07/12/15 Civic Technology , Open Policy # civic technology, EU Structural Funds, European Policy, MOOC, Open Data, Open Education, Open Educational Resource, Open Government

OpenCoesione School – A scalable learning format using OpenData as Educational Resources

The third edition of the open education project “OpenCoesione School” was launched on November 18th, 2015. While you are reading this post, about 2800 students and 200 teachers are involved in a collective learning experience focused on civic monitoring public funding through open data analysis, and also visiting sites, and conducting journalistic research.

OpenCoesione School – or ASOC, from Italian “A Scuola di OpenCoesione” – is an educational challenge and a MOOC (Massive Online Open Course) designed for students in Italian secondary schools. ASOC was launched in 2013 within the open government strategy on cohesion policy carried out by the national agencies responsible for Cohesion Policy in Italy, in partnership with the Ministry of Education and the Representation Office of the European Commission in Italy. The project is also supported by the European Commission’s network of Europe Direct Information Centres.

With a very limited budget compared to other similar practices, the project was designed in 2013 by a diverse group of experts including Damien Lanfrey and Donatella Solda from the Ministry of Education (who are now leading the ambitious Italian National Plan for Digital Schools), Simona De Luca, Carlo Amati, Aline Pennisi, Paola Casavola, Lorenzo Benussi and myself as members of the OpenCoesione scientific committee, and a specifically designated team including Chiara Ciociola and Andrea Nelson Mauro. Francesca Mazzocchi, Marco Montanari and Gianmarco Guazzo joined the team in the following editions. Other OpenCoesione staff members such as Chiara Ricci, Mara Giua and Marina De Angelis also contributed to the project.

From Open Data to Civic Engagment

The objectives of ASOC are to engage participating schools towards actively promoting the use and reuse of open data for the development of civic awareness and engagement with local communities in monitoring the effectiveness of public investment. The participating students and teachers design their research using data from the 900,000 projects hosted on the national OpenCoesione portal. On OpenCoesione, everyone can find transparent information regarding the investment on projects funded by Cohesion Policies in Italy as it provides data with detailed information regarding the amount of funding, policy objectives, locations, involved subjects and completion times. Schools can select the data they want to use in their research which can be related with their region or city.

The program is designed in six main sessions. The first four sessions aim at developing innovative and interdisciplinary skills such as digital literacies and data analysis to understand and critically understand the use of public money. Thanks to a highly interactive process, students learn basic public policy analysis techniques such as identifying policy rationales for interventions and comparing policy goals with results. This process employs “civic” monitoring tools of the civil society initiative Monithon in order to work on of real cases. Data journalism and transmedia storytelling techniques are used as well.

Schools that participated in the 2nd edition

During the fifth session, and based on the information acquired, ASOC students carry out on-site visits to the public works or services in their territory that are financed by EU and national funds for local development. They also conduct interviews with the key stakeholders involved in the projects’ implementation, the final beneficiaries and other actors. Finally, the sixth session is a final event where students meet with their local communities and policy-makers to discuss their findings, with the ultimate goal to keep the administrators accountable for their decisions. Here you can find all the video sessions and exercises: http://www.ascuoladiopencoesione.it/lezioni/.

Innovative learning

The teaching method combines asynchronous and synchronous learning. The asynchronous model is designed following a typical of MOOC (Massive Online Open Courses) style where participants learn through a series of activities and teachers are trained by the central ASOC team through a series of webinars. In the synchronous in-class sessions, these share a common structure where each class starts with one or more videos from the MOOC, followed by a group exercise where the participants get involved in teacher-led classroom activities. These activities are organized around the development of the research projects and reproduce a flipped classroom setting.

In between lessons, students work independently to prepare data analysis reports and original final projects. Also, in order to have an impact on local communities and institutions, the students are actively supported by local associations that contribute with specific expertise in the field of open data or on specific topics such as environmental issues, anti-mafia activities, local transportation, etc. Furthermore, the European Commission’s network of information centers “Europe Direct” (EDIC), is involved supporting the activities and disseminating the results. On ASOCs’ website there is a blog dedicated to share and disseminate the students’ activities on social networks.

ASOC’s pedagogical methodology is centered around specific goals, well-defined roles and decision-making. This has allowed students to independently manage every aspect of their project activities, from the choice of research methods to how to disseminate the results. On the other hand, the teachers are also involved in an intensive community experience that allows them to learn not only from their own students, but also from the local community and from their fellow teaching peers involved in the project.

Involving communities and policy makers

Ultimately, this takes the form of a collective civic adventure that improves the capacity to form effective social bonds and horizontal ties among the different stakeholders, actors of the local communities. In fact, detailed Open Data on specific public projects has enable new forms of analysis and storytelling focused on real cases developed in the students’ neighborhoods. This, in turn, has the key goal of involving the policymakers in a shared, participatory learning process, to improve both policy accountability and the capacity to respond to local needs.

Finally, ASOC’s key element is that the pedagogical methodology we have developed can be used as a learning pathway that can be adapted to different realities (e.g. different policy domains, from national to local, in different sectors) using different types of open data with comparable level of detail and granularity (e.g. detailed local budget data, performance data, research data, or any other type of data).

If you are interested in learning more from ASOC’s experience, you can read a case study which includes the results of the 2014-2015 edition on Ciociola, C., & Reggi, L. (2015). A Scuola di OpenCoesione: From Open Data to Civic Engagement. In J. Atenas & L. Havemann (Eds.), Open Data As Open Educational Resources: Case Studies of Emerging Practice.

Don’t hesitate to get in touch with us as we are looking forward to provide support to your institutions and communities to share what we have learned from this exciting professional journey!

Here you can watch the ASOC’s documentary video of the 2014-2015 edition https://vimeo.com/138955671

A Scuola di OpenCoesione 2014-2015: le voci dei protagonisti from OpenCoesione on Vimeo.

This is an adaptation from this post published in OpenEducation Europa. Chiara Ciociola is the main contributor, while I added a few phrases to her final version. Javiera Atenas very kindly helped us with the proof reading. I am the one who’s responsible for any inaccuracy! 🙂

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18/11/14 Civic Technology , Open Policy # Data Journalism, ddj, Journalism, Open Government, Open Government Data

Open Government Meets Journalism: Should A Public Administration Actively Involve Data Journalists?

According to a brutal definition, Data Journalism is “Journalism with Data“. Even though this data can come from a variety of sources, Open Government Data is seen as a gold mine. A data journalist could be interested, for example, in tracking crimes through local crime data or discovering specific episodes of corruption and misuse of public funding thanks to the data on public spending.

Now let’s see this from the perspective of the government. As more and more public sector organizations are venturing in the world of Open Government, the actual (re)use of their own Open Data is a measure of success of their strategy. And there is no doubt that Data Journalism is one of the best examples of re-use of Open government Data that can create public value.

It’s fascinating to see how many public administrations around the world are now aiming to actively involve data journalists in their Open Government programs. From my experience, this collaboration has taken three different forms so far:

[SOFT] The staff of an Open Government program participates in “data journalism hackathons” or other events organized by journalists. The government employees offer their knowledge about the data and the data journalists find a story worth telling.
This is what happened, for example, during the hackathon of the International Journalism Festival in Perugia, Italy. Representatives of some Italian Ministries first presented their data to the journalists and then stayed all day to answer their questions and work with them.
[MEDIUM] The government offers “training sessions” to journalists. Sometimes the data are difficult to understand because a specific jargon is used or the policy is so complex that at least a basic knowledge of some technical aspects is essential. The events are held on the government premises and are aimed at providing the journalists with the “right tools” to analyze the data (how to create a map or an interactive graph) and to interpret it.
For example, the European Commission recently organized a “school” for journalists focused on EU funds.
[HARD] The government hires data journalists. A data journalist working for the government can assume the role of communication officer and create visualizations and articles based on the government’s communication strategy. This is the case of the French portal Gouvernement.fr that recently added an “infographics” section (“les infographies et videos”) and is now looking for data journalists to create eye-catchy visualizations and content.
But journalists can also have different roles, especially when working for specific Open Government initiatives. For example, a data journalist is part of the team of OpenCoesione School, a special project that involves high school students in the development of an investigation on the use of public funding through open data.

In the last few days I noticed a couple of interesting tweets on this.

An initial reaction to the “Medium scenario” (government training journalists) takes into consideration the principle of independence. In a tweet, the civil servant and public policy expert Tito Bianchi said:

What is this shiver i feel in my spine every time I hear someone proposing to “train journalists” to correctly interpret data?

— Tito_Bianchi (@Tito_Bianchi) September 29, 2014

However, an evidence-based debate in the press is possible only if the data are not misinterpreted, and working with the sources of information is a key part of the game. In addition, journalists may have limited quantitative skills to analyze the data or limited knowledge of the technicalities of a specific public policy.

As for the “Hard scenario” (government hiring journalists), the experienced data journalists Nicolas Kayser-Bril commented on the French case with these words:

If you want to switch from data-driven journalism to data-driven propaganda, the French government is hiring http://t.co/nhxJjmc3iu — Nicolas Kayser-Bril (@nicolaskb) November 5, 2014

Nonetheless, he added that this could be an option if the agencies that are hiring are “independent, state-financed authorities that can scrutinize gov’t action, such as ombudsman, transparency authorities, courts of auditors”.

@luigireggi Well, some countries do have independent, state-financed authorities that can scrutinize gov’t action, so why not

— Nicolas Kayser-Bril (@nicolaskb) November 13, 2014

Do you think that a public agency should proactively involve data journalists? In which forms? Are there some “special cases”?
Under what conditions should a journalist accept to collaborate with an Open Government program?

Photo by Ahmad Hammoud

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19/09/11 Civic Technology

Open Data to the next level: WHY and HOW to involve the private sector

The attention of civil society and policy makers is now turning to uncharted lands: open data from the private sector can be mashed-up with governmental data to create new apps and services. The Open Data portal created by Enel – a leading Italian power company – is a step in the right direction

While the open data movement is spreading within public sector – with very interesting initiatives both at local and international level – the attention of civil society and policy makers has turned to an uncharted land, that is the open data from the private sector. The need to involve businesses in the open data movement emerged quite clearly at the first European Digital Agenda Assembly, held in Brussels on 16-17 June 2011. In particular, the European Commission aims at stimulating more private participation in the open data initiatives, and is considering specific actions to promote the re-use of big datasets held by large private sector organizations.

Professor Nigel Shadbolt, a member of the UK Government’s Public Sector Transparency Board, outlines the benefits of an open data strategy in an article published in Think Quarterly. “Open data offers the prospect of instant connectivity between partners, as in open supply chains, where businesses source from places they might never have considered or even suspected could be a source. Open data can reduce integration costs, improve transparency and harness the innovation of others. If you release your data then others will develop applications that make best use of it – providing new services that benefit you directly, like all of those free travel apps that the travel companies didn’t have to write, but which nevertheless drive people onto the transportation network”.

Following the example of other companies such as SimpleGEO from the US, Enel – Italy’s largest power company and a key player in the European market – is now opening up a first set of datasets. The company, which originally launched an open data portal on 23 August under Creative Commons BY NC ND license disallowing commercial re-use, earlier today changed the license to a CC BY, merely requiring re-users to mention Enel as the source of data. Datasets include economic and financial information about the company and “sustainability data”, which comprise data on generation, distribution and sale of electricity and gas.

Raffaele Cirullo, head of New Media unit at Enel, reports on Enel strategies to the Spaghetti Open Data (SOD) mailing list. As a first step, an initiative entitled Enel Sharing was launched in 2008 to harness the power of social media to promote the brand amongst stakeholders and disseminate the cultural initiatives of the company. Then the unit focused on emerging innovations in the field of new media as a way to introduce a new culture of sharing within the group. Open data is of course one of the most interesting paradigm shifts, with major marketing impact within the private sector. These are the main goals of Enel Open Data initiative:

improve the market by fostering competition
increase transparency by increasing participation
favor technological innovation by encouraging the development and spreading of new applications, mash-ups and data visualization systems.

Personally, I very much share the opinion of Lorenzo Benussi – researcher at NEXA Center for Internet & Society of Politecnico di Torino – who jumped in the discussion with a message to the SOD mailing list on the eventual advantages of the diffusion of the open data model in the private sector. First, open financial data on corporate accounting may lead to a more effective control of global markets. Secondly, information on businesses assets, processes and activities is of great interest to the public and can be mashed-up with governmental data on the matter. Some examples: information about natural resources provided by the oil industry, power and communication grids, ships logistics, etc.

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Civic Technology

OpenCoesione School – A scalable learning format using OpenData as Educational Resources

From Open Data to Civic Engagment

Innovative learning

Involving communities and policy makers

Open Government Meets Journalism: Should A Public Administration Actively Involve Data Journalists?

Open Data to the next level: WHY and HOW to involve the private sector

The attention of civil society and policy makers is now turning to uncharted lands: open data from the private sector can be mashed-up with governmental data to create new apps and services. The Open Data portal created by Enel – a leading Italian power company – is a step in the right direction

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