RISULTATI RICERCA

Despite a long series of initiatives, projects and political statements, an objective measure of the actual impact of investments in eGovernment in the Italian regions, and particularly in the Marche Region, is not easy to carry out and appreciate. This contribution makes a first original effort toward this direction, providing an empirical analysis of the progresses obtained in the process of digitalization of the PA and eGovernment in the Marche Region

Undoubtedly a fast and sustainable transition to the most innovative eServices requires the preliminary availability of a pervasive, reliable and updated digital network infrastructure. Unfortunately, in Italy nor the Market neither the State effectively worked to solve the enduring infrastructural digital divide affecting many less populated areas of the country. Although the awareness of this divide in the public opinion has recently grown, the accumulated retard persists, and reduces the competitiveness of the national economy, now adversely impacted by the structural crisis and the industrial decline. In this work we critically discuss the conventional empirical evidences available on the Marche Region, and we present new and more accurate ones. Contrary to the received wisdom, it emerges that Marche and more generally the NEC area remain among the most disadvantaged areas of the country, also due to the polycentric and diffused characters of their model of socio-economic and urban development. Looking into the near future, we envisage that the passage to the next generation of broadband (NGAN) will accentuate the existing coverage and quality problems of the digital infrastructure while, considering the employable public funds, to date there isn’t any trace of a prospective landmark change in policy-making

Social capital is one of the main determinants of the institutional capacity of local governments which can positively influence the impact of development policies and, ultimately, regional socio-economic performances. In particular, the economic backwardness and many unresolved issues in Southern Italy are often explained by low levels of social engagement. Open government data on projects funded by public money can enable new forms of engagement, like the citizen based monitoring of public policy. Citizen monitoring of development policies in Southern Italy can strengthen existing civic communities and create new ones. Furthermore, citizen monitoring has the potential to directly influence the quality of policy-making by collecting evidence on how projects are progressing. This evidence can be harnessed by local governments to improve the implementation of current policy and/or to plan new actions. The paper will analyze the case of "Monithon", an independent initiative aimed at monitoring EU and national policies for economic cohesion in Italy. Through this initiative, citizens are able to collect evidence on the progress and results of the projects funded by European and national Cohesion Policy in Italy, based on the official data from OpenCoesione, a governmental open data portal developed by the Department for Cohesion and Economic Development (Ministry of Economic Development).

European Cohesion Policy and its Structural Funds, involving all EU Regions and Member States, are a well-suited context to verify the presence of different approaches to the publication of Open Government Data, a crucial tool to foster governmental transparency and accountability. Following the theoretical framework introduced by Dawes (2010), this paper is aimed at exploring how national and regional managing authorities of Structural Funds are making available the data on the use of the funding, in terms of both data stewardship (quality, format, accessibility, detail, etc.) and usefulness (availability of tools to interact with the data). The analysis takes into consideration 15 indicators aggregating 62 characteristics of the data published by each EU 2007-13 Programme in December 2013. Results show that only a fraction of the concerned administrations is investing in advanced tools for data visualization and citizen engagement. These authorities rely on good quality and high detail of the information, thus confirming the interdependence of the stewardship and usefulness principles, as highlighted in the literature

What we can call the first phase of the Open Data is considered ended in our country. Once, speaking of this process, Tim Berners Lee wrote that the path of liberation of the Open Data must start from the top, from the intermediate level and below. And that is what has happened in the last three years in Italy. Now is the time of the second phase: we must imagine and define new targets beyond the principle of transparency’s sake, designed to support the change to a new government in which the citizen, his needs, but also his skills permeate public action. The Open Data Engagement well interprets this need by creating new spaces and tools of collaboration between the various actors.

This work reviews the international state of the art on the design and implementation of digital services based on Open Data - in particular those running over Open Government Data (OGD). Drawing from a large set of OECD countries, the author highlights how OGD can become a driver of pervasive change, spurring innovation and promoting efficiency and effectiveness within Public Administrations. This requires setting the appropriate institutional conditions, reforming the status and the norms of civil servants and activating a various and heterogeneous network of agents (including citizens and other external stakeholders), in a process that should become self-governed and sustainable, because centered on collective learning and feedbacks. Implications for the development of new methodologies of data collection and monitoring are also derived.

This paper focuses on the role of public sector in shaping the competitiveness of national economic systems and proposes an alternative measure of the quality of public administrations based on the availability of public eService. Using the Eiburs-Taips database, which allows a comparative analysis of the diffusion of four typologies of public eService (eGovernment, Intelligent Transport Systems, eHealth, and eProcurement), different patterns of performance are highlighted across PAs at the national and local (city) levels in UE15. The use of novel e-service based indicators confirms that Mediterranean countries, including Italy, lag behind the best performers of Northern Europe. Over and above national differences, the degree of specialisation in service categories largely varies also within countries and across large cities in Europe, suggesting that public policies should be fine tuned in this respect. Italy exhibits a rather weak performance overall, and in the areas of Infomobility and eProcurement in particular, which appear to be the most urgent areas wherein a competitive gap must be filled relative to other UE countries.

In the year of the Centenary, the Great War’s memory backs to find space in public discourse. The movie by Ermanno Olmi, ".. torneranno i prati", supported by a strong institutional endowments, processes that event from the point of view of its main victims. The soldiers forced into the war, without understanding it, by sovereign indifferent Powers. The reconstruction, focused on the existential deprivation of individuals, loses the historical sense of that experience and its deep connection with the age of the absolute sovereignty of States.

Many authors have written history and fiction papers about the story of Philomena Pennacchio, a key figure of the Italian post-unification brigandage. Her story and her character are a case study leading to the discussion about the relationship between history and narrative fiction. In some instances this meeting produced a genre, that I would call «historical feuilleton». In the middle of the following pages there is the comparison between the production of the history books, which tells the story of a young woman and her companion as an opportunity of revisionism of the national unification history, and the philologically accurate novel of a woman writer, Licia Giaquinto. The essay will demonstrate the cognitive force of the fictional novel, dropping the small personal story, worth of a micro-history, in a social and cultural well-defined context. Exactly the opposite of the biography in the form of feuilleton, which is now more popular.