How terrible “Risk and danger” will anyone who enters a public administration website ever run? What can ever happen? So why does the user of the brand new Recovery Plan site, Italia Domani, have to acknowledge and accept “that the use of this site is at their own risk”?
From what prehistory of digital bureaucracy comes this strange product that should also be the showcase of “A new country… ready to start with Italia Domani, the National Recovery and Resilience Plan“. If it is true that Italy Tomorrow “will leave a precious legacy to future generations, giving rise to more robust, sustainable and inclusive economic growth ” it must be said that this is unfortunately the wrong website. It should have been a civic monitoring and reporting tool: this is how the money from the Recovery Plan is spent, this is where the construction sites are, we tell you everything, we have nothing to hide. Instead, “the user accepts that the site and all its contents, including any services offered, are provided” as is “and” with all errors “”. What mistakes? And who committed them?
Let’s continue reading from the “terms and conditions” section: “The State General Accounting Office, therefore, does not issue any kind of guarantee, explicit or implicit, regarding such contents, including, without any limitation, the lawfulness, the right of ownership, the convenience or the suitability for particular purposes or uses “.
That is: the State General Accounting Office publishes the data on the Recovery Plan but does not guarantee that they are lawful, convenient or adequate or even that they are its property. Moreover, the aforementioned Accounting does not even guarantee “That the site is compatible with the user’s equipment or that it is free of errors or viruses, bugs or” Trojan horses “”. Therefore it is a website of the public administration that may not be compatible with our computers or our mobile phones and which may have even serious computer errors and viruses.
For this, of course, “The State General Accounting Office is not responsible for any damage suffered by the user due to such destructive elements”.
But what are we talking about? Does the government network the most important communication, information and participation tool of the next five years and do it in this way? A showcase site, from which it is not possible to download data for processing and checks (open data, where have you ended up?); also because the data provided may not be true or up-to-date? Not to mention that there is at least an extravagant copyright enforcement that we will return to.
Speaking of the fact that the site was online, on 3 August last, Mario Draghi’s spokesperson, Paola Ansuini, wrote in a tweet that “from today citizens will be able to get information and consult the projects and reforms of the #PNRR, monitor the investments and the implementation of the Plan #Italy Tomorrow”.
I want to think he hasn’t really seen the site. She did not see him and the Prime Minister did not see him. I want to think that that site is the result of the conditioned reflex of some digital bureaucrat who was in a hurry to go on vacation and simply replicated a form already present, unfortunately, in many other public administration sites, without taking into account its evident inopportunity especially in the website that has to tell our future.
This is not Italy Domani. It is Italy of the Other Yesterday. Italy Twenty Years Ago.
The first funds from the PNRR will arrive on Monday. There is time and way to fix it. Maybe even by deciding to publish everything in an open format: in recent years open data were the only digital parameter on which Europe did not fail us. It would be bizarre to go back right now.
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