Open Data, Italy has awoken

The original post was published in italian here  and translated in english for OKF (Open Knowledge Foundation) Blog

The week before last was probably the most important week yet for open government and open data in Italy. It started with the public announcement of the launch of both dati.gov.it and AppsForItaly, the Italian open data competition. A few days later, during the Italian Statistics Day celebrations, institutional and civil society actors who made this announcement got together at the first official institutional event on Open Data. And those attending the Open Government Data Camp 2011 in Warsaw, told the world.

Meanwhile, the Ministry for Public Administration and Innovation announced the Italian strategy on Open Government: Government 2.0, G-Cloud and, above all, Open Data . Obviously making an announcement is just the first step. It is necessary to continue working to reach our goals. However, the portal dati.gov.it. is now up and running. The idea is to turn it quickly into the open data national catalogue for Italian public sector.

And to push the public sector to publish their data – as well as citizens, software developers and the market to use it – the Ministry decided to support AppsForItaly, the Italian Open Data competition.

Apps4Italy is a competition open to European citizens, associations, communities of developers and companies to design solutions based on the use of interesting and useful public data, capable of showing the whole of society the value of information public assets.

Of course, nothing comes suddenly. For more than a year, most initiatives related to open data and open government were in fact carried out by independent civil society, associations, movements, foundations, and also local authorities and private companies who believe in the power of open data for transparency, democracy, and development. It’s interesting how such initiatives that come “from the bottom” can bring together the interest and support of the institutional world. Open Data is incredibly bringing institutions and public authorities to sit around a table with associations, committees, and representatives of civil society movements.

And this is what happened last October 20th at ISTAT, the National Institute of Statistics. The Workshop Open Official Statistical Data, was planned as part of the Italian Statistics Day celebrations and was the first “institutional” date after the launch of the government strategy on open government. There was talk of the Italian perspective on Open Data and Open Government, but also of the centrality of open data for the action and strategy of the European Commission, and about how the well-established Istat’s and the whole National Statistical System’s “culture of data” can and should be a key element in all initiatives related to the Open Data. Then the Region Piemonte and the municipality of Udine, directely involved in local open data initiatives, talked about their own experiences. And there was talk of the Italian initiative dati.gov.it and appsforitaly with movements, associations, foundations that made all this possible “from the bottom”.

Enrico Giovannini, president of Istat, touched on many subjects in his conclusions, worthy of mention in a separate post. In particular, he stressed what the Institute is doing to provide civil society, the Web, and the market with high quality data at an ever-higher level of detail.

Finally, in the same week the beta version of Wikitalia was also launched, a project that “puts on the Web a number of tools for policy transparency, re-use of public data and the participation of citizens.” It is a platform that primarily focuses on “the mayors and their administrations in order to decide their own philosophy and tools of the Open Government”. They have already joined the project the towns of Florence, Turin and Matera, while others will join soon.

Something is finally happening in Italy. And it is something important.