Presentation of eParticipation projects of the Emilia-Romagna Region by Sabrina Franceschini at the meeting "Innovation in Governance in the Mediterranean Region", United Nations - Republic of Croatia [Dubrovnik, 23-25/04/2008].

1. The e-participation projects of
the Emilia-Romagna Regional
Government (Italy)
“ Innovation in Governance
in the Mediterranean Region”
Dubrovnik, Croatia
United Nations, Republic of Croatia
23-25/04/2008
Sabrina Franceschini
Emilia-Romagna regional Government
sfranceschini@regione.emilia-romagna.it
www.partecipa.net

2. Introduction
Since 2004 the Emilia-Romagna Regional
Government (Italy) is engaged in e-participation
projects
Partecipa.net was the first e-democracy project, it
aimed to stimulate the citizens participation through
new mechanisms and new information systems
The project tested a permanent connection system
allowing telematic participation of citizens to the
definition of local policies

3. Promotional video
START

4. Budget & Timing
• Partecipa.net was partially funded by Italian
Innovation Ministry
•Required an economical co-participation of each
partner
• Budget: 730.700 euro for 24 months, 300.000 from
the Ministry
• Start date: September 1, 2005
• End date: October 31, 2007

5. Aims of Partecipa.net
•To define and create participation processes in an
integrated manner;
• to promote participation within and outside the
administrations;
• to provide a tool usable by all level of PA;
• to define, test and disseminate the methodology;
> Partecipa.net was designed as a project based on
collaborative learning where all involved partners (PAs,
citizens associations) contribute to increasing the
culture of participation to the political choices, in the
spirit of a true governance.

6. Outputs
• e-democracy portal: www.partecipa.net
• creation of an E-democracy Kit;
• implementation of the kit by the PAs partner of the
project;
• test of the kit through the realisation of participation
processes on Urban planning;
• creation of a committed working community

7. E-democracy portal

8. E-democracy kit: what is it?
• a complete set of tools, as technology and
methodologies are concerned, to activate
participation processes, easy-fitting to all
administrations and policies
• tools are neutral with respect to policies
• extremely re-usable
• open source

9. E-democracy kit
It allows citizens to:
receive information on
selected issues via
different channels
address questions on
specific themes and get
on line personalized
answers from experts
take part to on-line
forums
access on-line
technical documentation
(
(library)
take part to surveys

10. Criticalities and shortcomings
• project timing <> political/administrative timing
• involvements of decision-makers and citizens
• lack of communication => participation needs a lot of
communication!!
• difficult to create a developer and user community to
manage/evolve the tools

11. Since december 2007…
• End of the project activities. Extremely good
feedbacks in the evaluation phase
• New ICT plan of the Emilia-Romagna region
(2007-2009): e-participation included!!! 
• New PAs users of the Kit, new e-democracy
processes from the “old” Partecipa.net partners
• Starts of a new regional project: Io partecipo (I
participate)

12. The Emilia-Romagna E-participation community

13. The aims of Io partecipo
• To made available a permanent system connection
between citizens and administration
• To contrast the growing deficit of trust and citizen
disengagement
• To rethink local democracy processes through the
new opportunities offered by ICTs solutions and web
2.0 framework
•To involve citizens of our region (Emilia-Romagna) to
define policies and services in partnership with the
public administration

14. Coming soon…

15. Thank you very much!
Grazie mille!
Hhvala lijepa!