The concept of wikicracy – constructive collaboration between citizens and public institutions – in eight minutes, in the video of of my presentation at Happy Birthday Web (in Italian).

Not everybody agrees that participatory processes lead to better public decision. They do enable decision makers to access the extraordinary wealth of diversity, information and first-hand experience embedded in the citizenry: this is their advantage, and it is an important one. But they also have two disadvantages.

• such information is not organized. It is not simply a language problem: different people have different stories, and they just see things differently. If you ask someone what they think about pedestrianizing a street in the city center, for example, you are likely to get completely different answers according not just to that person’s position with respect to that street (does she live there? does she work there? does she own real estate in that street?), but also to her values, lifestyle, personality. A cycling enthusiast, or simply someone in good physical shape, will probably appreciate the advantages of pedestrianization, whereas a couch potato will be worried about restricted mobility. It just depends who you ask! Citizen participation (when the people involved are not very many, i.e. almost always) introduces an element of idiosyncracy in the decision making procedure – and this is a problem for public decision makers, that need to be accountable for whatever they do.
• the discussion can become hard and unpleasant. Good debate requires debating skills, and not everybody has them. Public decision makers generally do: it is a part of their job description. Citizens, it’s hit and miss. Some tend to ramble, or are aggressive; others refer to values or information not shared by the whole community (“pedestrianizing is useless! Nostradamus is clear, a giant globe of fire will swallow the city next year!”). Some might try to apply rhetoric to delegitimize the process if they don’t get what they want (“why do you involve citizens, if you are not prepared to listen to them?”). Different discussion styles might lead to a polarizing, non-convergent outcomes just as well as different positions.

I am convinced that these problems can be overcome at a very low cost – I defend this thesis in Wikicrazia. There is a condition: that participating citizens are recruited from a community oriented towards open and rational discussion. Preferably from an online community. Here is why:

• the members of these communities validate each other recursively, like Pagerank does with web pages. A person that makes wise, widely shared contribution to the conversation will quickly acquire reputation and authority. This is most visible in online communities, and takes the shape of accumulated comments, shares, likes, +1s or whatever the reputational currency is in each community. “Fishing” the highest-standing members from these open communities reduces the randomness of run-of-the-mill participatory processes.
• communities train their members in constructive debate. In well-run communities trolls are isolated. Well-meaning, respectful people talk to each other, and compensate each wise contribution with the reputational currencies mentioned above. This, too, is easier online, where the underlying technology typically does not support seizing the microphone and holding on to it for lengthy speeches, or shouting, or interrupting. The most respected members of such communities tend to be people that is useful, even pleasurable to debate with – even when you do not agree with what they have to say.

Since I believe this is true, I am going to try something daring: invite some members of the Edgeryders community – giving them expert status – to discuss with professional researchers and European policy makers (if you want to take part, read the relevant info ). Will they really enrich the discussion without increasing its entropy?

Sorry, this post in Italian only. I am holding a seminar (open access, in Italian) on the frontiers of collaborative public policies; and participate in the kickoff meeting of a research project on complexity science (invitation only – but I might be able to get you in, in English). Machine-translate for details.

La prossima settimana sarò a Venezia. Lunedì 23, insieme a Luigi Di Prinzio, Silvia Rebeschini e gli amici della Scuola di dottorato Nuove tecnologie dell’informazione territorio-ambiente, faremo il punto sulle frontiere delle politiche pubbliche collaborative al tempo della crisi. A quasi un anno mezzo dalla pubblicazione di Wikicrazia, queste frontiere sono in rapido movimento, e ha molto senso fermarsi un momento per aggiornarne le mappe. Info pratiche qui.

Il seminario è ovviamente collaborativo. Se avete delle esperienze di politiche pubbliche collaborative e volete condividerle (in un formato sintetico, per stimolare la discussione) scrivete a Silvia: srebeschini[chiocciola]gmail[punto]com.

Martedì e mercoledì mi fermo in laguna. Sarò ospite dell’European Center for Living Technology per l’incontro di inizio del progetto MD – Emergence by Design, nell’ambito del quale dirigerò lo sviluppo di un software per assistere i managers di comunità online (nome in codice: Dragon Trainer). L’incontro dell’ECLT non è aperto al pubblico, ma se ti interessa questa roba prova a scrivermi e vedo se riesco a farti entrare.

Apparently the new Italian government is determined to move to adopt open government practices. It is plausible: several ministers are curious enough to investigate new ways, and smart enough to live out this space as protagonists. Regional cohesion minister Fabrizio Barca has written a review of my book of open government that shows a deep and sophisticated understanding of the topic. The most determined in this is probably Education minister Francesco Profumo, who in 2011 – as the newly appointed CEO of the National Research Council, was taking steps to open up its governance. Not by chance, Profumo requested and got the competence on innovation.

The interesting problem is how to open up the Italian public administration, overcoming its inevitable resistances. To keep it simple, consider two possibities: a top-down strategy, focused on the production of regulation and guidelines, and a bottom-up one, focused on building capacity in the various agencies of the central State, but also – and mainly – of the Regions.

The top-down strategy consists in building a strong open government unit in the Innovation department. This unit writes regulations that mandate the adoption of radical transparency and citizen engagement practices; and it produces tools for the various government agencies to do so (for example guidelines, definitions, technical documents). If it works, this strategy results in a new central institution that can do open government.

The bottom-up strategy consists of infiltrating the various state and regional agencies with open and transparent policies and projects. The goal is not to concentrate competences, but to distribute them; and not to set up transparency and openness as add-ons to the policy process, but rather embedding them in each phase of the policy cycle, from design to ex-post evaluation. If it works, such a strategy builds new capacity in the existing agencies to whatever it is they do (education, health care, infrastructures and so on).

Clearly, the two strategies are not alternative but complementary. Nationwide regulation is needed: for example, we need a Freedom of Information Act as a legal tool of last resort, and you can only do this top-down. But I believe that the bottom-up strategy should be the main one. Here’s the reason: a technical unit that owns open government risks to be considered as a nuisance by the frontline agencies; and the latter can jeopardize open government policies simply by not cooperating, or treating them as more red tape, another bureaucratic requirement. It would be a disaster. Contrived open government is very likely to turn into a sad charade.

Some unsolicited advice to Profumo: minister, resist the temptation to gather the best and the brightest around you. Promote, rather, a community of practice of the Italian civil servants engaged in open government practices; set up an annual conference, reboot Innovatori PA, open channels of cooperation with the world’s leading administrations; use the authoritativeness of your role to reward those who perform well, at any level of the hierarchy; open up spaces of dialogue with the civil society. Don’t create another silo; rather, let open government’s women and the men work from the trenches, were public policies are deployed. Do this to stimulate the agencies’ demand for openness rather than push it down their throat. We risk the emergence of a typically Italian uneven situation, with some agencies performing much better than others. Well – that beats an evenly dismal situation.

I am working on a project called Edgeryders, a massively collaborative exercise to reassess and redesign public policy towards youth. The idea is to get participants to share their experiences on policy-relevant topics, like how we make a living or how we participate in public life. As the project starts to pick up speed it does what crowdsourcing exercises do: it spews up a torrent of experiential data. In my book and elsewhere I have claimed that respectful conversations converge: a consensus is achieved, and we can just move on. I still think that’s true, and fairly obvious to the participants. The problem is how you convey it in a verifiable form to external observers – European governments and the European Commission in the case in question. Demanding that they go through even a small part of the raw data is simply not realistic. So what do we do?

My best guess is ethnography. Ethnographic methods are particularly well suited to this kind of investigation, because they are designed to embed the point of view of the people they study. For the same reason, I would argue that they are well suited to Internet ethics: we are not the lab rats, we are the lab itself, just as we are not the users, but the protagonists of our online meeting places. Modern ethnography employs software like Atlas.ti or its open source counterpart Weft QDA to annotate interview transcripts.

The advantage of social networks-based data collection methods like Edgeryders is twofold.

• The data come already in written form. A major cost of ethnographic analysis, trascription of interviews (in 2006 they were talking about €100 per hour of recording), is therefore avoided.
• Crucially, the data are really fragments of a conversation. Participants comment, contradict, praise each other. What might appear like different “interviews” (see this great example) are really linked to each other by a web of social ties, which are encoded into a database, and amenable to quantitative analysis.

In order to take advantage of these features, we are trying to develop a methodology that I have been calling augmented ethnography. It should work more or less like this:

1. first, organize the material by participant. In Edgeryders, this means gathering all of my mission reports (a sort of blog posts), my user profile, and my comments, and filing them under my online identity. This produces a sort of uber-interview of a participant (me), that extends over several topics. Repeat over all participants. Annotate this material with Weft or Atlas.it.
2. next, specify a network to represent the conversation. To a first approximation, I would start by considering the all participants are nodes of the same network. A link is created between participants Alice and Bob according to some interaction encoded in the database: the most intuitive one in Edgeryders is that Alice and Bob are connected if at least one of them has commented one of the other’s mission reports, or if both have commented a third participant’s. Edgeryders was intentionally designed with redundance in the relationship modes, so that different relationships could, in principle, evolve by exaptation to signify different things.
3. crunch the network data and look for structure that could help you. One of the first things I would try is to compute measures of network centrality for each individual. This would help solve the classic ethnographers’s problem: the researcher arrives in some remote island to investigate a community whose culture he does not yet understand. A person sits with her and provides a lot of information. How can the researcher use it? That depends whether she has been talking to a respected member of that community or to the village idiot – and the researcher may have no easy way of knowing that. Network analysis can help: in respectful, fact-oriented conversation, the village idiot will almost never enjoy a high degree of centrality.

Of course, this is only a rough sketch. I don’t doubt that many clever tricks can be devised that will work on ethnography-on-a-database. Now, the problem is finding researchers that can take full advantage of that: competent ethnoghraphers that can take in the results of network analysys too. Readers: do you know any? Is there anyone interested in picking up this conversation, and maybe give my team and myself a hand?

Sorry, this post in Italian only. I review the medium term fallout from a generative regional policy I worked on in 2007-2009, wearing a Ministry of Economic development hat. The policy in question seems to have spawned quite a lot of interesting stuff. My tentative conclusion is that the ingredients of this success have very little to do with the amount of funding allocated, and are basically a function of an initial investment of attention for details, time, and freedom to explore alternative paths. Feel free to use automated translation if you are interested, and to get in touch with me if you want to learn more.

Era il 2007 quando ho iniziato a lavorare a Visioni Urbane, un progetto della Regione Basilicata che si proponeva di realizzare alcuni spazi per la cultura. Nel gruppo di lavoro rappresentavo il Ministero dello sviluppo economico; il mio compito era di spingere il progetto nella direzione di investire molto sulle competenze creative e imprenditoriali invece che nella costruzione di edifici.

I risultati di Visioni Urbane hanno superato le migliori previsioni. Il progetto – almeno per ora – ha avuto successo: la scena creativa lucana, in precedenza divisa da una cultura di sospetto reciproco, ha collaborato con generosità e competenza con la Regione per progettare una rete di nuovi centri per la cultura. Quattro di questi sono stati anche realizzati, non costruendo nuovi edifici ma recuperando edifici pubblici esistenti ma in decadenza e non utilizzati (in questo modo, circa 3 milioni di euro di nuovi investimenti in mattoni hanno messo a valore 10 milioni di euro di investimenti pubblici già effettuati), mentre un quinto, a causa di problemi strutturali insanabili, ha dovuto essere demolito ed è attualmente in corso di ricostruzione. La gestione di tutti e quattro i centri completati è stata messa a bando; in tre casi è già stata assegnata, mentre il quarto bando scade a gennaio. Due dei tre bandi già assegnati sono stati vinti da consorzi di associazioni e piccole imprese della comunità di creativi raccolta intorno al progetto.

Questi sono già ottimi risultati. Ma ancora più notevole è il fallout di Visioni Urbane: il piccolo gruppo di funzionari che lo ha condotto, e che risponde direttamente al Presidente della Regione, ha esteso l’approccio del progetto ad altre policies, parzialmente integrate con VU stesso. A quanto ne so io:

• la rete di coordinamento tra i centri immaginata per Visioni Urbane si è evoluta in una fondazione di comunità, partecipata dalle associazioni e le imprese della comunità creativa, da diversi enti locali e dalla Fondazione per il Sud (che funziona da acceleratore, perché raddoppia la dotazione finanziaria raccolta dagli altri soci). La comunità appoggia energicamente questa operazione.
• la linea di apertura a collaborazioni nazionali e internazionali di VU ha attecchito; i bandi per lo startup dei centri saranno aperti anche a soggetti esterni al territorio.
• il gruppo di VU è stato protagonista nel lanciare la candidatura di Matera a capitale europea della cultura nel 2019. La responsabile del progetto e il direttore vengono entrambi dall’esperienza di Visioni Urbane.
• la Basilicata ha costituito una film commission negli ultimi mesi del 2011. La comunità creativa ha chiesto più volte che il metodo molto partecipato di Visioni Urbane venisse applicato anche in quel caso. Non sono sicuro, però, che questo sia effettivamente accaduto.

Visioni Urbane è stato un progetto generativo. Nei primi tempi è stato necessario fare un investimento iniziale di attenzione, tempo e libertà. Attenzione ai dettagli, per imparare a fare fruttare al massimo ogni occasione e ogni euro di denaro pubblico; e tempo e libertà di azione per crescere, esplorare le alternative a disposizione, rimettere in discussione il proprio modo di pensare la policy (ne ho parlato nel mio libro). Questo ha ridotto, inizialmente, l’efficienza amministrativa misurata in velocità di spesa (ci abbiamo messo diversi anni a spendere quattro milioni di euro), ma ha lasciato all’amministrazione nuovi strumenti per analizzare e per fare. In tempi di crisi e di risorse calanti, è un pensiero che mi dà speranza.

“You are a radical!” In my brooding teenage years, my father would mean this as a criticism. In the world we grew up in, being average was a good thing: the backbone of society was the middle class: ethnic majority, a high school diploma or a run-of-the-mill college degree, a steady job, a mortgaged apartment, 2.3 children and a trade union membership card. That’s where you wanted to be: in with the sensible people, under the protection umbrella of NATO and the European welfare state.

The dream of stability and social inclusion of a large chunk of the population (if certainly not all of it) was good while it lasted. But it seems like the hegemony of moderate thinking came with one very big string attached: the collective inability to recognize the rise of global problems (rampant inequalities, climate change, the feral rich, the surveillance society) and deal with it effectively, thinking out of the box. It is not so much a matter of knowledge (though of course we do need more, better knowledge); for at least some of those problems the science is there, as Stewart Brand pointed out (see also the video above). The cognitive capacity of the median elector, not so much.

So what do we do? In terms of response speed and value for money, far and away the best option is to call in the radical thinkers, and give them much more latitude and resources. We have some unused capacity there: as Vinay Gupta recently pointed out, many of the really important problems and most of the candidate solutions to attack them are being investigated by many interesting people. Almost all of them are poor, because their projects lie outside the fundable sphere (by this Vinay means that they are practically unthinkable by the sensible, dominant middle class decision makers in academia, business and government). That capacity could be used to shape an almost evolutionary policy response: give these people the space to prototype their ideas, deploying a lot of them in a controlled testing environment, each with limited funding. Try everything: geoengineering, space colonization, energy-sufficient communities, reputation as currency, you name it. Then drop what does not work, and follow up on what does. Iterate. Nassim Taleb would call this angling for positive Black Swans: each of these ideas has a small probability of bringing about enormous, off-the-scale benefits, so they should all be made small investment in, not cutting ourselves out from those benefits.

Given all that, we should all hail NESTA’s recent call for the radicals that could potentially transform British society. It is the first time I see the R-word used with a positive meaning in a public policy context. And it is no surprise it’s NESTA (the British National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts), whose CEO Geoff Mulgan is one of the most interesting policy makers that I know of. The call is not very operational: there are no significant resources, or explicit plans to give the radicals some true leverage. But it is a start. I forecast a wave of increasingly radical thinking in public policy, as scientists and policy wonks hang out more together, and some of the hybris of the former rub off onto the latter. Let’s hope it’s not too late.

In the past few years I worked for several public sector agencies. Much of my work consists of thinking up and delivering projects that happen mostly through Internet channels. This is a good time to take a step back and muse on what I learned. As always, the most valuable lessons come from mistakes made – so it’s a good thing I made a lot of them.

• Software-as-service is a bad idea, though there are exceptions. My team and I made this mistake with Kublai, as we decided to deploy our platform on Ning. That allowed us to be up and running in half an hour, no small advantage; but we paid for it by sequestering our own database, procured and paid for by the Italian government, and handing it over to an American private company forever. A year later, Ning changed its CEO and business model: it moved its platform from the open source to the full copyright domain, disabled APIs and blocked migration tools. Just to do a network analysis, Ruggero Rossi had to write a web crawler – a bit like picking the lock to the door of our own home. It could have been worse: we were using a free service (that was before Ning rolled out pricing plans). If the company had simply shut down business, formatted the hard drives and walked away we could not have stopped them, since we were not in any contractual agreement. They would not even answer our emails. I am never going to even consider again rolling out a public sector project in which my agency does not have root access to the server hosting the database.

• Using proprietary software is not a good idea either, again with some exceptions. It is expensive and it amounts to a open-ended commitment to your supplier. If a large software house develops custom software for you and then sells you the license, no one, except that same supplier, is ever going to be able to tweak that code. You risk finding yourself disempowered and stuck in a situation in which changing the color of the background or the font is expensive (as in billable hours expensive) and involves a lot of administrative friction. Furthermore, it is politically questionable: proprietary software is not reusable for free by other administrations, and that is not good – especially in a time of budget cuts and of (justified) skepticism vis-a-vis the effectiveness of administrations in spending taxpayer money.

• That leaves free/open source software. I have been using WordPress in public sector projects since 2007; for the Edgeryders platform, more or less finished as of this week, my team ventured into Drupal. Working with open source software can be hard and frustrating. Features that are supposed to work simply installing a module or a plug-in turn out to have horrible bugs in practice; everything takes longer that you think; most of the work is not developing, but debugging. Meanwhile, the rest of the projects activities are stalled. It feels horrible. I think experience can mitigate the problem, but never really solve it. Free software is by definition organic and gritty: it works by hacks and duct tape as well as by elegant, rational solutions.

Despite all the problems, my experience of Drupal procurement is going to be positive in the end, as with WordPress before. The reason is this: these platforms allow, and even require, a hybrid figure of “power admin” to emerge, somebody who is less skilled than a developer but more so than a normal user. This happens because the admin interfaces of WordPress and Drupal are intuitive and very powerful; Drupal, especially, allows fine-grained control over your website. You can query the database, format the return of the query and send it to a page, a block or even an email message; you can tell the website to execute instructions of the kind IF [condition] THEN [action], not quite programming but on the border. Furthermore – and here I am thinking about my standing love affair with WordPress – when the admin interface is not enough, it is easy to find online resources and tutorials to get your hands into non-core parts of the code. I am technically incompetent, but still I have been able to teach myself to tweak the CSS in a blog’s style sheet, and even the PHP code for very simple tasks, like assigning different headers to different page or inserting a line of Javascript. That required a small-ish investment, to which the proliferation of “For Dummies” books in my library is testimony. This gives you an incredibly important freedom: that of developing in a quick-and-dirty fashion, launching, and then just keep tweaking as your project evolves. Trust me, you will feel the need from day one.

Here’s the trick: the hackerish power admin role is perfect for a public servant that needs to procure software. Getting to know the architecture of these platforms well and to take full advantage of their scope for customization does not make you developer, but it does mean being able to have a constructive conversation with your developers, get real on what can and can’t be done, how long it takes and how much it costs. Furthermore, a power admin can rethink her goals in terms of the software, and so come up with highly sophisticated terms of service for the procurement effort. For example, on Edgeryders we need to constantly reinvolve users in the conversation: this is done through email notifications and the recent activity feed. In Drupal, these functionalities are carried out by certain non-core modules. If the public servant knows this, she can procure not “a website that feels buzzing”, but “a website in which the activity stream module logs activities that are not logged out-of-the-box”, that is much clearer

When I got into motorcycle riding, I read the obligatory Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The lesson of that book is the following: the act of driving a motorbike is not really separable from that of doing its maintenance. “Romantic” bikers, who do not enjoy getting their hands dirty, don’t accept this, and delegate to professional mechanics even the simplest maintenance operation. But they pay the price of disempowerment, when their machines stop by the roadside and won’t get started again, and they don’t have a clue what’s wrong and how to fix it. This system failure can be disastrous in public policy: in the projects I manage technology typically accounts for less than 10% of the budget, yet if the technology is not there the entire project grinds to a halt.

Summing up, high quality procurement is impossible until you know what you are buying. In my experience the free/open source software community is up for sharing its knowledge; corporates producing proprietary software much less so. If, like me, you find yourself in the position of procuring a simple technological solution for the public sector, I recommend you turn to this community, arm yourself with patience and get your hands dirty with the technology the developers intend to use. Install and configure sandbox sites, add functionalities, tweak their look and feel. Spend time with hackers, show that you are eager to learn, an grill them with questions. Above all, don’t yield to the temptation of going “this is not my job, just make it work and send me the invoice”. It doesn’t work like that. This is very time consuming, but you will save that time, with interests, once you are in production. I know it’s not a perfect system, but it is still better than available alternatives. Truth be told, I think it would be really useful if somebody started a course of website procurement for public servants. Anybody out there is interested? I would certainly sign up.

Thanks Freddy Mascheretti, Ivan Vaghi, Paolo Mainardi and Claudio Beatrice for their patience and suggestions

Global problems demand global governance: we have been repeating it for years. And truly, after World War II, international institutions have proliferated and ended up playing important roles in almost every field. It’s not just the United Nations, with their galaxy of agencies, but also the Bretton Woods twin institutions, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank; OECD; OPEC; the World Economic Forum; the structured military alliances like NATO and SEATO; the Club of Madrid; the International Atomic Energy; the WTO and many others. In Europe, this tendency is amplified by the continent’s unification project, and Brussels’s influence on public policies of EU member states has come to be very important. By some calculations, 70% of the activity of the average European country’s parliament consists in signing and stamping directives discussed and decided upon in Brussels and Strasbourg – which would make those parliaments little more than expensive decoration.

This system is extremely efficient. With 736 MEPs (the German Bundestag has 622) and a bureaucracy of only 33,000 employees the European Union runs the world’s largest economy, with 500 million inhabitants (Oxford Economics estimates public sector employees at 2.5 million in the UK in 2009, though the two figures are of course not directly comparable). But such efficiency comes at a price; many Europeans perceive the Union’s institutions as distant, inaccessible, unaccountable – at least to them. The European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, is not elected, but appointed by the member states. The European Parliament is elected, but MEPs find it hard to reconcile the day-by-day work in Brussels with the need to stay in touch with their constituency, which tend to be very large. As a result, these institutions feel like they are working in a vacuum. They study official reports from far-away places, but the everyday life of citizens is perceived as some remote radio transmission with a lot of static on top. The combination of isolation and need for high quality information creates a space for lobbying, and, unsurprisingly, lobbying ensues. In the European political jargon, this problem is called democratic deficit.

The social Internet, I believe, has the potential to break the barrier separating the women and men working for international institutions from citizens. Social filtering allows to entertain massive-scale conversation without too many information overload problems. My past experience with Kublai showed that a central administration can open a direct dialogue with individuals in peripheral territories, leapfrogging all the local administrative levels, and that such disintermediated discussion is an very effective learning tool for the institutions that engage in it. My team and I are trying to enact similar tactics at the European scale with Edgeryders. Individual elected and appointed officials are exploring this space in a more agile way than large organizations can: Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake and Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes are notable examples.

International institutions are interested. Tomorrow (November 29th 2011) the European Parliament – led by its vice president, Gianni Pittella – hosts a discussion on this issue, with a lively program: I have the honor of presenting Edgeryders. On December 9th I will hold a webinar with United Nations Development Programme/Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It is a promising path: I hope it takes us far, because we are are in dire need of reinforcing supranational governance with democratic legitimacy.

On the road again. This time I am going to a birthday party: we celebrate the twentieth birthday of the World Wide Web. The date: Monday, November 14th. The location: Rome, Hadrian’s Temple. The guest of honor: sir Tim Berners-Lee, the Web’s proud father, who will deliver the keynote speech. Much more modestly, I too will hold a short talk about Wikicrazia, i.e. collaborative, Internet-mediated governance.

In the foreground, the party; in the background, difficult times for Italy. But they only make the celebration more necessary: nobody dare take it from us! As Saint Augustine wrote sixteen centuries ago, we are the agents of the times: if we don’t like them, we can always invent new times, or at least try to. A growing number of Italian citizens, connected by the web, is doing just that. I am trying to do my bit, too: Wikitalia – we will talk about it on Monday – is exactly that, Italy’s birthday present to the Web, and the Web’s to Italy.

(The video above was not made for the occasion: it is rather an attempt to explain to some interested non-Italians what I want to do with my life. But I find it fits the occasion well.)