Tag Archives: open data

Democratizing the data society

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“Data are the new oil”. Technical advances in computing and a pervasive social Internet make vast datasets on human behavior – as well as the tools to process them – available for cheap. Trouble is, democratic institutions don’t look like they are ready to tackle the big data challenge and the many thorny issues it brings about (privacy, anyone?). They risk playing a distant second fiddle to large hi-tech corporates. Last Friday I shared some musings along these lines at the Future Data conference, held in Florence by initiative of the Italian local authorities’ statistics society (thanks for inviting me!). I was busy with the RENA Summer School in Matera, so I had to send a video. It’s in Italian, but I plan to do more work in English around this.

Opengov squared: the European Parliament opens its Open Government Written Declaration

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The European Parliament accelerates on open government. Its latest move is a written declaration, a tool whose purpose is to launch or reopen debates on issues of interest to the Union.

With a very wikicratic move, initiator MEPs Gianni Pittella, Rodi Kratsa-Tsagaropoulou, Marietje Schaake, Maria Matias, Katarina Nevedalova have uploaded the draft text onto com-ment.com, a platform for collaborative commentary. The document’s title will speak to the heart of all admirers of the Internet’s ultrahorizontal form of governance: Request for comments: Written declaration on open and collaborative government.

The RFC will stay commentable until April 9th. Then it will be rewritten so as to take citizens’ comments into account, translated in the various EU official languages and brought to parliament. Cleary, the more active citizen participation to the “wiki” phase the higher the likelihood that this will go through and become an official act of the European Parliament, helping open government to occupy a central position in the Commission’s and the member states’ agendas. So get in there and speak your mind.

Buongiorno Wikitalia: a new phase for Open Government in Italy

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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.