4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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Context analysis
The input that led to the idea of the Compass of Transparency was the need to create a simple and effective tool that could monitor the progress of the transparency improvement of Italian P.A.s, following the laws of transparency that had been introduced in Italy in recent years. The context analysis phase had the goal to define the main requirements of the system, in order to be useful not only as an internal monitoring tool, but also as an instrument that could support the implementation of the law by the P.A.s and as a transparency tool for the citizens. The phase consisted of normative analysis and stakeholder involvement through the main social networks (such as facebook and twitter) to understand the need for civil society in this subject, thus performing an effective and innovative “co-design approach”.
Design, implementation and testing
The Compass of Transparency is characterized by an incremental-iterative approach, where new functionalities are identified, designed, implemented and tested periodically. This provides a delivery system which is always updated with the needs of the DPA and the stakeholders, through a series of frequent and subsequent software releases.
The design of a new feature is performed through the collaboration of the main stakeholders and a technical feasibility analysis. The new feature is then prototyped in order to check if the needs have been correctly understood and put into practice.
The implementation phase is usually very short, since the preparatory work of the release provides most of the information and elements needed by this phase. The production of early prototypes is also a way to speed up the implementation phase.
The testing phase is started by technicians and experts, both for the employed technologies and the innovation itself. The substantial part of the testing work has been done so far and will continue to be done in future, directly by the end users (citizens and public administrations). The system is always online in “beta permanent” state and users themselves can continuously notify any malfunctions. These are routed in a ticketing process that lead to the correction of errors and to a new release of the software.
Diffusion
As far as the diffusion of the innovation is concerned it is worth pointing out that when the system was put on-line, it was not immediately massively advertised. This has led to a gradual increase in the use of the instrument and of the innovation by users, ensuring a proper governance at all levels: social, political, organizational and technological. Once all the potential problems and possible solutions had been identified, the Department spread the use of the instrument, through both communication campaigns and a strong political commitment.
Since the main stakeholders have been involved during the co-design of the system and are regularly interested by new functionalities, the diffusion of the Compass and of its new features are disseminated at an early stage of the lifecycle of the Compass.
Users support and system management
This activity includes the services needed to guarantee the full functionality of the system,its evolutions, and the continuous match with the needs of users. This is accomplished through the usage of resources internal to the Department and services committed to an external supplier.
One of the most important activities performed in this phase is the help desk services (1st and 2nd level) for the public administrations that want to improve their level of transparency compliance. Support activities include technical consultancy, analysis of the P.A. website, organizational advice and continuous improvement of the database of the public administrations websites analysed by the Compass.
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5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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The Compass of Transparency has been designed according to a new approach, built around the co-design paradigm. In this sense, the role of civil society and the stakeholder engagement has been essential in all the phases of the project, both in the transparency and the anti-corruption fields. For instance, Transparency International has been involved actively in the definition of the anti-corruption initial plan, whose principles has represented an input to the Compass main ideas, thus making the system an effective corruption prevention tool. Thanks to many citizens on the social networks, new inputs have flowed inside the project, constituting the starting point system has been built on.
The Compass of Transparency changes the way transparency of the administrations is verified . It puts the citizen first, both as a user of transparency and as a contributor to the increase of transparency in P.A.s, by expressing his opinion about the quality (completeness, update and understandability ) of the published contents.
The Compass shows simple and intuitive user interfaces that can be used without any difficulties by people who are not internet experts (e.g. the retired). The idea is to involve also those who are not accustomed to ICT but wish to help the transparency process and whose contribution is precious, since a multidisciplinary knowledge and a deep experience about the context where the administrations operate is needed to correctly evaluate the quality of many pieces of information.
Integration with social networks facilitates the launch of social groups, such as the Facebook group "Traparenza siti web", that has grown in popularity and in registrations to more than 1.700 people, by November 2013. This group is composed of people that spontaneously cooperate, during online events, to analyze the websites of target administrations, using the Compass of Transparency as a main tool.
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6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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The Compass of Transparency has been designed in a period when the economic situation has required strong reductions in public investments and avoidance of additional costs for P.A.s in all e-gov interventions. In this scenario, the technological and organizational structure of the Compass has been planned to be operative without substantial maintenance or user assistance activities.
The low costs associated to the project are one of the key reasons for the 1st prize won by the Compass during the 2013 edition of the prestigious European Public Sector Award (www.epsa2013.eu), whose theme has been “Weathering the storm: creative solutions in a time of crisis”.
From the technological point of view, the Compass is a simple system, without user authentication. This reduces the support needed by the extremely high number of stakeholders that use the system. The only authentication is required for the "give your opinion" functionality, but it is performed through a social login, that doesn't imply additional costs for the DPA, since the user provisioning activities are not executed inside the Compass.
All the resources to develop and maintain the Compass of Transparency has been provided by the DPA itself from its own annual budget and human resources.
The design and implementation phases have been followed by 1 internal human resource, with technical-organizational experience, who has developed the concept idea and defined the technical issues, including the software and system specifications. The DPA has acquired the "all inclusive" service of development of the Compass, from an external software house. The budget for this activity has been around 20.000 €. The system has been developed and activated in a few months from the starting date of the project.
The maintenance phase includes the services needed to guarantee the full functionality of the system, its functional evolutions, and the continuous match with the needs of users. The annual budget for these activities includes the usage of resources internal to the DPA and services committed to an external supplier.
In detail, the governance and management of the "Compass of transparency" needs 2 internal human resources, with technical-organizational experience, for about 100 days/year. They deal with the governance of the project, the relationship with associations and public administrations, the strategies for the dissemination of the project to the whole national territory and with the evolution of the functionalities, aimed at the continuous improvement of transparency within the public sector.
In addition to this, a contract has been activated for the "all inclusive" web hosting service, the software and system management, the development of the new features defined by the DPA and for the operative support both to the P.A. and to citizens. The cost of this contract is about 20.000 € euro per year.
As far as the P.A. website are concerned, the impacts and costs related to the initiative are extremely low, since the Compass looks for contents according to the standardization rules defined by the law, without the need by the P.A. to interact actively in any way with the Compass.
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7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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Efficiency in check and governance of transparency:
The monitoring and verification of the compliance of 66 legal obligations on 20,000 websites is likely to need about 1250 man-days. The automatic system monitors all Italian institutional websites in less than 2 hours, and guarantees the immediate ability to undertake any corrective actions that could be necessary both at the political and organizational level. Without this functionality, it would be necessary to employ 5 human resources for one year, in order to give a result that would be soon already obsolete.
Besides that, the verification of the single website can be done in real time in just 5-6 seconds.
Transparency effectiveness:
Before the Compass of Transparency went online it was not possible to measure the state of transparency in Italy except through unreliable sample surveys.
In 18 months of activity of the compass of transparency the compliance to the disclosure requirements has grown by 50%, and continues to grow.
Access to information:
The standardization of the transparency requirements and their online availability through the Compass without any authentication mechanisms guarantees substantial improvements in the quality of the services provided.
The Compass improves access to information related to the transparency requirements, because the contents are standardized and users know, in a simple way, how to find information on PA websites. Citizens can now access the contents published by administrations in their websites without the need of actually identifying and opening the P.A. website and searching the desired content in it. This saves a lot of time and increases the percentage of successful researches by the users, who can access the service from anywhere and without the need to navigate many pages of the P.A. website. In this way representing an optimal situation for places where digital divide is strong.
Quality of published contents:
The verification of the compass of transparency is carried out in an automatic mode and, as such, it does not rate the quality of the published contents. To this regard the Compass offers citizens the possibility to enter the system through a social login, and express opinions on the quality of the information related to transparency requirements. This ensures a genuine process of participation and collaboration is activated, where the human factor supports the automatic control in order to improve transparency and efficiency of PA, resulting in a reliability increase of the instrument
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8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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The Compass of Transparency is a monitoring and governance tool about transparency in the public administrations. it analyzes the websites of the P.A.s looking for the contents that must be published according to the laws. A report is automatically generated for each administration, that states which contents have been found on the website, in addition to providing direct links to the contents themselves.
The Compass regularly checks more the Italian institutional websites. The results of the automatic scans are stored in a data warehouse and a graphic dashboard is updated regularly with fresh data extracted from it. It is therefore straightforward to monitor progress in the transparency improvement process in all P.A.s, since data is displayed online, free to everybody, in a very understandable format and in open data. So, it is possible to see in a glance what regions of Italy are most advanced as far as transparency themes are concerned and, with a few clicks, it is possible to access the links to the published information directly in the P.A. websites.
Moreover, ranking functionalities are provided and updated regularly, divided by typology of administration. It is possible, this way, to monitor and evaluate easily the level of transparency of administrations belonging to the same kind. The ranking functionalities are a constant stimulus for the administrations to raise their level of transparency through their websites.
Through the dashboard functionalities, it is possible to evaluate the effect of governance activities, such as new rules, guidelines, information campaigns, and so on. Through the Compass it is easy to verify how these actions are reflected in concrete changes in the transparency panorama, both at national and at local level. The key success factor is the real time update of the data the Compass shows to the users: whenever a single new transparency item is published inside each institutional website, this is collected by the Compass engine, thus updating the transparency dashboard.
The monitoring process can be done through different points of view, that can be combined together: geographical (national level, regional level, by single administration) or by theme (category or single transparency contents). Therefore, it is possible for different actors to perform effectively their monitoring activities.
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9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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Challenges and obstacles:
1 ) The standardization of the access to the content relating to transparency requirements in terms of denomination of the sections and subsections , especially considering the high number of public administrations and their heterogeneity (large central government , small municipalities, schools , etc.).
2) the introduction and activation of competition among public administrations that would ensure the process of implementation of the transparency rules of institutional websites
3 )the involvement of citizens and civil society in the monitoring process of transparency in PA in order to be perceived on behalf of PA as a useful tool for supporting and improving performances and services.
Solutions:
1 )We promoted the standardization of syntactic elements subject to publication, with the aim of ensuring a continuous monitoring of the implementation of the rules and simplifying the access to information by citizens, with a positive feedback in terms of increased trust, corruption prevention, social control and accountability.
2 ) Features designed to enable competition among PA (classification and comparison between different administrations) have been introduced in the Compass, in order to optimize and share the opportunities offered by the system. The benefits in terms of improving transparency, with the introduction of these tools, have been significantly higher than those related to the period where the functionalities were absent.
3 )The instrument has been delivered through the major social networks: twitter, facebook, etc. Subsequently many citizens have come spontaneously together into groups and have began to monitor the PA websites. These monitors have also led to a report which was sent to the authorities in charge of deeper institutional control. As a consequence, many public administrations have contacted these groups to get support for improving transparency.
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