The Italian project e21

1. The Italian project e21 Fiorella De Cindio Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione, Università degli Studi di Milano fiorella.decindio@unimi.it Fabrizio Ruggeri Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Istituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche fabrizio@mi.imati.cnr.it Mario Sartori Pafin 91 m.sartori@progesam.it

2. Outline of the talk • History of the project • Agenda 21 • e21 group and goals • ICT solutions • Where am I? • Future

3. (Short) history • Call for selecting projects to promote digital citizenship (e-democracy), promoted by the Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technology in 2003 • 10 municipalities in Lombardia region, region government, universities, research institutes, city networks and private companies involved (or to be involved) in local Agenda 21 • 130+ proposals, 58 approved (e21 was #1) • To start in summer/fall 2005, for 2 years

4. Goals • Improve, through a suite of ICT (and DA) tools, the participation methodology for carrying on local Agenda 21 projects • Coordinate projects at regional level • Study of the use of existing e-democracy and e-participation tools in (local) governance, and implementing few new ones • Which technologies are useful in which phases of local governance, and under which conditions?

5. Agenda 21 • Agenda 21 programme subscribed by 178 nations at the UN Summit on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 to promote projects for sustainable local development • Aalborg Charter (of European Cities and Towns towards Sustainability) signed in 1994 → since then, hundreds of municipalities involved in local Agenda 21 processes • Aalborg Commitments from the conference Aalborg +10 in 2004, approved by 100+ European administrations

6. Agenda 21 in Italy and Lombardia • 1300 Agenda 21 projects (end of 2003) in Italy about sustainable development : - waste, water, mobility (60-70%) - energy, territory planning, air quality (40-50%) • Most of them in Lombardia (and Emilia Romagna): 20.5% • 1,000,000+ citizens and 150+ municipalities (including the major ones) involved in Agenda 21 in Lombardia • 650,000 inhabitants in the 10 municipalities involved in e21

7. Steps in Local Agenda 21 Guidelines for various phases of the participation process: • Drawing the state of the territory • Identifying the most critical situations (e.g. traffic, pollution, waste) • Envisaging sustainable solutions for solving these critical situations in a participatory way • Choosing, again in a participatory way, which one of the envisaged projects can be implemented (evaluating priorities and available resources) • Monitoring the implementation of the selected projects and their effects

8. Agenda 21 (the good side) • Citizens involved from the beginning when preparing the Report on the state of the environment (RSA) • Debates in forums are great opportunities to participate, be informed and take responsibilities • Projects synthesised in action plans involve three components: local administrations, citizens, economical agents • Projects could be realised involving the interested components • Constant communication and information to the public, through all the process

9. Agenda 21 (the bad side) • Involve (and keep involved …) all the stakeholders • Actual availability of information to keep the participative process running • Participation of outside (w.r.t. territory) actors with a decisional role • Difficulty in knowing fairly well the viewpoint of the population and keeping people in touch with the Forum • Relation between discussions at A21 working tables and forums and the decisional power of the city governments

10. Municipalities in e21 • 10 cities (5 out of 12 province capitals), all subscribers of the Aalborg charter • Divided in 4 categories: - starting Agenda 21 - already operating Agenda 21 - interested in realising, through participative methodology, proposals out of Agenda 21 - interested in applying their current Agenda 21 approach to other situations (participated budget, School Agenda 21, …)

11. e21: Analysis of current projects • Study of current projects to - evaluate their status (RSA, forum, realisation, etc.) - know level of participation - know needs (mainly ICT) • Meeting with A21 local managers and some stakeholders

12. e21: Analysis of current projects Mantova (e21 project coordinator): • Fall 2001: contacted 230 stakeholders (associations) and 110 agreed to be part of an Agenda 21 Forum • December 2001: first draft of RSA • From 11/2001 to 11/2002 monthly meetings of the Forum to prepare an Action Plan for Sustainability, with 4 subgroups: - traffic and mobility - nature, tourism, art and culture - production and health and environment protection - safe and accessible city and solidarity

13. e21: Analysis of current projects • Action Plan contains 106 actions, along with their priorities, to be realised by 2010 • Action Plan approved in 2/2003 and subdivided in - structural actions - pilot actions - good practice and actions by the Children City Council in three macro areas: - mobility and infrastructure - socioeconomic - environment

14. e21: Analysis of current ICT and e-participation tools • Analysis of ICT technologies used in the cities for participation, communications and decisions, with the goal of studying a common, central platform, accessible by everyone • Meeting with ICT managers (cities, URP and city networks) and local e21 facilitators

15. e21: the role of municipalities • Start the process and A21 Forum, working tables, etc. • Provide structures to let Forum working • Provide data, information to define RSA and its indicators (e.g. economy status), plans, etc. • Promote communications, citizens’ participation • Prepare plan, approve decisions and apply them

16. e21: ICT applications • Development (at central level) of a web based set of ICT tools for various stages of A21 processes (diagnosis, debates, proposals, decisions, realisation, monitoring and evaluation), using: - open source tools - portable tools and programming languages (e.g. Java, PHP) to be used both in Windows and UNIX/Linux - web interfaces according to international standard with accessibility to be verified - in accordance to national and international norms - by groups of disable people, with high skills in computer science

17. e21: ICT applications Framework aggregating • Infrastructural components: - authentication and authoring system (LDAP protocols) - CMS (Content management system) (modules, XML) - forums, mailing list and (group) newsletters management - monitoring service (including auto evaluation) • Service components: - certified consultation system - decision support systems - users cooperation system - integration and exchange of data and archives with other systems

18. e21: ICT applications Interactions • Coordinating web site (ad personam) • ASP (Application Service Provider) platform in a project server or • Web based services (using SOAP; XML RPC)

19. e21: Training • Local e21 promoters: courses (at central level) on community management, participative processes, Agenda 21 • Municipalities officers: courses (at local level) about use of e-participation techniques, as required by their own municipality, through workshops, focus groups, e-learning

20. e21: communications Information at many stages on: • Nature and goals of the process in progress • Current problems and involved actors • Tools for on line and off line participation • Rules for the participation

21. e21:Local steps • Communication and information: continuous attention, with actions depending on the stage of the project • Integration of e21 tools in existing Agenda 21 processes • In situ application of ICT tools • Local experiments • Auto evaluation (LASALA methodology)

22. e21: Where am I? • In formulating and modelling problems (as a statistician) • In the development of decision support systems • In the deliberative phase to combine a method about managing online meeting to get more closer to a decision (e-Liberate by Schuler, 2005) with e-negotiation methods developed within TED by URJC (Madrid) • … (I am the only statistician/decision analyst in the group)

23. More news on e21 and TED? • TED news: newsletter published every three months (next issue in June) on TED and Ted related activities (announcement of workshop, call for papers and for visits, visits and conference reports, etc.) To get your copy, write to fabrizio@mi.imati.cnr.it • TED final conference: most likely in Mantova in fall 2006 • Aranjuez summer school (david.rios@urjc.es)