The Italian project e21

1
The Italian project e21

• Fiorella De Cindio
• Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione,
  Università degli Studi di Milano
• fiorella.decindio_at_unimi.it
• Fabrizio Ruggeri
• Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di
  Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche
• fabrizio_at_mi.imati.cnr.it
• Mario Sartori
• Pafin 91
• m.sartori_at_progesam.it

2
Outline of the talk

• History of the project
• Agenda 21
• e21 group and goals
• ICT solutions
• Where am I?
• Future

3
(Short) history

• Call for selecting projects to promote digital
  citizenship (e-democracy), promoted by the
  Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technology in
  2003
• 10 municipalities in Lombardia region, region
  government, universities, research institutes,
  city networks and private companies involved (or
  to be involved) in local Agenda 21
• 130 proposals, 58 approved (e21 was 1)
• To start in summer/fall 2005, for 2 years

4
Goals

• Improve, through a suite of ICT (and DA) tools,
  the participation methodology for carrying on
  local Agenda 21 projects
• Coordinate projects at regional level
• Study of the use of existing e-democracy and
  e-participation tools in (local) governance, and
  implementing few new ones
• Which technologies are useful in which phases of
  local governance, and under which conditions?

5
Agenda 21

• Agenda 21 programme subscribed by 178 nations at
  the UN Summit on Environment and Development held
  in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to promote projects for
  sustainable local development
• Aalborg Charter (of European Cities and Towns
  towards Sustainability) signed in 1994 ? since
  then, hundreds of municipalities involved in
  local Agenda 21 processes
• Aalborg Commitments from the conference Aalborg
  10 in 2004, approved by 100 European
  administrations

6
Agenda 21 in Italy and Lombardia

• 1300 Agenda 21 projects (end of 2003) in Italy
  about sustainable development
• - waste, water, mobility (60-70)
• - energy, territory planning, air quality
  (40-50)
• Most of them in Lombardia (and Emilia Romagna)
  20.5
• 1,000,000 citizens and 150 municipalities
  (including the major ones) involved in Agenda 21
  in Lombardia
• 650,000 inhabitants in the 10 municipalities
  involved in e21

7
Steps in Local Agenda 21

• Guidelines for various phases of the
  participation process
• Drawing the state of the territory
• Identifying the most critical situations (e.g.
  traffic, pollution, waste)
• Envisaging sustainable solutions for solving
  these critical situations in a participatory way
• Choosing, again in a participatory way, which one
  of the envisaged projects can be implemented
  (evaluating priorities and available resources)
• Monitoring the implementation of the selected
  projects and their effects

8
Agenda 21 (the good side)

• Citizens involved from the beginning when
  preparing the Report on the state of the
  environment (RSA)
• Debates in forums are great opportunities to
  participate, be informed and take
  responsibilities
• Projects synthesised in action plans involve
  three components local administrations,
  citizens, economical agents
• Projects could be realised involving the
  interested components
• Constant communication and information to the
  public, through all the process

9
Agenda 21 (the bad side)

• Involve (and keep involved ) all the
  stakeholders
• Actual availability of information to keep the
  participative process running
• Participation of outside (w.r.t. territory)
  actors with a decisional role
• Difficulty in knowing fairly well the viewpoint
  of the population and keeping people in touch
  with the Forum
• Relation between discussions at A21 working
  tables and forums and the decisional power of the
  city governments

10
Municipalities in e21

• 10 cities (5 out of 12 province capitals), all
  subscribers of the Aalborg charter
• Divided in 4 categories
• - starting Agenda 21
• - already operating Agenda 21
• - interested in realising, through
  participative methodology, proposals out of
  Agenda 21
• - interested in applying their current Agenda
  21 approach to other situations (participated
  budget, School Agenda 21, )

11
e21 Analysis of current projects

• Study of current projects to
• - evaluate their status (RSA, forum,
  realisation, etc.)
• - know level of participation
• - know needs (mainly ICT)
• Meeting with A21 local managers and some
  stakeholders

12
e21 Analysis of current projects

• Mantova (e21 project coordinator)
• Fall 2001 contacted 230 stakeholders
  (associations) and 110 agreed to be part of an
  Agenda 21 Forum
• December 2001 first draft of RSA
• From 11/2001 to 11/2002 monthly meetings of the
  Forum to prepare an Action Plan for
  Sustainability, with 4 subgroups
• - traffic and mobility
• - nature, tourism, art and culture
• - production and health and environment
  protection
• - safe and accessible city and solidarity

13
e21 Analysis of current projects

• Action Plan contains 106 actions, along with
  their priorities, to be realised by 2010
• Action Plan approved in 2/2003 and subdivided in
• - structural actions
• - pilot actions
• - good practice and actions by the Children
  City Council
• in three macro areas
• - mobility and infrastructure
• - socioeconomic
• - environment

14
e21 Analysis of current ICT and e-participation
tools

• Analysis of ICT technologies used in the cities
  for participation, communications and decisions,
  with the goal of studying a common, central
  platform, accessible by everyone
• Meeting with ICT managers (cities, URP and city
  networks) and local e21 facilitators

15
e21 the role of municipalities

• Start the process and A21 Forum, working tables,
  etc.
• Provide structures to let Forum working
• Provide data, information to define RSA and its
  indicators (e.g. economy status), plans, etc.
• Promote communications, citizens participation
• Prepare plan, approve decisions and apply them

16
e21 ICT applications

• Development (at central level) of a web based set
  of ICT tools for various stages of A21 processes
  (diagnosis, debates, proposals, decisions,
  realisation, monitoring and evaluation), using
• - open source tools
• - portable tools and programming languages
  (e.g. Java, PHP) to be used both in Windows and
  UNIX/Linux
• - web interfaces according to international
  standard
• with accessibility to be verified
• - in accordance to national and international
  norms
• - by groups of disable people, with high
  skills in computer science

17
e21 ICT applications

• Framework aggregating
• Infrastructural components
• - authentication and authoring system (LDAP
  protocols)
• - CMS (Content management system) (modules,
  XML)
• - forums, mailing list and (group) newsletters
  management
• - monitoring service (including auto
  evaluation)
• Service components
• - certified consultation system
• - decision support systems
• - users cooperation system
• - integration and exchange of data and
  archives with other systems

18
e21 ICT applications

• Interactions
• Coordinating web site (ad personam)
• ASP (Application Service Provider) platform in a
  project server or
• Web based services (using SOAP XML RPC)

19
e21 Training

• Local e21 promoters courses (at central level)
  on community management, participative processes,
  Agenda 21
• Municipalities officers courses (at local level)
  about use of e-participation techniques, as
  required by their own municipality, through
  workshops, focus groups, e-learning

20
e21 communications

• Information at many stages on
• Nature and goals of the process in progress
• Current problems and involved actors
• Tools for on line and off line participation
• Rules for the participation

21
e21Local steps

• Communication and information continuous
  attention, with actions depending on the stage of
  the project
• Integration of e21 tools in existing Agenda 21
  processes
• In situ application of ICT tools
• Local experiments
• Auto evaluation (LASALA methodology)

22
e21 Where am I?

• In formulating and modelling problems (as a
  statistician)
• In the development of decision support systems
• In the deliberative phase to combine a method
  about managing online meeting to get more closer
  to a decision (e-Liberate by Schuler, 2005) with
  e-negotiation methods developed within TED by
  URJC (Madrid)
• (I am the only statistician/decision analyst in
  the group)

23
More news on e21 and TED?

• TED news newsletter published every three months
  (next issue in June) on TED and Ted related
  activities (announcement of workshop, call for
  papers and for visits, visits and conference
  reports, etc.) To get your copy, write to
  fabrizio_at_mi.imati.cnr.it
• TED final conference most likely in Mantova in
  fall 2006
• Aranjuez summer school (david.rios_at_urjc.es)