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The Project

ROUTE-TO-PA is a multidisciplinary innovation project, that, by combining expertise and research in the fields of e-government, computer science, learning science and economy, is aiming at improving the impact, towards citizens and within society, of ICT-based technology platforms for transparency.

ROUTE-TO-PA envisions that Information and Communication Technologies for Transparency must improve the engagement of citizens by making them able to socially interact over open data, by forming or joining existing online communities that share common interest and discuss common issues of relevance to local policy, service delivery, and regulation. Moreover, ROUTE-TO-PA aims at engaging citizens to a higher degree by providing a robust and more holistic understanding of transparency, by underpinning the next generation open-data based transparency initiatives, ensuring that published data are those of value to citizens, with a personalized view in different forms to different segments of the citizens and public based on their profiles for facilitate better understanding.

ROUTE-TO-PA will deliver the experimented innovative and engaging ICT platforms to ensure citizen-friendly, conscious, and effective access to open-data, by offering easy understanding of, and social collaboration on, open data offered by PAs.

Objectives

The project vision is that Information and Communication Technologies for Transparency must improve the engagement of citizens:

  1. by making them able to socially interact over open data, by forming or joining existing online communities that share common interest and discuss common issues of relevance to local policy, service delivery, and regulation;

  2. by providing a robust and more holistic understanding of transparency, by underpinning the next generation open-data based transparency initiatives, ensuring that published data are those of value to citizens, with a personalized view in different forms to different segments of the citizens and public based on their profiles for facilitate better understanding.

The objectives of Route-To-PA are the following:

  1. develop a Social Platform for Open Data (SPOD) enabling social interactions among open data users and between open data users and government data;

  2. build Transparency-Enhancing Toolset (TET) as extensions for existing major Open Data Platforms

  3. develop a set of recommendations (GUIDE) as good practice guide for open data publishers for achieving higher quality transparency through open data. The objectives will be deployed, tested and experimented in a real setting, with at least 5 pilot studies in five different European countries.

Link: www.routetopa.eu/

Pilot activity in Prato

The Route-to-PA tools were tested in two pilot activities in the city of Prato.

The first pilot was opened to citizens willing to provide locations for the installation of new wi-fi antennas to increase the current city coverage. Citizens have used the SPOD platform to co-create a dataset reporting the name of the place, the geographic location and the motivation and the proposer’s name (the picture shows the map produced from the co-created dataset). The collected ideas will be used by the city administration to update the wi-fi coverage plan.

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The second pilot has involved the students (12-13 years old) from 3 classes of the Filippino Lippi school and 2 classes of the Pier Cironi Institute and the objective has been the building of a co-created dataset of the street tabernacles in the city, including the location and picture of each mapped tabernacle but also some stories and other information to enrich the knowledge of the territory. Some of the students used the SPOD app to directly add pictures and locations in the dataset, while others used the desktop version of the platform. The work was carried out under the supervision of the school teachers and in total 276 tabernacles were mapped (see the picture below).

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