The 2016-2018 ICT Three-Year Plan approved by the previous Council in 2015 states: “in order to verify the effective use of IT equipment by Capitoline personnel and to optimize the assignment of the same to user employees, no. 2 surveys, in March 2013 and November 2014, following which it emerged that the fleet of peripheral IT equipment is underutilized as only a third of the workstations (33.3%) were active, only 8.2% with an open session of MS-Office (Word, Excel) and about 20% using the internet navigation software “. Despite this, all the licenses, including those not used (which are more than 90%), were renewed for 3 years by the Department in charge and by the Commissioner following the fall of the Marine Council.
With resolution 55/2016 I committed the Capitoline Administration to the use of free software in accordance with the provisions of art. 68 of Legislative Decree no. 82/2005 (Digital Administration Code – CAD) and subsequent amendments, or to promote and support the adoption of formats and protocols open in every area, both on servers and on desktops, both with reference to collaboration tools and those of content management; in the same resolution, the Department of reference was entrusted with the task of defining a new regulatory proposal to define the architectural and technological standards of the Capitoline information system and the telecommunications network and to replace the regulations on the subject adopted by the City Council on 26 September 1997 and therefore much earlier than the current legislation and in particular to the CAD. The Regulation for the assignment and use of IT work equipment and mobile telephone services was approved by the Council in February 2018, also provides for the repeal of the Municipal Council resolution no. 3372 of 7 August 1997 and, obviously, in the definition of the “Ordinary standard equipment”, with reference to the pre-installed software, it is declared that the Administration favors free / open source software solutions.
“To follow up on what is expressed by Resolution 55 of 14/10/2016, in order to reduce the vendor lock-in (an expression to mean a strong constraint arising in favor of a supplier), a specific Working Group, coordinated by Rome Simple Department, is carrying out the actions necessary for the introduction of FLOSS (Free and Libre Open Source Software) culture and operational tools. The Working Group has produced a plan for the adaptation of the existing structure to FLOSS. From the server and application point of view, taking into account the existing contractual constraints, we act on the renegotiation of the contracts themselves. From the point of view of client workstations, the installation of FLOSS products has been started. An internal network of FLOSS contacts has also been set up. ” (Three-year ICT Plan 2018-2020).
At the end of the work, more than 6500 unused Microsoft Office licenses (out of about 15000) were uninstalled and about 15,000 LibreOffice licenses were installed, an office suite that includes: Writer (the word processor), Calc (the spreadsheet application) , Impress (for creating powerful multimedia presentations), Draw (the vector drawing and flowchart application), Base (the database front-end), and Math (the equation editor).
In October 2017, the “Implementation actions of the guidelines and guidelines for the commitment to the use of free or open source software in the Capitoline Administration were approved and published.”
In 2019 I asked the Director of the Digital Transformation Department, who is also Head of Digital Transition (RTD) for Roma Capitale, to call all the structures of Roma Capitale to:
- agree on acquisitions and adoptions of hardware and software goods and services with its Department and share the software requirements plan;
- acquire a prior fairness opinion on the solution to be adopted, in the event that the Department is not the contracting authority, for the acquisition of hardware and software goods and services;
- adopt free software or adequately justify any different choice.
Could he do it? Absolutely yes, thankfully, precisely because it is RTD!
On 23 September 2019, the Director sent this request to: Directors of the Support Structures to the Bodies and Administration, Directors of the Staff Structures, Directors of the Line Structures, Directors of the Territorial Structures, Institution System Libraries Cultural Centers, Capitoline Agency on Addiction.
A last anecdote on the adoption of open source in Rome was a sentence said by a councilor in a technical meeting between our departments, in which he talked about the acquisition of a new software for his sector and he declared “until I’ll be Councilor I’ll never buy open source software “; after his replacement, his successor luckily adopted an open source solution!
I reported other technological interventions carried out by my Department in an article in April 2019 which, among other things, reads the following.
“More and more Roma Capitale services use the national payment platform PagoPA. In January 2019, the value of payments transited through the PagoPA node was in fact 25,844,559 euros, exceeding 94% of the total revenue of the month, against a 2018 percentage of 92%.
In the context of digital simplification and transformation, many interventions were carried out this quarter which, in addition to the appointment of the RTD, were mainly focused on access to services by business representatives. In fact, we have activated for them the possibility of registering and accessing the services of the institutional portal with SPID (Public System of Digital Identity), we have adapted the SUAP / SUAR Telematic Desk (Single Desk for Productive Activities and Single Desk for Hospitality Activities) to the layout and to the look & feel of the institutional portal of Roma Capitale and we have made it possible, in the first Municipality, to fill in the online sub-entry for the Public Land Occupation (OSP) for Bars and Restaurants ”.
In implementation of the CAD and in line with the strategic objectives of the Digital Agenda, Rome has also joined the national projects from the national application platforms (SPID since December 2016, PagoPA, electronic invoicing, ANPR, CIE) and participates in the ANCI national observatory for the Smart Cities.
Although Rome was not included in the experimental project on 5G, thanks to open memoranda of understanding with Fastweb, Ericsson and ZTE we have brought Roma Capitale among the leading cities in the experimentation of new generation connectivity technologies, with a # Roma5G project that aims to develop 5G-based services in the areas of Culture and Tourism, Mobility and Security. On 22 February 2018 the first demonstrative 5G signal was turned on and on 17 December a first virtual reality service was activated at the Baths of Diocletian.
The objective of these protocols is cooperation for the definition of projects with particular attention to digital applications for the “smart city” and IoT sectors, enriching the “digital ecosystem of the city”, grasping its strategic development priorities and transforming it into a digital innovation laboratory.
In June 2019, Roma Capitale and the European Space Agency (ESA) signed a memorandum of understanding on satellite and 5G technologies for the development of innovative services for the city and to design and implement solutions and applications based on the integration of satellite resources with fifth generation mobile networks.
The objective of the cooperation between the institutions is to enrich the experiments of the # Roma5G project by making use of the professionalism and technical experience made available by ESA. Specific assets such as earth observation, global navigation satellite system (GNSS), satellite communications will be integrated with 5G technologies in the four vertical areas of intervention envisaged by the project, safety, mobility, culture and tourism, infrastructure monitoring.
ESA will also support companies belonging to the member states of the Agency that will apply to develop services that integrate space technologies and 5G responding to the requirements proposed by Roma Capitale by providing funding and sharing skills.
A smart city is also a connected city, which is why we have aimed not only at the development of fiber and the experimentation of 5G, but also at facilitating the access of citizens to Wi-Fi, simplifying the authentication method, (DigitRoma Wi-Fi is one of the services that can also be accessed with SPID), by joining WiFi-Italia.It, the federated national Wi-Fi network coordinated by MISE, increasing the number of hotspots, and pushing towards the rationalization and strengthening of the Data Center.
It is certainly not a revolution, but another step towards simplification and digital transformation: from January 31, 2019, secretarial fees are no longer paid for the personal certificates requested online. The online request guarantees full validity, immediate availability and, through a Unique Identification Code and a digital stamp, the uniqueness and integrity of the certificate.
This intervention was clearly understood by Roman citizens given the growth in access numbers to the site and online services recorded on March 27, 2019: visitors to the institutional portal, which in 2018 were over 14 million, in the first two months of 2019 saw a 4% increase in the daily average. Between January and February 2019, downloads from the site’s “Deliberations and acts” database reached 120 thousand, an increase of over 30% compared to the last two months of the previous year. The percentage of certificates issued online, out of the total of those that can be obtained through the institutional website, rises from 51.8% in 2017 to 58.6% in 2018 to 66.7% in the first two months of 2019. In particular, almost 588 thousand certificates were issued online in 2018, with almost 80 thousand fewer certificates issued over the counter compared to 2017.
There are over 360 thousand registered users of Rome Capital’s Wi-Fi and, even in January 2019, the average number of accesses per month consolidated at 17 thousand. More and more Roma Capitale services use the national payment platform PagoPA. In January 2019, the value of payments transited through the PagoPA node was in fact 25,844,559 euros, exceeding 94% of the total revenue of the month, against a 2018 percentage of 92%. These results are also recognized by the FPA-Dedagroup survey on the digital maturity of the capital municipalities, in which, on the three dimensions of Digital Services, Digital PA and Digital Openness, Rome is among the most virtuous cities.
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