ABSTRACT
1.
INTRODUCTION
2.
CITIZENS
PARTICIPATION, ICTs AND HUMAN FACTORS
3. THE EXPERIENCE OF “CALL ROME 060606
SERVICE” IN ROME
4. THE WEB SITE: http://www.roma6tu.it/
5. THE WEB SITE:“http://www.professionecittadino.it/”
6. CONCLUSIONS
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
8. ANNEX 1- List of Tables
9. CURRICULUM
10. RECENT PUBLICATIONS
11. CONTACTS
Giovanna Anselmi, ENEA
– Ugo Mocci, roma6tu
ABSTRACT
Different channels are currently employed
by citizens and local administrative and operational bodies to communicate each
other. In Rome a dedicated call centre (Call Rome 060606 service) has
been recently set up to help citizens in gathering information on
administrative services, sending suggestions, signalling drawbacks and in
general to share information on the main events occurring in the town. Such
service is organised in two cascade levels: a I level front end that provides
direct access to the information and a II level front end involving the
internal offices for a deeper investigation if required. The service makes use of both telephone and
web site channels to meet citizen’s information demand; statistics concerning
use and acceptance of the service are regularly reported on the web site. Such
statistics show that the service is effective to meet demand of general
information arriving to the I level front end but do not contain enough details
to evaluate the effectiveness of the sessions involving the II level front end
and the internal offices. In this regard both the technical quality of the
implementation and the receptiveness of the departments to listen and interact
with the citizens are important. Suitable information can be derived from the
activity of the web sites promoting citizen participation and transparently
managing web databases storing both the
citizen’s messages and the relevant answers given by the departments. In this
regard the web sites http://www.roma6tu.it/
and http://www.professionecittadino.it/
(respectively operating in Roma and Bologna) have been addressed. The analysis
has shown that technical, organizational and human factor barriers should be
still overcome for further improvement of the service.
Giovanna Anselmi, ENEA
– Ugo Mocci, ICT roma6tu
1. INTRODUCTION
Web technologies are not yet effectively used to stimulate citizen’s participation in management and government of the urban areas. Ongoing efforts of the local administrations are mainly aimed to provide on line access to town information and to allow citizens to perform remotely the most common administrative procedures. Though significative this approach seems limitative and shows that on line technologies are not considered as a suitable channel to develop e-democracy or a tool to improve town monitoring and public services provisioning with citizens help. In other words citizens are not considered as a valuable “resource” of knowledge and a reference subject to improve both city environment and social life.
An Italian song says “freedom is not to
fly like a bird / freedom is participation”. To be effective and responsible,
citizens’ participation requires some prerequisites to be met, in particular,
to access transparently to the city life information and to contribute freely
to the building of the town knowledge databank. To meet the requirements
technology can be used, so to really open the management and government of the
towns to citizens’ participation.
Citizens have physical coverage of the
whole town territory and can observe the real status of the town every day.
They are naturally interested in what happens in the urban environment and in
the places where they go. Thanks to the available on line technologies and to
the diffusion of intelligent terminals, citizens constitute an intelligent,
motivated, redundant, no-cost monitoring network. Why it is left completely
unused? Even if technology is already available, other factors seem to be
lacking; in particular the awareness that:
-
active and participant citizens are
essential to improve the social cohesion of the towns;
-
citizens can contribute to monitor and
manage effectively the urban environment and the main public services of the
towns;
-
technical and human barriers limit and
discourage the active participation of the citizens.
In the following we analyse such aspects
with reference to some experiences carried out independently in the towns of
Rome and Bologna. Firstly, we consider the characteristics of different
communication channels as a tool to support citizens’ participation. Secondly,
we refer to the service for citizens recently activated in Rome (“Call Rome
060606 service”). Subsequently we analyse complementary information available
from two web sites created to improve citizens’ participation operating
respectively in Rome and Bologna. In the last section we summarize the results
of the analysis and suggest directions for further initiatives.
2. CITIZENS' PARTICIPATION, ICTs
AND HUMAN FACTORS
Citizens’ participation is a systemic requirement to achieve cohesion and efficiency in urban areas characterized by quick changes in population and social environment. In this regard and also in the view of an e-democracy perspective, the diffusion of ICTs can offer new opportunities to both citizens and local offices.
Quite often participation risks to be
just an empty word simply related to the possibility given to the citizens to
express their views or complaints. A lot of usable channels are available to
this purpose and publicity to citizen’s opinion is given on the different
media. These opinions are filtered and only temporary reported (at most a news
on a TV program or a letter on a newspaper for a day). As a whole such
information appear dispersed and difficultly accessible. The true citizens
participation requires instead the availability of fully transparent and
accessible information infrastructures collecting and storing all citizens’
opinions, so creating a city life knowledge databank, usable by social bodies
and the public administrations for management, social research and planning.
The existence of such databank would constitute an incentive for a good
administration of the towns and give the citizens the proof that their opinions
are really appreciated and taken into account. Such perspective would improve
civic education of the whole social body and stimulate better citizens’
behaviours.
From a systemic viewpoint the presence of
citizens all over the territory and the diffusion of both mobile and fixed
means of communication make it possible to realize costless and effective city
monitoring networks having a significant interest for public service
provisioning, town maintenance and urban security.
As regard to
these objectives the different channels usable by the citizens to communicate
have different characteristics and utilization. The telephone channel with its
high penetration offers simple, fast and interactive operation and can be used
by all kind of people (also unskilled) both to get information and to send
messages. However the telephone channel reveals inappropriate to build a
citizen’s knowledge databank because technologies for storing, classifying and
handling vocal messages automatically will be still immature for a long time
ahead. Similar considerations apply to other traditional communication
channels, like ordinary post and fax. On
the opposite, the internet technologies are able to meet all the technical
requirements needed to develop and implement effective systems and tools for
citizens participation: network coverage, wide diffusion of connection
terminals, easy graphic interfaces, interactive forms, large storage capacities
and powerful search engines, all assure a proper and cheap technical framework
to develop a channel really usable by citizens. Some features of the Internet
technology has been already successfully exploited to implement e-mail, dynamic
forms, discussion forum, remote voting. However, other features, like on line
data base management and information processing, have not yet found their full
application.
Indeed the problem of citizens’
participation, is not reducible to a technical problem, because it involves
also political willingness and positive attitude of the administrative
departments. As far as citizens’ participation will be perceived as a trouble
or an obstacle, any technical tool offered to the citizens will not encourage
them to improve their active participation. There are not extended field experiences on
the subject. The authors have tried to analyse the
problems encountered in the real world referring to the experiences made by the
“Call Rome 060606 service”, operated by the City of Rome (web site: http://www.comune.roma.it/)
and by two other web sites, promoting citizens participation respectively in
Rome (web site: http://www.roma6tu.it/) and Bologna (web site: http://www.professionecittadino.it
).
3. THE EXPERIENCE OF “CALL ROME
060606 SERVICE” IN ROME
In June 2002
the City of Rome launched the new “Call Rome 060606 service” to simplify
citizens access to the services offered by the municipality (1). “Call Rome
060606 service” offers a 24 h multilingual centralized service that is
structured in a two level front end:
-
the I°
level front end answers questions concerning “ Who, Where and When” inside the
administrative and operational offices; gives information about activity,
opening time and location of the offices; forwards calls to the internal
numbers or to public services operating companies or, if requested, transfers
calls to a II° level front end:
-
the II°
level front end acts as an advisor helping citizens to solve their problems,
tries to answer more specific questions concerning the administrative
procedures and gives access to the municipality databank.
Statistics on
utilization of the new service are available on the town web site and an
overview is reported in Table 3.1.
From June 2002
to November 2003 “Call Rome 060606 service” cumulatively managed about
1.460.000 calls. In November 2003, 98.2 % of the calls concerned asking of
information, 1.1 % suggestions and 0.8 % complaints. As a whole 31 % where
directed to the public service companies, 34 % to the town departments and the
remaining 35 % to local municipalities or to extra-departments. 82 % of all
calls where managed by the I° level and the 18 % was directed to the II° level
front end.
More recently
“Call Rome 060606 service” has offered the citizen an additional channel by
e-mail. Statistics on this channel (1) are reported in Table 3.2 and in Table
3.3.
|
Total managed
calls (15 months) |
1.460.000 |
|
Call subject:
General information |
98.2 % |
|
Suggestions |
1.1 % |
|
Complaints |
0.8 % |
|
Call address:
Public services companies |
31 % |
|
Town departments |
34 % |
|
Local Municipalities |
35 % |
|
Calls managed by
I level Front End |
82 % |
|
Calls managed by
II level Front End |
18 % |
Source: http://www.comune.roma.it
Table 3.1 “Call Roma 060606 Service”: citizen’s
calls overview
With very few appreciable exceptions the behaviour of the departments was not very encouraging: 13 out of 20 proposals remained completely ignored; 4 out of 20 where signed for receipt by the URPs and only 4 out of 20 received a significant answer. No cycling question-answer dialogue between the citizens and town offices started up.
|
Type of requirement |
Percentage |
|
General
information |
74.3 |
|
Suggestions |
15.8 |
|
Complaints |
5.9 |
|
Contentions |
4.0 |
Source: http://www.comune.roma.it
Table 3.2 “Call Roma 060606 Service”: citizen’s e-mails content
From June 2003
to November 2003 the service received by the citizens 2700 e-mail totally,
74.3% concerning asking of information, 15.8 % suggestions and 9.9 % complaints
and contentions. The monthly profile of the number of calls since the
introduction of the e-mail channel in June 2003 is rather instructive: starting
with 349 e-mails in June, a maximum level of 1265 e-mail was reached in July;
afterwards the number of citizens e-mail continuously decreased from 670 in
August to only 101 in November 2003 (Table 3.3).
Though the
“Call Rome 060606 Service” has been successful as a whole, no analysis of
citizens’ satisfaction and no evaluation of the impact due to citizen’s
suggestions and complaints are available on the City of Rome web site. However,
some general remarks can be pointed out anyway:
- even if a significant part of demand concerning general information is met with the direct access to the town web site (no statistics are available on the point), many people seem still to prefer the traditional telephone channel to get general information and communicate.
- compared to the telephone channel the e-mail channel is much less utilized. Moreover its use is decreasing with time.
|
Month (2003) |
# E-mail |
|
June |
349 |
|
July |
1265 |
|
August |
670 |
|
September |
138 |
|
October |
144 |
|
November |
101 |
Source:
http://www.comune.roma.it
Table 3.3 “Call Roma 060606 Service”: citizen’s e-mails number in time
The last point reveals problems of
different kinds that would be important to analyse and hopefully to overcome.
Responsible politicians are aware of such difficulties and in February 2004
have launched a public call “Idee in Comune” (1), asking citizens to send
proposals to improve the town and the city life. 25 proposals will be chosen
for realization in cooperation with the citizens.
4. THE WEB SITE: http://www.roma6tu.it/
The web site “roma6tu” (2) was opened in Rome at the beginning of 2002 to experiment new ways of citizens participation. The site was specifically designed to offer the following features:
- to collect citizens complaints and proposals and publish them on the web site;
- to group and send proposals and citizens messages to the administrative departments or to the public service companies of the town;
- to monitor on the web site the answers or the interventions taken by the institutions and by the
companies;
- to manage a fully
accessible “roma6tu archives”, where
both citizens messages and received answers are permanently stored.
In the first months of activity the site received
more than 50 e-mails from the citizens. The messages where processed by
“roma6tu” and from them 20 proposals on specific problems where generated. The
proposals, together the pertinent citizens e-mails, where sent to the
administrative departments, asking for intervention and offering to report
answers on the web site. “roma6tu” monitored the whole answering process to
verify administration efficiency and attitude to the dialogue with the
citizens. Whether ignored the messages where sent again with the warning that
the behaviour of the departments or the public company would be monitored. In
case of answer “rome6tu” offered the opportunity to a further dialogue, sending
new messages to analyse more deeply the relevant problems.
|
Proposal subject |
Department |
# Attached e-mail |
# Delivery |
# Answers |
|
|
URP |
Department |
||||
|
Quality
registers for the companies |
Public works |
|
2 |
- |
- |
|
Districts
maintenance |
Maintenance |
3 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Public service
company web sites |
Companies |
1 |
1 |
- |
- |
|
Taxation offices
drawbacks |
Taxation |
3 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Collapsed
buildings restoration |
Public works |
2 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Restoration
after works |
Public works |
2 |
1 |
- |
- |
|
Roads
maintenance |
Maintenance |
1 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Abandoned cars
removal |
Mobility |
2 |
1 |
1 |
- |
|
Markets
maintenance |
Maintenance |
1 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Traffic & pollution |
Environment |
1 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Parking in down town |
Mobility |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
|
Antipollution
limitations |
Environment |
1 |
1 |
- |
- |
|
Public
assistance |
Social affairs |
1 |
2 |
- |
- |
|
Cancelling
prescribed taxations |
Taxation |
1 |
1 |
- |
- |
|
Birds and
animals |
Environment |
2 |
1 |
- |
1 |
|
On line
administrative procedures |
Taxation |
2 |
1 |
- |
1 |
|
Parking
limitations areas |
Mobility |
1 |
1 |
1 |
- |
|
Urban Planning |
Maintenance |
14 |
1 |
- |
- |
|
Air
conditioners regulations |
Environnant |
1 |
1 |
- |
1 |
|
Traffic viability |
Mobility |
1 |
1 |
1 |
1 |
Source : http://www.roma6tu.it/
Table 4.1 Citizens and town departments: a difficult dialogue
The subjects of the proposals, the involved
departments, the repetition of messages delivery, the answers given by the URP
(Public Relationship Unit) or by the departments and their attitude to the
dialogue with the citizens are summarized in Table 4.1:
With very few appreciable exceptions the behaviour of the departments was not very encouraging. 13 out of 20 proposals remained completely ignored; 4 out of 20 where signed for receipt by the URPs and only 4 out of 20 received a significant answer. No cycling question-answer dialogue between the citizens and town offices started up.
The
preliminary experience of “roma6tu” shows that the culture of citizens’
participation is not popular within the civic administrative departments and
its lack represents the main barrier to more extensive citizens participation.
5. THE WEB SITE:“http://www.professionecittadino.it/”
The web site “professionecittadino” (3) was opened in Bologna at the beginning of 2001 with the objective to collect citizens’ opinions and stimulate the discussion about the town problems. During a period of 12 months a total of 90 messages where received and published on the site (the messages are still in the archive). The subject covered by these messages was rather wide and is summarized in Table 5.1.
Citizen
e-mail subject
|
Percentage
|
|
Social affairs |
23.5 |
|
Roads and traffic |
18.2 |
|
Public services |
14.6 |
|
Pollution |
10.1 |
|
Education & Culture |
7.8 |
|
Health |
7.8 |
|
Public works |
4.5 |
|
Others |
13.5 |
Source:
http://www.professionecittadino.it/
Table 5.1 Citizens’ e-mails subjects
Only a part of the messages (about 60 %
of the total) really expected an answer from the administrative departments or
from other responsible public bodies. About 55 % of those messages where
answered. About 25 % of the citizens messages stimulated also comments from
other citizens,
as shown in Table 5.2.
Citizens
e-mail statistics
|
# |
Total
number
|
90 |
|
Messages generating comments by other citizens |
23 |
|
Messages requiring an answer from the offices |
55 |
|
Answered messages |
25 |
Source: http://www.professionecittadino.it/,
Table 5.2 Citizens’ e-mails statistics
These figures indicate a more favourable and mature situation in Bologna as to both citizens’ participation and the interest of the public offices to communicate and dialogue with the citizens. The existence of a link to “professionecittadino” within the city site confirms this empirical evidence.
However,
though “professionecittadino” has continued his activity with other
initiatives, the attempt to create a citizens messages databank has not been
further supported.
6. CONCLUSIONS
The information on the use of the e-mail channel to send messages on the town problems and the attitude of the public offices to answer and dialogue with the citizens are rather limited, indicating a lack of initiatives in the field.
The previous preliminary analysis available
from web sites http://www.comune.roma.it, http://www.roma6tu.it/,
http://www.professionecittadino.it/, allows to fix some
points useful for further discussion:
-
the utilization of internet technology
to support citizens participation is still limited and the relevant experiences
are at an initial stage (4,5);
- the main technical drawbacks of the current situation are twofold: firstly, citizens massages are dispersed in many different locations (newspapers and other media web sites, citizens associations, etc.); secondly, such information are not collected together and properly processed to extract meaningful overviews of the town problems;
-
town operational managers and politics
are not completely aware of the importance to provide tools necessary to build
up transparent citizens databanks, fully accessible by citizens, associations
and social analysers;
-
the potential benefits of citizens
participation in terms of better knowledge of the town problems, efficiency of
public services and stronger social cohesion have not yet properly debated and
evaluated;
- the lack of tools suitably supporting citizens’ participation makes the interest of the citizens to participate more and more marginal and even decreasing.
To get a new perspective, incisive initiatives should be carried out by local administrations in the following directions:
-
to launch
coordinated field experiments investigating the better ways to support a true
citizens’ participation;
- to start suitable cooperation initiatives among media, citizens associations and town administration to gather citizens messages in a centralised system;
- to develop, deploy and manage technological tools for building up fully accessible town knowledge databank centred on citizens participation;
-
to improve the attitude of the public
administrative and operational structures of the town to dialogue openly and
constructively with the citizens.
7. BIBLIOGRAPHY
(1) Web site http://www.comune.roma.it
(2) Web site http://www.roma6tu.it/
(3) Web site http://www.professionecittadino.it/
(4) G. Anselmi, ENEA – U. Mocci “ Applying ICTs to Public Participation in Enhancing the Urban Environment.” IPTS REPORT N° 69/02
(5) G. Anselmi, ENEA – U. Mocci “Citizens role in participating monitoring of urban
areas.” The 2003 Hawaii International
Conference on Social Sciences. The Second Annual Conference. June 12 - 15, 2003. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
8. ANNEX 1 – LIST OF TABLES
Table 3.1 “Call Roma 060606 Service”: citizen’s calls overview
Table 3.2 “Call Roma 060606 Service”: citizen’s e-mails content
Table 3.3 “Call Roma 060606 Service”: e-mail number in time
Table 4.1 Citizens and town departments dialogue
Table 5.1 Citizens’ e-mails subjects
Table 5.2 Citizens’ e-mails statistics
9. CURRICULUM
Dr. Giovanna Anselmi graduated in Political and Social Sciences at the Catholic University of Milan in 1970. Until 1983 she conducted research into Economic Planning and Social Politics at ISPE (Italian Economic Planning Studies Agency). Since 1983 she has been a senior Researcher at UDA/Advisor Unit at ENEA (Italian Agency for Energy, Environment and New Technologies), where she has been responsible for several research activities and evaluation in national and international projects. Her professional interests concern the Impacts and Changes in Economic, Social and Cultural Scenarios of IC Technologies, Technology Assessment and Sustainable Growth Studies.
Dr. Ugo Mocci graduated in electronic engineering at the Rome University La Sapienza in 1966, where until 1969 he conducted research on system identification and automatic control. In 1970 he joined Fondazione Bordoni where he led and managed research groups on design and planning of telecommunication networks, network management and performance analysis, high speed Internet networks with quality control, wide-band networks for interactive services. He has participated in many European projects promoted by ESA, RACE and COST organizations and until 1999 was secretary for many years of the annual European Network Planning Workshop. He has presented about one hundred contributions in international congresses and was co-editor of the volume Broadband Network Teletraffic, Lecture Notes in Computer Science N. 1155, 1996, Springer- Verlag. His present interest concerns the applications of IC technologies to promoting citizens’ participation in the local government of urban areas. In this framework he has recently realised the web site http://www.roma6tu.it/ .
10. RECENT
PUBLICATIONS
G. Anselmi, ENEA – U. Mocci “Citizens role in participating monitoring of urban
areas.” The 2003 Hawaii International Conference
on Social Sciences. The Second Annual Conference. June 12 - 15, 2003. Honolulu, Hawaii, USA
WEB: http://www.roma6tu.it/.
G. Anselmi,
ENEA – U. Mocci “ Applying ICTs to Public Participation in Enhancing the Urban
Environment.” IPTS REPORT N° 69/02
WEB: http://www.roma6tu.it/.
G. Anselmi,
ENEA “E - Government for Universal Access: National IT Strategies and Policies
in European Union.” The 6th Asia-Pacific Regional Conference of International
Telecommunications Society: Information Infrastructure and Sustainable
Development: Challenges to Government Policy and Corporate Strategies - Hong
Kong, 5-7 July 2001
G. Anselmi,
ENEA "Access to Publicly-Funded RTD programmes: EU Government Measures”
IPTS REPORT N° 44/00
G. Anselmi,
ENEA – U. Mocci "Telematics and New Services: Impact of Communication
Technologies in the Urban Areas.” Cities in the Global Information Society: an
International Perspective. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK, 22 - 24 November 1999
Ugo Mocci, ICT expert
Phone:
+39670475016;
E-mail: umocci@inwind.it
Giovanna
Anselmi,
Organization:
ENEA (Italian Agency for New Technology, Energy and Environment)
UDA/Advisor
- Lgt. G.A. Tahon de Revel 76 – 00197 Rome, Italy.
Phone: +39 06 36272801
E-mail: <ganselmi@sede.enea.it> <c.mocci@libero.it>