Open Data in Italy?..."Yes, We Can"

A call for strong and courageous policy on public sector information - Minister, let's do it!

Rome: 11 March 2010

Open data and the European PSI re-use Directive are on the agenda in Italy. The Italian press is reporting on these topics and they are under deliberation online.

These deliberations are at time when the Italian government has responded to the European Commission’s infringement procedure for incorrectly transposing the public sector information Directive 2003/98/EC. The European Commission (EC) has announced that the Italian Government has drafted an amendment to the Legislative Decree 24^th January 2006, No. 36 on the re-use of documents in the public sector. If the Italian Parliament passes the amended law then Italy will have transposed the re-use of public sector information Directive 2003/98/EC correctly.

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What is being reported by the Italian press?

A news item in the Il Sole 24 ORE on the 11^th March 2010 calls for strong an courageous public sector information policy.

The news story by Juan Carlos De Martin entitled, “Tesori pubblici” (“Public Treasury”) comments (approximate English translation) (Italian text online):

“The multiple articulations of public administration by now they all have something in common, namely, the production of prodigious amounts of information in digital format. Sometimes this information is the primary result of the administration: and we think of map data, land registry, the weather information, or to images of public broadcasting. In other cases, however, the data are produced by the administration in carrying out institutional objectives, but they are half compared to the output main product or service. This might be the case, for instance, the database of average travel times of public transport in a big city or a geographical map of the postcodes. Such data - explicit and visible in the first instance and largely invisible to the public in the second - are together referred to as "public sector information (PSI).

It is significant that in Italy, these words begin to be widely used only recently. Until recently, in fact, the awareness that the government can be considered more and more as entities that acquire, produce and communicate information was minimal. Without such awareness, it's almost normal that data are normally produced and used as needed, depending upon the particular circumstances, but without uniform guidelines, regardless of uses and re-use other than for which they are originally produced without an overall or long term vision.

This means a small, highly fragmented and variable access and re-use. The data may be available (at times) or not (more often). The data might be available, but only to certain entities. Their very existence could be known, thanks to dedicated registers (but this is almost never the case), or instead it is known to the public or any other government or even other offices of that administration. It might be available at market price or the marginal cost of reproduction of the media or free. The data could be preserved for years by the entity that produced it or discarded immediately after use. The data might also be of consistent high quality or not. Also, it could be made available with open and well documented formats, or formats that constrain the use of certain software or equipment. Can be used for any use or not. And so on.

The price we pay for this lack of strategy and initiatives relating to public sector information are enormous and will grow further, if Italy does not immediately become more active. Other countries, in fact, have understood for some time that public information is an important factor in economic and social growth, as evidenced also by a specific European Directive (2003/98/EC) in force since 2003. PSI (Public Sector Information) should be inexpensive because it is possible to promote entrepreneurship, from the simple application for smartphones that gives the arrival times of public transport services to complex logistics, environmental, or more.

Society because civil society with the PSI can be more effectively monitor the government and politics (see, for example, www.wheredoesmymoneygo.org) and replace it, if only temporarily, while it was deficient or insufficiently agile or fast (www.seeclickfix.com). On this basis it is understandable why the Obama administration in the U.S., with one of his first acts, ordered the creation of the integrated portal www.data.gov and because recently the British government followed suit, on the advice of Tim Berners-Lee, giving rise to the site www.data.gov.uk.

The motto of both initiatives Anglo would be, "Raw data immediately for free." Crude and immediately expire and because the data because the engineers know how to handle them even if not finished and certified. Free because we must resist the temptation, strong in times of budgetary restraint, to induce the PA to pay its data: it is a fact now proven fact that the modest income for a single PA would be obtained at the expense of revenue of general taxation would be much larger if the data that were available online for free. According to some studies, for example, meteorological data, the economic impact caused by releasing the information freely online (in USA) are three to ten times higher than that generated by selling data to market prices (as often happens in Europe).

Italy has a great need to activate factors of economic growth and social development. The definition of a strong and courageous policy on public sector information, and perhaps of all, government action to ever use the most cost-effective, and one that, among all, should show the broadest consensus among all social partners. Minister, let's do it!”

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What is being said in blogs and online forums? “Open Data in Italy?...Yes, We Can”

In an online forum, FourmPA, under the title: La via italiana all'open data. Tra CAD, trasparenza e privacy (The Way to Italian Open Data. Between transparency and privacy), there is an informative discussion and video discussing open data Italian law, privacy and transparency. The topic is an intereview with Ernesto Belisario, a lawyer and expert in new technologies, on open data and Italian law.

In an excerpt from this fourm topic interview, the following action is recommended about where to start with open data.

“We must act on a triple line of action:

• must rethink the transparency (the Italian law has become antiquated, having been conceived before the advent of information technology)
• we need to rethink privacy, recognizing that it is a concept in constant evolution and change the rules accordingly
• we urgently need to modify the CAD in this light, making it even more stringent standards in terms of availability, accessibility and usability of public data (Article 50 et seq) involve an even more significant one of the formats and open standards, with the balance the future changes in transparency and privacy.”

Ernesto Belisario, discusses the interview on his blog under a topic entitled, “Open Data in Italy?...Yes, We Can” and comments in this excerpt (approximate English translation) (Italian text online):

"For some time now, it is viewed with admiration (and a bit 'of envy) the fact that this open government model has already been applied (not just the U.S. but also UK, Finland and New Zealand); undoubted benefits that the entire country-system would have in terms of transparency, effectiveness of administrative cost savings and boost the economy-business (just yesterday Gigi Cogo has also written a nice post).

I tried to identify some of the barriers that separate Italy from the American model in the transition from Closed to Open Government Administration, which can be divided into two types: organisational and regulatory issues.

Organisation for the government, except for rare and honorable exceptions, have no awareness of their information assets, and above all else, should engage in a proper census and digitization of the existing (I have my say in more detail here). Secondly, the existing rules on transparency, privacy and digitization do not seem adequate to support this effort, as I said in deepening published FORUMPA. However, the road - winding and bumpy - it can be walked along a double line of action: virtuous individual Departments may already now start to publish their information assets (on-line and free-form), the State and the Regions must modify the existing rules in order to facilitate their task and, more generally, require all agencies-government model (using, for example, the Decree amending the Digital Administration Code, which will be issued in the next weeks)."

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