OpenCoesione Promoting transparency and civic monitoring on

Cohesion Policy

Center for Technology in Government

State University of New York at Albany

23rd September 2014

Carlo Amati, Simona De Luca, Aline Pennisi, Luigi Reggi

Open government and transparency on public funds

The main purposes of this initiative:

• more efficient and effective usage of resources and

destination of funds consistent with people’s needs

• improve decision making and policy design, also by

increasing access to and quality of information

• increasing involvement of stakeholders and civic partners

• broadening the opportunities for analyses and

evaluations on relevant policy issues

• encouraging the creation of new tools and services

revolving around the availability of open data

opencoesione.gov.it

807,536 projects funded

80,1 billion euro assigned 32,3 billion euro actually spent

over 80 thousand entities involved

all over Italy (although mostly on the South)

in many different policy sectors to reduce disparties, attract business and enhance

opportunities and the quality of services

What is Eu and Italian Cohesion Policy about?

opencoesione.gov.it

farmsubsidy.org

Recovery.gov

eufunds.ftdata.co.uk

Inforegio

September 2014

Countries with

interactive portals

on Structural

Funds projects:

DK, F, H, NL, PL, IT

http://ec.europa.eu/reg

ional_policy/projects/

map/index_en.cfm

opencoesione.gov.it

OpenCoesione

published in Italy in July, 2012

2011 2012

Transparency on cohesion funds in Europe?

The transparency on the beneficiaries of Structural

Funds in Europe and Italy

L. Reggi, Materiali UVAL, Issue 27, 2012

Data in machine readable format

opencoesione.gov.it

What’s in OpenCoesione?

Information about projects undertaken for

implementing regional policies:

• description

• funding (amount and sources)

• locations

• thematic areas

• public/private subjects involved

• deployment timing

Highlights of data provided

Access to web portal since launch (July 17th 2012)

to September 18th 2014

2.193.718 pages visualizations, 526.098 visitors,

2 minutes average time on the site, 4,3% from

outside Italy

opencoesione.gov.it

Projects and funds (total

or subets accoding to

user’s queries)

Interactive graphs

for immediate distribution

of investment and number of

projects by nature and

policy theme

Interactive table

on investment by

nature and policy

theme

Direct search of public

authorities in charge for

programming and other

recipients of projects

Direct access to locations

through interactive maps

and search to discover

the number of projects

undertaken,

the amount of overall

investments in the place

and the list of projects

Top projects listing

in home page (most

recently completed and

largest financially)

Main contents: homepage Highlights of data provided

Periodical insights

and short focuses

opencoesione.gov.it

For each policy theme a selection of

territorial indicators on the social

and economic context of each region

Highlighted indicators assure

comparable information among

regions

The idea is to invite the user to

make connections between

projects and the issues they should

impact on

Main contents: homepage Highlights of data provided

opencoesione.gov.it

Main contents: project search E.g.: transportation infrastructures over 100.000 € in Naples

opencoesione.gov.it

30.06.2014

Project at a glance

opencoesione.gov.it

30.06.2014

Recepients at a glance

Enabling factors on various dimensions:

• awareness within a branch of administration of the

relevance of the data ordinarily produced to spend the

funds (but little used for directing the policy)

• political insight on benefits of transparency and citizens’

voice

• the availability of a national unitary monitoring system

(since 2007)

• the open government and open data discourse, which

helped combine the previous factors

How was OpenCoesione made possible? A combination of factors ….

opencoesione.gov.it

National unitary

monitoring system

Marche Regional

Admin

Calabria Regional

Admin

…

Ministry Dev.t

Ministry Education University

and Research

Ministry Interior

Veneto Regional

Admin

National unitary monitoring system

• Federate architecture:

a system of systems

• Based on data

exchange protocol

shared by all systems

opencoesione.gov.it

• Data from monitoring systems are updated every two months

by the Administrations in charge of managing the funds and are

made available in OpenCoesione approximately three months

after the reference date.

• Data currently available on OpenCoesione is updated to June

30th 2014

• The set of published variables and web-portal default analyses

are in increasing over time, on the basis both of capacity to

inspect quality standards and of user demands

How often are OpenCoesione

data updated?

opencoesione.gov.it

Monitoring System

113 variables downloadable in CSV format

32 variables downloadable from project search on OC + APIs

classifications by CUP system

Identification, classifications by NSRF, funding, timing, locations, subjects

Var1 …………………… Var32

Var1 …………………… Var93

Var1 ……………………………… VarN

Available data on implemented projects Different sets of variables

classifications by CUP system

Identification, classifications by NSRF, funding, timing, locations, subjects

opencoesione.gov.it

A user licence is granted in order to

support the re-use of published data.

The CC BY-SA 3.0 licence allows

users to reproduce, distribute and

communicate to the public data and

analysis, as well as to modify and

adapt or even use data for commercial

purposes.

Data to be re-used User license agreement: CC BY-SA

opencoesione.gov.it

A long way to go on data …

• From EU Funds to all resources for cohesion policy in Italy

• The monitoring system collects indicators on actual targets

of individual projects (hopefully to be published in future)

• Too few data on actual beneficiaries/recipients of projects

and sub-awards

• integration with other data sources (register of public and

private bodies, procurement process, etc.)

opencoesione.gov.it

• Data Journalism Days are seminars for journalists, policy

analysts, researchers and students interested in using

information on investment projects funded by cohesion policy.

They are aimed at understanding what kind of data is available

and at promoting mashups between OpenCoesione data and

other sources in order to draft analyses, graphics, maps and tell

stories.

How to promote knowledge society Actions to help the role of information intermediaries

opencoesione.gov.it

• Moni-thon (from mara-thon and hacka-thon) is a civic

monitoring marathon: groups of citizens map out the projects

funded by cohesion policy in their town or area, select a theme

or another specific feature and they go on the spot to see what

the project in really about and check on its realisation. The

evidence is uploaded into a common experimental platform.

Fostering civic monitoring Actions to help citizens’ voice and dissemination

opencoesione.gov.it

Raising a new generation of civic awareness

Involvement of high schools in an experimental civic

monitoring that mixes civic education, digital competencies

and data journalism in order to understand and communicate,

with innovative methods, how cohesion policy affect our

neighbourhoods.

Development of digital competencies (data skills, data

journalism skills)

Implementation of a project work on storytelling about

projects funded by cohesion policy

Providing feedback on results in a public event

www.ascuoladiopencoesione.it

opencoesione.gov.it

Slow pace in implementing cohesion policy Low absorption rates of the funds Understanding whether policy is effective

Why should citizens be involved ?

opencoesione.gov.it

Moni-thon is an independent initiative for Citizen monitoring of Cohesion policy projects in Italy based on the Open Data from

www.opencoesione.gov.it

Citizen monitoring as a possible solution

A meso-level action - between TOP-DOWN and BOTTOM-UP

Public Agencies

Open Data Portals

Citizen monitoring

Administrative data

Open Data + visualizations

Evidence, Ideas, suggestions

How citizen monitoring should work

Tools 1. Interactive map including

• user-generated Citizen

monitoring reports

• Relevant projects selected by the community

2. Toolkit / Common

methodology 3. Storytelling

• Blog • Tips&tricks 4. News on financed projects

Monithon.it

Involving civic communities

Shared methodology Light organization and community management High heterogeneity: Different interests, selected themes, geographical areas, teams, etc.

Citizen monitoring reports

Local communities

• 56 reports • Some throughout

investigations • 10+ local

communities involved • Concentration in the

South

Monithon Toolkit

+ Mailing list (we do speak English! ☺) monithon@googlegroups.com

The Toolkit

Projects selection

Monithon “ex-ante” Crowdsourced ideas and suggestions

Monithon “in itinere” Measuring progress

Monithon “ex post” Measuring results

Monithon “ex post” Measuring outcomes / impact

The phases of a Monithon

ILVA production site EU Projects

Areas near the ILVA plant

Projects selection The case of ILVA - Taranto

@LinoCastrovilli @luigreggi @PaolaLilianaB

Monithon “ex ante” The Palermo future metro track

• Project analysis • Why is it stucked? • What do people say? • The experts’ opinion • How the Municipality tell

this story to the public • Suggestions from local

stakeholders

@giuliodichiara

& friends

Monithon “in itinere”: Combating organized crime through the re-use of confiscated assets

Monithon “ex post” - Live testing of local transport systems

@PaolaLilianaB @chiaracio @cristinatogna

Qualitative & Quantitative Data collected

What kind of questions this initiative raises for us?

Are we really meeting citizen expectations regarding

transparency on the use of funds

How to deal with data quality problems, mainly on results of

the funded projects

How to deal with privacy problems related to recipients

How can we gain from (and promote) collaboration and

information sharing to improve government’s capabilities

Making data interoperable in the global world (and first of

all in the EU!)

How can we make better use of technology to engage

citizens

opencoesione.gov.it