The document discusses open government initiatives in Italy. It describes the formation of an Italian Association for Open Government to increase awareness and promote open government strategies. Current Italian regulations focus on digital administration, interoperability, and reuse, but have limited effectiveness due to lack of enforcement. Lessons learned are that specific sanctions, training, and following models like Consip are needed to increase compliance with standards and open government principles. The document provides recommendations for public administrations to consider open standards, data persistency, transparency and more when procuring software.

1. Interoperability and standards: making it happen
From theory to practice?
From theary to practice?
“my“
Italian experience
Flavia Marzano
flavia (dot) marzano (at) gmail (dot) com
http://www.allamoda.eu/made-in-italy-e-le-sue-grandi-%E2%80%9Copere%E2%80%9D/
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2. Italian Association
for Open Government
From theary to practice?
• The initiative (http://www.datagov.it/) for the association
was taken by a group of law experts, technologists, public
and private managers, university professors, exponents of
NGOs,...
• The aim of the association is
mainly to increase the
awareness of citizens,
enterprises and PAs on
Open Government issues
and to promote the
implementation of open
government strategies in
Italy.
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3. Open Government?
From theary to practice?
“My Administration is committed to
creating an unprecedented level of
openness in Government. We will work
togheter to ensure the public trust and
establish a system of transparency,
public participation, and collaboration.
Openness will strengthen our
democracy and promote efficienct and
effectiveness in Government.”
(President Obama 21/01/09)
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4. Open Gov Manifesto: why?
Notwithstanding some indifference on the Administration’s
From theary to practice?
side, a movement for open government is present also in Italy
where several new grassroots initiatives are now growing.
The attainable goals are:
• active participation
• 2.0 government
• growth of transparency
• information as an infrastructure
• knowledge sharing
• collective intelligence (crowd wisdom)
• trust and confidence (in PA)
• permanent innovation
• extended network services
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5. Regulations on Gov
procurement
From theary to practice?
Present Italian regulations (since 1993) concern: Digital
Administration, Interoperability, Reuse, Accessibility.
Each norm defines some standards!
Italian norms:
• D.LGS. 39/1993
• L. 59/1997
• DPR 513/1997
• DPR 445/2000
• CAD (Code of Digital Administration) D.LGS. 82/2005
• New CAD D. LGS. 235/2010
…
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6. Main sections of the new CAD
From theary to practice?
• Rights of citizens and enterprises
• Organization of Public Administrations
• Digital documents
• Electronic Signatures
• Electronic document transmission
• Public Administration Data
• Data availability
• Network services
• Development, acquisition and reuse of ICT systems in PA
• Public Connectivity System
• International network of PA
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7. Key issues in CAD
• Comparative technical and economic evaluation of ICT
From theary to practice?
solutions must be performed verifying:
• Opportunity and convenience of ad hoc solutions
• Possibility of reuse included in the acquisition contracts
• Opportunity and convenience of acquisition of software under a
proprietary licence
• Opportunity and convenience of acquisition of software under an
open source licence
• PAs must inform the public agency DigitPA about the solutions
adopted in order to make easy reuse possible for other PAs
• The solutions adopted by PAs must in principle be modular and
must admit the possibility of representing data and documents
also in open formats
• PAs owning customized software must be able to give it for
free to any other PA, giving also the documentation and the
source code in order to allow a customized reuse
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8. Effects of regulations 1
• One of the most relevant experiences related to
From theary to practice?
public procurement regulations involves CONSIP
(http://www.consip.it)
• Consip, public stock company owned by
Italy’s Ministry of the Economy and Finance
(MEF), operates on behalf of the State, within
the framework of the strategic guidelines and
tasks given by its sole shareholder.
• It analyses the demand and supply markets,
develops purchasing initiatives according to PA
requirements and provides purchasing know-
how and consultancy services to meet
specific requirements
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9. Effects of regulations 2
• Regulations are in principle tight but not really compulsory (no
From theary to practice?
sanctions are provided by the norms). As a consequence
standards are not always respected specially those
concerning accessibility, usability, transparency,
completeness of information.
• A limited effect of present regulations is also due to the lack
of specific competences by administrators. As a
consequence many activities are performed within old
schemes, paying more attention to avoid possible sanctions
than to improve services.
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10. Standards?
We need:
From theary to practice?
 maintenance and persistency of
information
 Interoperability
 Neutrality
 Suppliers indipendency
 Investment protection
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11. Constraints and Common rules
Public Administrations buying software have
From theary to practice?
to ensure the respect of many different
constraints at least from the legal, technical
and economical points of view.
Nevertheless PAs can not forget that they are
spending public money for public interest,
so they also have to ensure the respect of
some “common” rules…
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12. Lessons learnt and
Recommendations 1
From theary to practice?
The evidence coming from almost 20 years of public
procurement based also on the new technologies shows
that in Italy:
• It is necessary to provide a system of specific sanctions
in order to increase compliance with regulations
• It is essential to organize dissemination and training (both
of PA technicians and of politicians) in order to increase
awareness and specific competences
• The Consip model, albeit quite centralistic, appears to be
reasonably good and it may probably ensure a more
systematic compliance with standards
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13. Lessons learnt and
Recommendations 2
From theary to practice?
On the technical side it is important to stress the advantages
of openness in order to make standards-based public
procurement practically feasible.
In particular PAs in procurement should be aware of the
need of:
• open standards • neutrality
• open data • business continuity
• open formats • data persistency
• open access • accessibility
• open g-cloud • Transparency
• interoperability • scalability
• software reusability • …
• absence of lock-in
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14. To do list for PAs 1
From theary to practice?
PAs in buying software must ensure:
• pluralism, competition and security
• Integration with the software already in use
• The “continuity of data
• Interoperability and cooperation
• Availability of source code ate least for inspection and
traceability (even in case of proprietary code)
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15. To do list for PAs 2
From theary to practice?
PAs in buying software must:
• Be proprietary of the “structure of data”
• Be proprietary if software custom
• Get better price/performance solutions and maintenance
• Verify the TCO
• Buy software based on Open standards
• Be sure to be able to change supplier
• Be sure that the software acquired will not have any
backdoors
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16. To do list for PAs 3
From theary to practice?
In giving information Pas must grant to citizens:
• Transparency
• Privacy
• Accessibility (both in the sense of availability of documents
and in the sense of accessiblity for disables)
• Possibility to read public documents without having to buy
any software (nor license)
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17. What do we still miss?
1. Open access
From theary to practice?
2. Trust
3. Innovation
4. Awareness
5. Political commitment
We need to move
from transparency
to openness!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/xamad/299972023/
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18. Thank you
From theary to practice?
for your attention
flavia (dot) marzano (at) gmail (dot)com
This work, in its original parts, is licensed under the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Italy License.
To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/it/
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