On June 22, 1994 (not a typo, now you will understand better), the news reporters of all the newspapers received an invitation from the future. I quote it verbatim, including capital letters: “Friday 24 June, at 10.30 in the Sip room (P.zza della Costituzione, 2) in Bologna, the Mayor Walter Vitali, in videoconference with the Mayor of Rome Francesco Rutelli, will present to the prints the IPERBOLE project which provides for the connection of citizens with the worldwide INTERNET network, through connection with Cineca (Interuniversity Electronic Computing Center of North – Eastern Italy).
The IPERBOLE project offers: e-mail and, for all citizens who request it, free news, interactive evening, night and holiday connection at special rates for full use of the network (full Internet). The same service will be offered free of charge to neighborhoods and trade associations. Finally, significant discounts are provided for small and medium-sized enterprises in the metropolitan area for industrial uses. The conference will be attended by councilors Stefano Bonaga and Piero Sandulli, project managers, Cineca managers, IT technicians and SIP managers. Please consider this as an invitation. Best regards”. Who knows what the journalists of the time must have understood.
In Italy, the Internet was still a UFO, an unidentified flying object: a few days before, I.Net, the first Internet service provider, was born, but it was still a microscopic initiative. Yet a revolutionary service was born in Bologna: the first civic network. The intuition was the councilor for innovation Stefano Bonaga. He said that his famous light bulb had turned on when CINECA, the computer center in Bologna, had connected Italy to the Internet for the first time by land (via the e-Bone backbone which led to Paris). Bonaga, who is a philosopher, was enthusiastic about it and had decided to build the first civic network that would allow its citizens to get information, but also to dialogue and make their voices heard by those who administered the city.
In the mind of the councilor, he himself will say years later, there was a system of columns scattered around the city and connected to the network with which to carry out permanent surveys with citizenship. Iperbole was not this, created by Cineca and a startup of the time, Omega Generation, was a social network that has evolved into a citizen information portal. In an official presentation five years after the launch of the service, which took place in January 1995, Leda Guidi, who was there from day one until retiring five years ago, notes that there were around 15,000 users who they generated over 50,000 daily contacts for a total of 53,000 hours per month (“equal to six years!”). Iperbole was and remains a model of how to bring civil society online: but on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary Bonaga expressed all his disappointment at how his intuition had been implemented: “For me sadness prevails”. Leda Guidi comments: “We can always do more, but the truth is that we threw our hearts over the obstacle. Iperbole was a great collective learning experiment, both for municipal employees and for citizens. The social network of a city “.
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