Tag Archives: #opendataitaly

Open data: the hardship and the power

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These days the Spaghetti Open Data mailing list (priceless) is all the rage for two interesting contributions.

  1. the first one is the extraordinary data.gov demo in earthquakes. It draws from a dataset of earthquakes, filed by intensity and location, and returns a map of earthquakes in the world over the last week. It updates dynamically, so what you’ll see changes over time: above is a screeb grab of what northern Japan looks at the time of writing, with well over 300 seismic evens over a world total of more than 400. (hat tip: Federico Bo)
  2. the second one is useful to dampen our enthusiasm with a realistic assessment of real-life difficulties. Eric Sanna has published a tutorial of sorts to build a simple chart starting from a dataset of absence from work of the employees of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Italian law mandates public agencies to publish data on employee absences, and CNR obliged — but using PDF, not exactly on open format. Tinkering around, Eric went from PDF to Excel, and from Excel to chart. But that took 1h 30′; and Eric is way more data literate than the average — he actually works at ISTAT! Plus, his tutorial stops where the real elaboration begins, and the civic hacker sets off to extract some hidden knowledge from the data. For example, what could the peak in absences in August possibly mean? Conclusion: manipolating data is hard, and it will stay hard. There is a lot of work to do to make public data truly usable, and until that work gets done the potential of open data will go, at least in part, untapped.

Spaghetti open data: what’s coooking

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After a long new year festivity pause, the Spaghetti Open Data is back with a vengeance. These days everyone is playing around with a WordPress plugin coded by Vincenzo Patruno, a developer working for ISTAT, very active among us spaghetti and open data lovers. The plugin is a widget that taps into ISTAT’s data warehouse and returns real-time demographic data on a municipality, province or region of our choosing (installation, supereasy, is explained here).

Seeing this, another mailing list participant, Paolo Mainardi got the idea to do the same thing for Drupal. So he asked Vincenzo for the code, promptly got it, and just a few hours later he released a similar plugin, that taps into the same data, that runs on Drupal (get it here). Kudos to Vincenzo and Paolo: clearly the Italian open data movement has all the technical skills it needs.

Then, of course, we’ll need to build a community of open data re-users, with both the drive and the ability to tell stories grounded in data; stories that we can use to better understand our common life as citizens, from integration policies to the State’s accounting, and redesign them as needed. But that’s a completely different ballgame, and we are not there yet. But we will. A first step in that direction might be an initiative of the city of Torino, which just launched this call for ideas (hat tip: Lorenzo Benussi, on the same mailing list).

Spaghetti open data: ciò che bolle in pentola

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Dopo una pausa natalizia piuttosto lunga, la mailing list di Spaghetti Open Data è ripartita alla grande. In questi giorni stanno un po’ tutti giocando con un plugin WordPress scritto da Vincenzo Patruno, informatico in forza all’ISTAT e nolto attivo su SOD. Si tratta di un widget che attinge al data warehouse online di ISTAT e restituisce dati aggiornati in tempo reale sulla popolazione del Comune, Provincia o Regione italiana che ci interessa (l’installazione, molto facile, è spiegata qui).

La cosa divertente è che un altro membro della mailing list, Paolo Mainardi, ha avuto l’idea di fare la stessa cosa per Drupal. Ha chiesto a Vincenzo il codice del suo plugin, e poche ore dopo ha rilasciato un plugin analogo – e che usa la stessa fonte di dati – per Drupal (potete prenderlo da qui). Complimenti a Vincenzo e a Paolo: direi che il movimento italiano open data ha dimostrato di avere le capacità tecniche per andare lontano.

Poi ci sarà da costruire una comunità di utilizzatori dei dati aperti, che abbiano voglia e capacità di raccontare storie basate sui dati che ci servano a capire meglio – e a riprogettare – la nostra vita in comune, dalle politiche dell’accoglienza ai conti pubblici. Ma questa è un’altra storia, e ci arriveremo. Una prima mossa in questa direzione potrebbe essere quella della città di Torino, che ha appena lanciato questo bando (hat tip: Lorenzo Benussi, sempre sulla solita mailing list)