Outline

Citizens Participation to Improve Open Data Portal Productivity and Efficiency

Management summary

Challenge

The lack of transparency on how public money is spent and the lack of control over the projects status are two of the main reasons for the slow pace in implementing public projects, frequently causing inefficiencies of all kinds (e.g., time and cost inefficiencies). Moreover citizens are frequently not involved and are not aware about projects that are taking place in the area where they live.

Solution

Open data about projects’ financings in conjunction with a platform that enables projects’ on-site monitoring (and sharing of the results) can help solve the problems mentioned above.

Best Practice identification

Why is this a Best Practice?

• Exposing open data about public projects financing and offering to the citizens a collaborative platform for controlling those projects, helps to eliminate some inefficiency in public spending and helps citizen to be actively involved in public projects.
• The platform for monitoring public projects is a method and a model whereby citizen monitoring may be initiated and a tool for civic partners to: press forward, report on malpractice, but also collaborate in making all these projects work, in accelerating their completion and understanding whether they actually respond to local demand.
• This approach fosters a civic use of open data, so that citizens can feel a closer connection with the ways in which public money is being employed and ultimately with public policies and decisions.

Links to the PSI Directive

• Open Data platform(s)
• Publication and deployment of information
• Data and metadata

Why is there a need for this Best Practice?

• It fosters participation of the citizens and efficiency of the public sector bodies.
• Making the citizens and the policy makers aware about a problem is the first step for solving it and improving the efficiency of public expenditures

What do you need for this Best Practice?

A few things are needed for this to happen:

• Good quality open data (that in the case explained in the paper4 are published on OpenCoesione), they must be at least:
• Understandable (through use of good metadata)
• Machine processable
• Complete
• Up to Date
• A portal, like Monithon (that is an independently developed initiative), that permits active involvement of communities and furnishes a shared methodology for checking the actual state of the projects described by the open data on the portal described above.

Applicability to other Member States

The approach is applicable to any Member State.

Contact info

Luigi Reggi luigi.reggi@gmail.com Lorenzo Canova lorenzo.canova@polito.it