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