| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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Open data and transparency on investment in public infrastructure are the main features of "Opencantieri", a platform that allows citizens an increasingly widespread and accurate visibility of such an important aspect of the country's development policies. Compared to the past, a greater number of information and new data on public works in Italy are recorded and publicized on "Opencantieri" platform.
Everyone has the opportunity to know the amount of the work financed, its effective cost and, eventually, the delay from the planned date of conclusion of the work. For the first time in Italy all this information has been published in open format on the Ministry's website dedicated to OpenData (http://dati.mit.gov.it), promoting and encouraging the re-use of data.
“Opencantieri” is an important and substantial basket of dataset related to infrastructure and transport. The enabling platform, based on open source systems, allows to explore the data catalogues, to perform graphics, to display on the map geo-referenced information. It is possible to find information about traffic accidents, data on Italian port infrastructures and on public spending on transport. Furthermore, the same data used by "Opencantieri" are reported.
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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 Project foresaw a steering committee coordinated by the General Direction for IT and Statistical Systems of the Ministry itself, with the involvement of the entire plurality of the institutional parts.
The Committee organized its activity also delegating tasks and specific functions to workgroups. The Committee and the workgroups put on the lead, verification and evaluation of the Project, activated themselves to grant a stable support to the different levels in order to coordinate the activities within the competence of the subjects involved to achieve the Project purposes.
“Opencantieri” is born from the will to further empower the service to citizens. Citizens are enabled to monitoring in a simple way, through dashboards and geo-localized information, the progress in works related to streets, railways, subways, harbors and airports, accessing to various indicators and economical parameters. Citizens are considered as subjects cooperating for the same purpose and involved to produce, verify and participate through shared data. Possible errors in data are immediately visible and quickly managed. Data producers are consequently more responsible for verifying data correctness and in realigning them in case of errors. Data achieves an absolute importance, becoming “infrastructure” at the same level of servers and communication nets.
The Project is an empowerment, in terms of informative potential and public works monitoring, being at service of both national and regional Institutions and citizens. Therefore, it assumes a distinctly national level and, at the same time, it is visible and usable at international level. In purely numeric terms, at a national level a potential pool of platform users and beneficiaries of about 48 million people over the age of 20 can be supposed.
The fact that the Ministry is responsible for the management of the Project coupled with the expected involvement of the Regions furtherly increases the potential pool of users. In fact, the Ministry intends to develop a model of data transmission, control, fruition and spreading that prove to be responsive to the needs of all Regions, both those not owing autonomous informative systems and those owing.
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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“Opencantieri” was born in order to give an overall vision on public works, enabling citizens to understand infrastructures, as well as to inform them about the whole process. The challenges faced by “Opencantieri” were several, starting from preliminary issues. The first one was related to the lexicon, in order to operate in a consistent way on information coming from different worlds. A meta-glossary was developed as a bridge between the different languages.
The second analysis referred to spotting the different data-providers and to activate synergy mechanisms aiming at applicative cooperation i.e., the ability of a computer system to rely on the automatic interchange of information with different systems. This can be achieved by data-exchange services, following common rules agreed by the different institution. This is at the very basis of any further operation of transparency and accountability. “Opencantieri” is for sure an example of such cooperation.
From a chronological point of view, on February 2015 took place the first experimental phase seeing a constant implementation of the surveyed works, towards november 2015 when the “Opencantieri” platform was formalized in Turin from the former President of the Council of Ministries Matteo Renzi during the Italian Digital Day.
The downloaded raw data allowed a detailed analysis to the expert user, although not allowing an immediate answer to the questions posed by unexperienced citizens. This is the reason why “Opencantieri” selects a set of particularly representative parameters, state variables synthetizing a work in terms of costs, progress, manners of performing. Such variables form the indicators that, in synthesis, can answer to users’ questions.
From a structural point of view, two types of public works were identified: the first one refers to the 32 “main” interventions “foreseen” by the Infrastructures Annex to DEF 2015. The answers are represented on two “dashboards”. The first dashboard, the “indicators” one, bears six “tools” able to offer a glance in a scalar manner, on different levels of aggregation: “all works”, “by sector”, “by single work”. The second dashboard, is dedicated to the “timeline”, showing overlying bars to understand the “temporal position” of the intervention compared to its administrative and technical course.
The second types of interventions is related to those comprised in the program contracts stipulated with ANAS and RFI beside harbor and airport works. In an interactive manner, on a geographical map, it is possible to visualize the interventions and to understand their nature and path status, in addition to the foreseen amounts and to the answers to the usual simple questions posed by the community that are at the very basis of transparency.
The Ministry of Infrastructures and Transports sustained, with funds coming from his own budget chapters, a cost of € 48.000,00 VAT included for external collaborations only related to the first phase of development and commissioning of the Project. Further € 300.000,00 / year must be added to these expenditures for implementation of activities and platform maintenance, all comprised in an agreement with the public company Formez PA.
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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The motley team that brought the Project on, allowing its realization, is composed by different public and private Institutions. “Opencantieri” and the related “dati.mit.gov.it” platform hosting the datasets in open format, were realized by the Italian Ministry of Infrastructures and Transports, through a cooperation agreement with Formez PA, Department for the Planning and the Coordination of the Economic Policy (DIPE) of the Presidency of the Council of Ministers, Politecnico di Milano Foundation, Sciamlab S.r.l. in addition to the contribution of the Ministry of Economy and Finances. “Opencantieri” is based on data gathered in the PIS information system, realized by the temporary consortium of companies made up of Capgemini Italia and Ernst & Young Financial Business Advisors. The implementing bodies are ANAS, RFI, Consorzio Venezia Nuova, plus other Institutions and special purpose entities.
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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1) Greater capillarity of the mapped works, inclusive of a greater number of information supplied for each of them.
2) Increased civic participation and also greater citizens' trust in the work of public administration.
3) Release of data in open format, resulting incentive to re-use by the community and increase in the share level and active involvement of citizens, sectoral associations, economic entities.
4) Greater transparency, citizens participation in and awareness of Public Administration's activity, involving the community not only in monitoring the status of progress of large-scale building sites.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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When the "Opencantieri" team began to analyze the various databases, valuable for the project, has discovered a veritable semantic babel: names, categories, sets do not match. All this multiplied by hundreds of concepts and classifications. Before the technological effort there was conceptual effort. The biggest challenge was to create a uniform database. It has required an intense and important work to harmonize and to aggregate information since they were often allocated to different databases and grouped in a different way with heterogeneous nomenclatures. The "Opencantieri" team had to develop a homogeneous set of indicators in order to make various works comparable and to enable to respond to simple questions, which are of greatest interest to citizens: "How much time is late that construction site? How much have increased the cost? It is added, to these actions, the commitment to standardize different glossaries on one open platform, the one of "Opencantieri”. In fact, “Opencantieri” is a projectuality container of different public entities, terms and expressions relating to procurement, often not homogeneous. The enormous job of adjustment has allowed an easy definition of all the terms used for the correct understanding of the same, regardless of the reference subject and origin. This knowledge system is public, open, available and reusable. As in a "bank of the language", whoever need to build, to manage or to widen his/her own glossary can choose, among the available concepts, those that better meet their needs and integrate them into his/her lexicon. It is also possible to establish further ex novo concepts that continue to exist as collective heritage, which are is ready to be navigated, reused by other users.
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