In my last blog post I described Wikitalia as an association inspired by Code For America and MySociety. We are working to develop Wikitalia in several ways. Currently, we’re focused on building capacity in local public administrations to adopt open data and open government practices.

It’s not so simple, but we are trying to find a sustainable business model to survive. It’s one of our goals for this year, and it isn’t the only one. We are working to simplify the association and to focus more on projects and less on process. We Italians love bureaucracy, don’t we?

I’ve heard that “less is more” and I believe it’s a truth that we often forget. As you can see from our projects, several of them are connected directly to the idea of a “wiki-town” or something similar.
The idea belongs to Alberto Cottica, who wrote a book titled “Wikicrazia“. Based on this idea, we are developing a model to manage how Wikitalia itself works in every single city, in a more scalable way. We use direct experiences as sources for the model. After our work with the municipality of Florence in 2012, we are now focused on Matera.

Open Matera: Supporting Open Data projects at the municipal level

One of the projects I’m working on now is Open Matera: if you don’t know Matera, it is a beautiful town in the south of Italy. If you have ever seen “The Passion of the Christ“, directed by Mel Gibson, it was filmed on location in Matera (here is an article with more information about the town).

Matera wanted to do some projects related to Open Data and Open Government, as I have written on Wikitalia’s blog some days ago. For instance, there is an informal association, called “Matera2019“, that is helping the city to submit its candidacy for European Capital of Culture 2019.
After a first discussion published on SOD (Spaghetti Open Data mailing list), we organized two events in February 2013. One of them was a public event, where several experts talked about Open Government ideas and related projects. It took place on a Sunday evening, a very cold one, but the room was full to bursting with people interested on the subject.

The next day, we had an official meeting with the Mayor of the town and some town councilors, who expressed a shared desire to make Matera Open Data a reality. After some months, we had reached a formal agreement between the Matera municipal government and Wikitalia. The agreement has two main goals:

  1. Wikitalia pays for a two-day course on Open Data and Open Government management to build capacity in the community and the local public administration.The objective is to enhance local organizations’ abilities to perform Open Government activities independently. In that way, they will be better able to understand the concepts and context of Open Data and Open Government management. Compared with official Open Data Institute courses, like “Open Data in practice“, our course is smaller and more informal. We want to make people passionate about their own role in a Open Gov context, and about how they can change their perspective on politics and on public policies. This is especially important now that in Italy we perceive the State as an institution far removed from daily life.
  2. Wikitalia makes a direct effort to help the municipality develop and maintain an Open Data portal, designed with an Open Data engagement approach. During August and September 2013, an informal attempt to set up a local instance of CKAN as a test became an open bottom-up shared process experiment. In other words, Francesco Piero Paolicelli, a local developer who is helping the Matera2019 association, had published successfully the official Matera Open Data website. It’s a community-driven effort, supported by the municipality.

Read more on the full article published on epsiplatform.eu.