Simple Rome is the name that the Mayor gave to my Department and I liked it because it looked a lot like the concept of the XVI Municipality that we have already talked about here.
At the first conference I went to as Councilor, the moderator, after introducing me, said: “Simple Rome, doesn’t it seem like an oxymoron?”. In reality it is a goal, very ambitious I am aware of it, but it is a goal, this was my answer and to achieve this goal I worked for the 38 months in which I was Councilor.
The Rome Simple Department was born in 2016 with the aim and commitment of starting the digital transformation process of Roma Capitale. The proxies with which I started my work as Councilor were among others: Open Government, Smart City, Digital Agenda, Modernization of the city, Simplification of Citizen – PA relations, Strategies and coordination of the Roma Capitale site, Digital Skills, Equal Opportunities and gender policies, Enhancement of the statistical function, promotion of the collection, processing, dissemination, archiving and analysis of statistical data and at the beginning also Registry and marital status, Demographic and Electoral Services.
A week after my appointment, Chiara Buongiovanni interviewed me about my goals and reminded me that I have been on the net for years as a Co.Co.Co. (I collaborate to share knowledge) and there I added two more Co .: Happy for the opportunity that I was given to do in first person what I have been asking politics to do for years and Aware of the great complexity of the work to be done! And when Chiara asked me where I would start from, I said that I would do an assessment so as not to lose the good things done by the previous administrations: in short, dwarfs on the shoulders of giants.
Six months before becoming Councilor (and even before knowing that I would become one) I gave my definition of POLITICS, I love acronyms and acrostics and I defined it like this:
• People: I am a citizen but I want to be a person first and therefore I want policies that work for people
• Options: I want to be able to choose who will govern me (locally and in the center), I want an electoral law (national and regional) that restores preferences
• Secular: I want a secular government, which respects all religions but which operates secularly and chooses the best solutions for citizens and for the country without fundamentalism and “beliefs”
• Inclusion: I want to live in a smart country, in a smart territory, in smart cities that are inclusive and that have administrators able to listen and collect the proposals of the people who live there
• Transparency and Information: I want to live in a country where information is honest and transparent. I want a FOIA (Freedom Of Information Act) also in Italy (at that time there was not yet the legislation that we arrived at thanks to the work and battles of many non-governmental associations, including the General States of Innovation).
• Construction: I want to hear “nice idea and …” a proposal to improve the idea and I no longer want to hear “nice idea, but …” and a thousand destructive criticisms (subsequently I defined 2 hashtags: #YesButter vs #WhyNotter).
• Openness: I want a policy that is open to listening, I want an open and transparent administration.
After my Roman experience the acronym could change like this:
• People and Participation
• Openness
• Secularism, Freedom, Legality
• Inclusion
• Transparency and Technologies
• Information and Innovation
• Collaboration and Sharing
• Accessibility, Openness and Listening
Let’s go back to the objectives defining the requirements: to be such an objective must be concrete and above all measurable.
Obviously we started by defining the 2016-2021 programmatic guidelines for the Government of Rome Capital, a document that I drafted with the collaboration of Giuseppe Iacono (friend and chief of staff of my Department in total autonomy and with the great satisfaction of seeing them fully accepted by the Mayor.
My Chapter of the Policy Lines is divided into 4 main areas:
1. open government
2. digital skills
3. digital agenda (digital services, simplification of internal administration processes, connectivity)
4. smart city
and it is on these issues that the interventions of the Department have been activated.
We have already described the starting situation, here we describe the objectives and soon we will see the things done, the lessons learned not to be forgotten and we will conclude with indications on what remains to be done, proposals and a suggestion: decline the new program of Roma Capitale on the 17 goals for sustainable development.
In the 38 months of life of the Department, starting from Chapter 8 of the 2016-2021 Program Lines for the Government of Rome Capital, many problems have been faced, numerous solutions have been initiated and above all we have had the opportunity to make some important useful experiences not only for Roma Capitale but for any local administration that is faced with similar problems.
Telling this experience is important to understand where problems and difficulties were born and where they can arise, to evaluate the validity of the solutions identified and to highlight what remains to be done and which solutions and experiences can be usefully transferred to other realities.
With the aim of making Rome a national laboratory for digital transformation, all interventions were guided by: rights, openness and access.
My Policy Lines begin like this: “Citizens expect Roma Capitale to take a step forward in the quality, effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of services. Expectations are high and the current state is critical: often inadequate services, high costs, slow municipal machinery in responding.
Digital technologies and services are an essential lever for addressing these critical issues: they allow to optimize and innovate the functioning of the public machine and to radically change the relationship between institutions and the territory. The governance program of Roma Capitale in terms of digital innovation, open government and simplification is one of the main tools for the overall transformation of the Administration and is an irreplaceable lever for affecting existing criticalities. A systematic analysis and recognition of the existing will be preliminary and indispensable for an evaluation of the subsequent work of the Administration also by the citizens.
Innovation is change made, concrete, tangible, measurable: the program, articulated on the parallel strands of the transformation of the public machine and innovation in the relationship with the territory, will use an agile method and structured work plans for each strategic area, with clear responsibilities , metrics and indicators to evaluate the progress of the program.
An integral part of the definition of the work plans will be the involvement of all the actors starting from the identification of needs and the definition of objectives up to the evaluation of the quality of the results.
This organic, programmatic and systemic approach is the basis of the intervention model in the main areas of Roma Semplice:
• open government;
• digital skills;
• digital agenda (digital services, simplification of internal administration processes, connectivity);
• smart city.
In order to set up the work effectively, each chapter of my programmatic lines has been divided into three paragraphs:
1. Current situation and critical factors
2. Visions and goals
3. Priority actions
This approach made it possible to easily carry out progress analysis and periodic reporting and in particular the mid-term budget after which I prepared a quarterly updated report (my last report was that of the 3 years).
The objectives of the Program Lines have been defined in total harmony and compliance with European and national directives and regulations and in particular:
• Strategy for digital growth 2014-2020
• Digital Agenda for Europe (a flagship initiative of the Europe 2020 strategy, launched in 2010)
• Italian digital agenda
• Open Government Partnership
• Urban Agenda for Europe (May 2016) under the Amsterdam Pact
• Approval of the Statute of the Agency for Digital Italy (2014) which, among its various tasks, also has that of drafting the Three-Year Plan for IT in the Public Administration
• EU Action Plan for eGovernment 2016-2020
• Vademecum for the smart city
• Tuscany Regional Law 1/2004 (Promotion of electronic administration and the information and knowledge society in the regional system)
• Emilia Romagna Regional Law 11/2004 (Regional development of the information society)
• Last but not least the CAD, Legislative Decree 7 March 2005, n. 82
In summary, we have worked to guarantee all rights to digital identity, information and use of content, protection of personal data, participation, access and digital inclusion, to a daily use of the benefits of technologies. digital, to training.
All based on the concepts of openness and transparency, bases of digital citizenship, on the three fronts that we will describe shortly in the post: “Principles and rules of good digital governance”. We will see how these objectives can also be achieved thanks to the adoption of free software, the adoption of open standards, open formats for public content and data, the obligation to distribute their archives also as open data (Open by default) , the digitization of services, the adoption of open metadata, the adoption of open access and open licensing models.
Guaranteeing: access to data (personal data, data relating to assets owned …), access to the network, access to proceedings (structured interactions between the Digital Citizen and the PA), access to documents (acts, communications of the PA), FOIA.
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