Last week – that appropriately ended with the Open Government Data Camp in Warsaw – has been extraordinary for Italians who care about open government and open data. The Emilia Romagna Region and the City of Florence launched the respective open data portals; the Ministry for innovation and public service announced the dati.gov.it, recruiting civic hacking competition Apps4Italy for added firepower; and Wikitalia, an ambitious civil society initiative, went public.

The present scenario seemed unthinkable just a year ago. Sure, there are reservations and new challenges, as Andrea De Maio warned; we need to be on our guard, and to keep our bullshit detectors on and fully charged. But we have reasons to savor the moment and treat ourselves to a small celebration.

The Italian way towards an open government is different from the more famous cases of the USA and the UK. In those countries the initiative was taken by the government, whereas south of the Alps the civil society has played an important role, in some cases a leading one. Informal meeting spaces – my favorite one is the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list – allowed the more curious and adventurous civil servants to interact with the movement and build up ammo to “sell” open government initiative to their respective institutions. For this reason, we in SOD (I know, unfortunate acronym) have watched most open gov-open data initiatives unfold from the very early days: the ones quoted above, but also others (the Ministry’s initiative is an exception).

This interaction between institutions and civil society has been extremely constructive. The latest example: the portal dati.emilia-romagna.it was launched on Monday morning. The link was immediately picked up and circulated onto the mailing list. In the space of about ten hours, the Region got a lot of kudos – pushed out onto the main social media by mailing list members – and a comprehensive expert test drive, as different members tried its features and posted suggestions for improvement, unsolicited and for free. Something similar happened with ENEL’s open data website, that went live with an unappropriate license. The community’s suggestions (and in this case the criticisms), amplified by social media, led the person in charge of the company’s open data initiative to subscribe to the mailing list, where he received a warm welcome and a passionate argument for changing the license and really opening up those data. Three weeks later, ENEL adopted a fully open license. Take a moment to ponder this: this is what governance could look like – pluralistic, respectful, fast, knowledge-based and low-cost. In my country, it generally does not.

So, the time has come for taking this scene to the next level, and that is Wikitalia. The idea first occurred to Riccardo Luna. He chanced to read my book Wikicrazia at exactly the right moment, as he was looking for new challenges after successfully launching Wired Italia magazine. Riccardo resonates with the vision of constructive collaboration I outlined in the book, that of Internet-mediated collaboration between citizens and institutions is both viable and badly needed if we are to live in Italy. During the summer he, I and others fleshed out this vision into an organization and an action plan. The result is a nonprofit initiative which is inclusive (the door is wide open to any collaboration), action-oriented and with a clear strategy, and natively global (I personally insisted in involving friends and colleagues abroad like Beth Noveck, Andrew Rasiej, Tom Steinberg, Marietje Schaake, Micah Sifry and others right from the start).

So, buongiorno Wikitalia. All Italians that want a regeneration are invited to invest in themselves and get to the next screen. Press PLAY to get started, and good luck.

I am working on the construction of a new online community, that will be called Edgeryders. This is still a relatively new activity, that deploys a knowledge not entirely coded down yet. There is no instruction manual that, when adhered to, guarantees good results: some things work but not every time, others work more or less every time but we don’t know why.

It is not the first time I do this, and I am discovering that, even in such a wonderfully complex and unpredictable field, one can learn from experience. A lot. Some Edgeryders stuff we imported from the Kublai experience, like logo crowdsourcing and recruiting staff from the fledgling community. Other design decisions are inspired from projects of people I admire, projects like Evoke or CriticalCity Upload; and many are inspired by mistakes, both my own and other people’s.

It is a strange experience, both exhalting and humiliating. You are the crowdsorcerer, the expert, the person that can evoke order and meaning from the Great Net’s social magma. You try: you say your incantations, wave your magic wand and… something happens. Or not. Sometimes everything works just fine, and it’s hard to resist the temptation of claiming credit for it; other times everything you do backfires or fizzles out, and you can’t figure out what you are doing wrong to save your life. Maybe there is no mistake – and no credit to claim when things go well. Social dynamics is not deterministic, and even our best efforts can not guarantee good results in every case.

As far as I can see, the skill I am trying to develop – let’s call it crowdsorcery – requires:

1. thinking in probability (with high variance) rather than deterministically. An effective action is not the one that is sure to recruit ten good-level contributors, but the one that reaches out to one thousand random strangers. Nine hundred will ignore you, ninety will contribute really lame stuff, nine will give you good-level contibutions and one will have a stroke of genius that will turn the project on its head and influence the remaining ninety-nine (the nine hundred are probably a lost cause in every scenario). The trick is that no one, not even him- or herself, knows in advance who that random genius is: you just need to move in that general direction, and hope he or she will find you.
2. monitoring and reacting rather than planning and controlling (adaptive stance). It is cheaper and more effective: if a community displays a natural tropism, it makes more sense to encourage it and trying to figure out how to use it for your purposes than trying to fight it. In the online world, monitoring is practically free (even “deep monitoring” à la Dragon Trainer), so don’t be stingy with web analytics.
3. build a redundant theoretical aresenal instead of going pragmatic (“I do this because it works”). Theory asks interesting questions, and I find that trying to read your own work in the light of theory helps crowdsorcerers and -sorceresses to build themselves better tools and encourages their awareness of what they do. I am thinking a lot along a complexity science approach and using a little run-of-the-mill network math. For now.

These general principles translate into design choices. I have decided to devote a series of posts to the choices my team and I are making in the building of Edgeryders. You can find them here (for now, only the first one is online). If you find errors or have suggestions, we are listening.

These latest weeks my team and I are very busy laying the foundations of a new project, Edgeryders, that aims to mobilize an online community’s collective intelligence (I wrote about it here). The idea is not new in itself: actually, I myself have managed similar projects in the past. What’s new, at least for me, is the natively global dimension of this project. The blog (just a placeholder for the real website, which should launch at the end of October) has been up all of two weeks, and we had visits from 59 countries; and in just one week 60 people from 19 countries volunteered to beta test our site – all of this at zero expenditure on communication, since the website is just a placeholder. Beta testers are not only geographically diverse, they are also an intergenerational bunch, with people of all ages.

Beta testers are pioneers, the early adopters of the future Edgeryders community, and it is likely they will play an important role in shaping its atmosphere and its social norms. I find it very encouraging that they are such a diverse bunch: normally, a lot of diversity means fresh air to breathe, and individual social status determined by merit and generosity rather than social class, skin color or sexual preferences. And this is critical to feel at home in a community.

The pioneering phase (invitation only) should start next week. If you would like to be a part of it request an invitation we still have a few places left.

Sorry, this post in Italian only. It reports from Blogest, an Italian gathering of bloggers and social media people. Please use automated translation to get a feeling for it.

NOTA DI ALBERTO – Questo post inaugura una serie di guest post a cura del Nocciolo duro, gruppo di lettori del mio “Wikicrazia” così avanzati da essere in grado di presentarlo al mio posto. Sono davvero onorato di avere lettori così intelligenti e intraprendenti, e spero che a questo primo post seguano molti altri.

Il mondo wiki è in movimento continuo, anche in Italia. Sabato 1 ottobre 2001 a Blogfest, il Nocciolo duro di wikicratici che si ispirano al lavoro di Alberto Cottica, ha partecipato a Blogfest, la manifestazione organizzata a Riva del Garda (TN) che riunisce ogni anno tutto ciò che in Italia gravita attorno alle community della rete.

In rappresentanza del Nocciolo, Simone De Battisti e Renato Turbati hanno preso parte a Wikicamp, dove si è discusso di esperienze operative che utilizzano la tecnologia wiki per sviluppare progetti e creare conoscenza.

Peppe Liberti, scienziato e blogger, ha parlato di Open Access. A partire dall’utilizzo che fino ad oggi si è fatto degli articoli inviati alle riviste specializzate, da parte dei professori e/o ricercatori universitari, che diventano sostanzialmente di proprietà delle riviste stesse e che per metterli a disposizione della comunità scientifica richiedono il pagamento (anche agli stessi autori), il relatore ha spostato l’attenzione su alcune esperienze differenti che si stanno affermando in Europa. In particolare, secondo Liberti,

Princeton ha deciso di esercitare il diritto non esclusivo di rendere disponibili a chiunque le copie degli articoli scritti dai membri delle sue Facoltà (a meno che non venga espressamente richiesta una deroga per qualche particolare articolo). Questo significa che Princeton da ora in poi autorizza i docenti a postare le copie dei loro articoli sui loro siti personali o in quello istituzionale o dove gli pare purché siano disponibili gratuitamente. Si tratta, in buona sostanza, di un disincentivo a pubblicare su quelle riviste che chiedono il trasferimento del copyright.

Come ha ricordato Frieda Brioschi, presidente della Fondazione Wikimedia Italia, in questo caso il link con il mondo wiki sta nel rapporto che sussiste fra chi crea conoscenza e chi ne usufruisce.

Elisa Mazzini, redattrice web 2.0 presso Turismo Emilia Romagna (APT Servizi Emilia Romagna), ha parlato del progetto Adotta una parola, iniziativa di APT Servizi Emilia Romagna che prevede che cittadini e istituzioni possano raccontare gli elementi caratteristici del loro territorio adottando una voce su Wikipedia.

Simone De Battisti e Renato Turbati, hanno parlato (molto bene) di Wikicrazia.

Giulia (non ho capito il cognome) ha parlato della ricerca Lundquist, che analizza quante fra le 100 aziende italiane con maggior capitalizzazione, hanno una pagina su Wikipedia in inglese.