Andrea DiMaio

Although I spent most of my professional life dealing with clients and issues outside my home country, I still follow what happens here and sometimes find unlikely sources of inspiration for my research. 

Italy is well known worldwide for nicely designed products and fashion: the tag “Made in Italy” on several goods has been seen for decades a powerful brand in itself. Creativity is indeed a common trait of many Italian designers and entrepreneurs, as much as engineering comes to mind when thinking about German products.

Does the made-in-Italy creativity apply to government 2.0 as well? Looking at a few examples, that would seem to be the case.

Last year, when publishing all taxpayers data online, the Italian Revenue Office probably started the largest crowdsourcing experiment ever tried: nobody knows how many people who saw that data online for one day only reported about potential non-compliance cases and how many investigations were triggered. Still last year, a regional tax agency found out about property tax fraud by looking at Google Earth pictures and comparing the actual size of a property with what was declared for tax purposes.

Today I may have found another interesting example of a new trend or maybe just a new spin of government 2.0. The Italian Minister for Public Administration and Innovation, Mr Renato Brunetta,  decided to use the home page of the department he is responsible for to respond to a weekly magazine (L’Espresso) that challenged his claims to have achieved incredible success in fighting absenteeism and increasing productivity of government operations. Anybody who goes to http://www.innovazione.gov.it gets a page like the one below

and must scroll until the end to reach to a link to the traditional home page. Many have criticized the Minister’s decision to utilize a government department web site for a political discussion and for personal purposes: blogs and the press are still debating whether this is an adequate use of taxpayers’ money or not.

However if one scratches the surface and forgets about the political angle, there are a few interesting things. This new page links into the original magazine’s article, into a detailed response by the Minister about why he thinks they got it all wrong and – most importantly – a forum where people can discuss the whole thing,. Browsing through the latter, it is quite evident that most comments are against his move and many support the magazine. What I find surprising and somewhat refreshing is that while he is using the government’s estate for a political debate, he is also exposing himself to all sorts of comments, which are given great prominence since they are accessible from the home page and they carry the Italian government banner at the top of the page.

The Minister could have used his Facebook page (where he is quite popular, with lots of supporters) to do this, making the online debate happen outside the government turf. To some extent, he has been quite bold and has blurred the boundary between the machinery of government (i.e. the department organization with its web site) and the elected official with his political connotations. I do not remember to have seen anything like this elsewhere and, while this may just be another example of how Italians tend to improvise to deal with new issues, maybe we are witnessing the beginning of a new trend.

Undoubtedly this experience will give Mr Brunetta further food for thought to reconsider or confirm his decision to fight the personal use of social media by government employees.

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Category: web 2.0 in government     Tags: government 2.0

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