le propone: i “nostri” tagli di bilancio sono un’assennata misura di controllo degli sprechi, mentre quelli degli avversari sono stangate indiscriminate su servizi essenziali. Il tutto è decisamente troppo emotivo; troppo perché votare “di pancia” rischia di avere conseguenze gravi (chi fosse interessato può leggersi Il mito dell’elettore razionale di Bryan Caplan). Nel corso della recente campagna referendaria, per esempio, si è parlato molto poco di energia nucleare e di modelli di gestione dell’acqua: hanno prevalso affermazioni vaghe ed emotive come “non mi fido di questo paese” (ma la usi la sanità pubblica? La scuola? Le autostrade?) o “restituiamo il futuro ai nostri figli” (nel senso di usare il nucleare perché produce meno gas di serra o di usare più carbone e petrolio perché non sono radioattivi?).

Mi sono fatto l’idea che i dati in formato aperto potrebbero essere un elemento di riequilibrio della discussione. Non solo i dati contengono fatti, ma discutere sull’interpretazione dei dati conduce ad analisi sempre più sofisticate: “guarda, il PIL è cresciuto molto più sotto il governo dei Grigi del misero 0.3% all’anno dell’amministrazione dei Colorati!” “Vero, ma considera che gli anni di amministrazione dei Colorati hanno coinciso con una depressione mondiale. L’indicatore giusto è il differenziale di crescita tra il nostro paese e la media mondiale, ed esso rende giustizia alla sagge politiche di rilancio condotte dai Colorati.” Per prevalere, i duellanti sono costretti a confrontarsi con il dato. Cosa misura veramente? Come interpretarlo?

Perché questo succeda, naturalmente, i dati sono essenziali, ma non sufficienti: ci vuole anche una fetta di opinione pubblica, per quanto minoritaria, che sappia usarli per costruire storie sul nostro vivere insieme e proporle alla discussione comune. In mancanza di questo i dati possono venire usati male, o branditi come armi, e diventare strumenti di riduzione della qualità del dibattito. È per questo che sto nel movimento open data, e, in quel movimento, mi sono autoassegnato il ruolo di proporre iniziative di stimolo della domanda di dati e data literacy. Nel video qui sopra (20 minuti) provo a spiegare meglio la mia posizione.

The European Commission manages a lot of money. Just regional development projects are allocated a little less than 350 billion euro over the 2007-2013 period; research is allocated another 50 billion, and on it goes. Many critics complain that these resources end up funding mainly “the usual suspects”: universities, large corporations, public authorities, trade unions. These players can deal with the bureaucratic complexities of mounting a European project (for example, build a consortium with at least X partners in Y countries, one of which should be a new member State to increase chances of being funded); but they are not necessarily the most effective at using the money to everyone’s advantage. On the contrary, large organizations tend to have large overheads, a lot of middle management as opposed to line-of-fire staff, low propensity to risk.

Small and micro enterprises, young entrepreneurs, social innovators, creative businesses – often the most interesting players, who can contribute substantially to regional development, research and many more things beside, are left out of the game. As a rule they get demoralized by the formalistic, bureaucratic culture of these processes, and they don’t even bother to bid for funding; when they do bid, they almost always lose. All this has been clear for a long time; as of lately these people have been making themselves heard in a an unusually clear way, and Europe is starting to react. The video above, produced by my friends at CriticalCity Upload, proves the point: it has been shown in a plenary session at the Digital Agenda Assembly, as 1,200 people – including Commissioner Neelie Kroes – watched. Attendees reported the audience responded with thunderous applause.

With this problem in mind, the Department of Regional Affairs at the Prime Minister’s Office is building a project called Opera, a tool to build European project in a peer-to-peer modality (an open community will launch in September). One of its most fascinating features is the possibility to search for possible partners, and to comment and rate their performance. The community spots reliable, fast, collaborative partners and makes it easier to find them — and this will help the emergence of better partnerships and better projects, increasing the efficiency of that funding. The Opera project is explicitly inspired from Kublai, a project I helped launch in 2008 and directed until earlier this year. The Opera team promanates from Studiare Sviluppo, an in-house company of Italy’s central administration that also worked on Kublai. I am happy and proud that the work done by me and my tea, has helped inspire other Central administrations.

Kublai and Opera make use of Web.20 to get to a fascinating result: making public policies more inclusive and more efficient at the same time. Enhanced inclusivity stems from opening the door wide open to get on new agents that are fast and innovative; and these, cutting a slice of the pie for themselves, increase overall efficiency (the efficiency gain is impressive: CriticalCity Upload – incubated in Kublai – has a cost per user reached that is one thirtieth of European e-participation projects). It is not so surprising, because public policies work through people, and chaning the players is a great way to change the game. It remains to be seen whether policy innovators will manage to protect iniatives like Opera from the inevitable backlash of incumbents, that have so far gotten a very confortable deal under the present system. For all the talk of Creative Destruction, not everybody likes creative destrucion.

The campaign for this year’s municipal elections in Milan left us with a precious legacy: the awareness that many citizens are willing and able to collaborate with their elected representatives in a constructive way. Thanks to the large number of people involved, their great creative energy, and their Internet tools to coordinate towards common goals, the connected citizenry’s potential to contribute to a much needed general renewal of the country is out of the question. The Italian civil society claimed a role for itself; there was no Obama to summon it. As it turns out, it has proven to be at least as advanced as any other in the world, and possibly more so.

This legacy, it turns out, has a dark side. Besides citizens, the protagonists of the Milanese campaign were Internet communication experts, who tend to have a marketing background. The marketing-derived approach makes sense for election campaigns, because voting has near-zero cost; low thresholds for access; and above all is often driven by non-rational, gut feeling motivations. All of these characteristics carry through to the purchase of consumption goods. So, political communication experts speak the language of marketing and advertising: they tell stories like Nixon losing the presidency to Kennedy because, in the key TV debate, he was sweating. Their job is not to help the citizenry to build a realistic idea of what is needed in the next term, but cajole them into voting for a certain candidate, even if they do it for superficial or wrong reasons. Granted, it is not particularly noble, but it works.

Collaboration between citizens and public authorities is very different from competition for votes, and the analogy with purchase of consumption goods does not carry through. Designing and enacting policies is a high-cost, prolonged activity; it requires rational argument, data, competence. In this context the marketing profession’s seduction techniques don’t work well; what’s more, they risk doing damage. In particular, they risk creating participation bubbles: initially luring into signing up people that later, faced with the exhausting wrangle of designing policy, get disheartened and defect en masse – leaving themselves with a bad experience and others with the chore of reorganizing the whole process. Enacting the wiki government is not about attracting large crowds, but about enabling each and every citizen to choose whether to engage, and just what with, while giving her honest information about the difficulties, the hard work, the high risk of failure associated with participation. Indicators, too, have different meaning than in marketing: in the advertising world attracting more people is always better, whereas in the wiki government there is such a thing as too much participation (it entails duplication of information, with many people making the same point, and reduction in the signal-to-noise ratio, with low-quality contributions swamping high-quality ones).

There is a fundamental difference in the way the decision to engage is modeled: in wiki-style collaboration participants self-select, in marketing the communication experts selects a target in a top-down way. In the former the participant is seen as a thinking adult, that needs to be enabled and informed so that she can make the right decision; in the latter the consumer (or voter) is seen as a stupid, selfish individual that reacts to gut stimulation, and that needs to be led to do what we know must be done. The outcome of collaboration, when it is well designed, is open and unpredictable; the outcome of marketing, when it is well designed, is meeting some target set a priori.

All in all, a shift towards marketing of the discourse on collaboration would be a mistake. An increase in the number of participants to a single process does not automatically mean an improvement; a mayor is not a brand; a willingness to help out is not a trend to be exploited on the short run (and if it is we have no use for it, because collaboration on policy yields results on the medium to long run); and above all citizens are not a target, because they don’t need to be convinced: they need to be enabled to do whatever it is they want to do. It is crystal clear that Italians are up for trying out a collaboration with any half-decent public authority; this collaboration needs space and patient nurturing to grow healthy and strong, sheltered from hype and unrealistic expectations. I hope that the leaders of Italian authorities – starting from the new mayor of Milan Giuliano Pisapia, the leader who best synbolizes the current phase – resist the temptation to frame collaboration as a campaign, citizens as voters, rational conversation as hidden persuasion. Yielding to it would mean shooting themselves in the foot, and wasting an opportunity that the country cannot afford to miss.

Sulla campagna che ha portato Giuliano Pisapia alla carica di sindaco di Milano è stato già scritto molto; e comincia a circolare qualche analisi anche sul ruolo giocato dai media sociali, e in particolare da Twitter con i casi #morattiquotes e #sucate. Non c’è dubbio che la campagna elettorale della squadra Pisapia-Boeri sia stata fortemente collaborativa (gli utenti che hanno usato l’hashtag #morattiquotes sono stati oltre quarantamila); e non c’è dubbio nemmeno sul fatto che Pisapia abbia capito e accettato il gioco, facendo un passo indietro e lasciando che fossero i suoi simpatizzanti a raccontarlo, con le parole e con i media che preferivano. Lascio ad altri, più esperti di me in materia, il giudizio su come l’esperienza di Milano modificherà le campagne elettorali del futuro.Much has been written on the campaign that led Giuliano Pisapia to being elected mayor of Milan. Analysis on the role of social media, Twitter in particular with the #morattiquotes and #sucate is begining to circulate. There is no doubt that the Pisapia-Boeri campaign was very collaborative (more than forty thousand users tweeted with the #morattiquotes hashtag); and that Pisapia himself played ball, taking a step back and letting his supporters do the heavy lifting of voicing for him, in the way and on the media they liked. I am not qualified to comment on how this campaign will change political communication in italy.

I do want to highlight that, as the campaign drew to a close and victory was declared, something unexpected happens: the loose collaboration between Pisapia the candidate and his supporters did not end with it. The first message that Pisapia the mayor delivered to the city was “Don’t leave me alone”, and his words rang sincere; a few hours later, to a journalist asking him how he would deal with the inevitable pressure of interest groups he serenely replied “There are hundreds of thousands of Milanese out there that are not going to let me sell out” (video, at 8′ 50″). Message received, loud and clear: Pisapia believes in the wisdom of “his” crowd. In this sense, he is a real wiki leader.

As the mayor seems to want to create, within his administration, some space that citizens can help fill with content, like a Wikipedia page, his supporters are giving signs that they want to play along. On Friday June 3rd, just four days after the election, a new hashtag spread over Italian-language Twitter, #pisapiasentilamia (Pisapia, hear my voice). The light-hearted tone recalls the campaign, but the content is serious and quite concrete. Citizens share their needs, priorities and dreams for Milan in the coming years: bikesharing in the suburbs, longer service hours for the metro, a single card to access every museum in town. Some promise to think about it in depth; others volunteer to work with the new administration for free. As is often the case, the willingness to help of the connected citizenry took by surprise commentators not accustomed to the Internet social dynamics.

Granted, the 140 characters of Twitter are hardly suited to designing policy; it is unlikely that they will much further than a book of dreams. But a threshold has been stepped over: some of the mayor’s supporters are migrating from (partisan) cyberactivism to (nonpartisan) collaboration with a city institution. This is the same collaboration that I tried to account for in my book; I think it arises fairly naturally as a feature of civility in the 21st century. In this new space it will be natural for people that did not vote for Pisapia to participate, and they will be welcome. If the new Milan administration plays its cards right, it could give rise to a world class participation experience, in which citizens not only contribute to policy design, but to policy delivery as well. I recommend it goes for it: wiki government is very efficient, and not nearly as disruptive as it sounds. I am confident that the Milanese — not just those on Twitter, either — would play ball like there’s no tomorrow.

UPDATE: a few hours after this post went online Pisapia tweeted that he is reading all #pisapiasentilamia suggestions and grateful to everyone putting them out. That’s very good angling: he is not committing to act on the basis on those suggestions (indeed he could not do so), but simply to read them and take them into consideration. In a separate tweet he thanked me for the post. Meanwhile a #pisapiasentilamia showed up on Facebook.

Sorry, this post in Italian only. It’s only book presentations in Sicily; please use Google Translate if you still want to know more about them.

Amo e la Sicilia e ammiro i siciliani. Sono particolarmente contento di potere presentare Wikicrazia sull’isola, e questo succederà tre volte nei prossimi tre giorni. Sabato 4 sarò a Palermo, per Una marina di libri, una nuova fiera del’editoria indipendente (evento Facebook). Domenica vado a Patti, in provincia di Messina, dove sarò ospite del mitico Caffè Galante. Patti, come molti comuni siciliani, ha completato il primo turno delle elezioni municipali e attende il ballottaggio; proveremo a montare una presentazione del libro centrata sulla dimensione comunale (evento Facebook). Lunedì 6 sarò invece alla Sala Hernandez di Catania, in un evento organizzato dagli amici di The Hub Sicilia (evento Facebook). Mi sposterò da una presentazione all’altra in moto, tanto per aggiungere un po’ di turismo (spero) intelligente allle occasioni di lavoro.

Ringrazio molto il mio editore Ottavio Navarra (siciliano, of course) per avere organizzato questo minitour siciliano, e festeggio riproponendo qui sopra il video che racconta i suoi primi passi come editore, in una terra bella ma non sempre facile per gli imprenditori puliti. Il calendario delle presentazioni è qui.