Italy must expand its online franchise: a policy promising attractive side-effects for the Italian economy
Valeria Cipollone - November 26, 2013 in Featured, Open Data
This blog has been reposted from the Bruegel Blog.
“55 years after its promulgation, how would you like to change the Italian constitution?” This is the rather difficult question posed to Italians in the online public consultation that closed in early October. Nonetheless, this attempt to improve the discourse between policy-making institutions and their citizens may have represented a distorted reality, skewed toward the most educated. To successfully use emerging technologies to enhance its democracy, Italy must expand the online franchise, by improving broadband access and bringing down service costs for more Italians – a policy promising attractive side-effects for the Italian economy at a time of challenge.
With the online public consultation on the Italian constitution, two democratic innovations were attempted in Italy. First, using a public consultation to collect citizen opinions over a large and challenging topic instead of a more specific one. Second, releasing results from a public consultation in open data form, under the creative common license CC-BY, which authorizes work sharing and remixing. But to be effective, new democratic channels need to be supported by adequate infrastructure and a consistent digital culture. At the current state, this might not be the case with Italy as showed by data.
Similarly to its European partners, Italy’s most active Internet users are young people between the age of 16 and 35, with around 80% of this group accessing online services regularly. In comparison, the same is true for only 50% of those between 44 and 54 years old (Eurostat). If political interest prevails over lack of digital competence, the survey outcomes could be skewed to the older part of the population and vice versa. The first data released by ISTAT (the Italian Institute of Statistics, that has analyzed survey outcomes) show that the percentage of respondents between 38 and 57 accounts alone for over 40% of the total, and it doubled the percentage of respondents between 23 and 37.
Furthermore, as the consultation has been available online only, significant parts of the population may have been put at a disadvantage when wanting to participate, either due to a lack of competence or simply an absence of Internet access. Italy is affected by a big digital divide. In 2012, household access to broadband was 55% (EU 27 70% in 2012), with regional variations across the country of up to 20%.
The number of respondent types could be narrower than hoped. New instruments of democracy may attract a part of the population less intimate with canonical democratic measures (e.g. vote in the election, debate in public forum), but once again data betray expectations. Most of the survey participants had at least high school diploma indeed. But this could be already foreseen looking at Eurostat data. Those latter show significant positive correlations between education level and internet usage. Not only does this technological advantage has potentially favored those with higher education, but the most educated respondents are also overrepresented among those already exercising their civil rights through traditional tools.
Those threats hang on the validity and efficacy of the survey, where only around 0.4% of people with right to vote has participated. Introducing new democratic measures is a first step into a political and economical modernization path. Nonetheless, to face this challenge Italy needs to guarantee equal and homogeneous access to broadband across the territory for all the citizens.
Some policies to this end have already been adopted. The Italian government launched ‘the National Plan for Broadband’ in 2008, aimed at reducing the infrastructure deficit currently excluding 8.5 millions of people from broadband access. The European Digital Agenda stipulates that all Europeans should have access to Internet above 30 Megabyte per second by 2020. In order to respect these objectives, Italy presented ‘the Strategic Project for Ultra Broadband’ at the end of 2012 and the public investment tranche of 900 million euros for the plan, announced last February, aims to create over 5000 new jobs and raise GDP by 1.3 billion euros.
Access does not mean use. Equal broadband access needs to be accompanied by affordable prices. In 2012, Italian citizens paid 25% more than the OECD average for broadband access. The government should work primarily to open the market to more competition, or even to intervene on market failures at the price level.
Source: OECD
Betting on broadband infrastructure is a winning game. Offline, it will significantly increase GDP, the number of jobs and the level of innovation across the country. Online, though the experience from other countries suggests it offers no magic pill, it could improve dialogue with institutions, providing more options for participation, for example also via new e-government tools.
Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School of Management) talked about open consumer-developed innovations revealing that consumers actually innovate a lot to solve their needs as private users and while they are generally willing to let others adopt their innovations for free, they don’t actively invest in knowledge diffusion. As producers of findings, economists have high incentives to diffuse those, but as users of private research methods and data they have low or negative incentives to diffuse to rivals. Lower costs of diffusion, increasing the benefits from diffusion, more collaborative research processes and mandatory sharing are some of the ways to increase economists’ incentives to diffuse research methods and data as they diffuse findings. [
Micah Altman (MIT Libraries, Brookings Institution) stressed that best practices are often not “best” and rarely practiced thus preferred to discuss some probably “not bad” practices including policy practices for the dissemination and citation of data: e.g. that data citations should be treated as first-class objects of publication as well as reproducibility policies where more support should be given to publishing replications and registering studies. He emphasised that policies are often not self-enforcing or self-sustaining and compliance with data availability policies even in some of the best journals is very low. [
Shaida Badiee (Development Data Group, World Bank) shared the experience of setting the World Bank’s data free in 2010 and the exceptional popularity and impact the World Bank’s data has affected. To achieve better access, data is legally open – undiscriminating about the types of uses – given the appropriate user support, available in multiple languages, platforms and devices e.g. with API access, plug-ins for regression software, integration with external applications and mobile phones, etc. She reminded that data is as good as the capacity of the countries which produce it and that working closely with countries to improve their statistical capacities is necessary for the continuous improvement of data. The World Bank works in partnership with the global open data community and provides supports to countries who are willing to launch their own open data initiatives. [
Philip E. Bourne (UCSD) shared some thoughts from the biomedical sciences and indicated that while there are some success stories, many challenges still need to be addressed e.g. the lack of reproducibility and the unsolved problem of sustainability. He highlighted that change is driven by the community and there should be a perception that the community owns this culture including e.g. transparency and shared ownership, a reward system for individuals and teams, strategic policies on open access and data sharing plans, etc. and critically, the notion of “trust” in the data, which is crucial to the open data initiative. Funders and institutions may not initiate change but they would eventually follow suit: the structural biology community created successful data sharing plans before funders. He emphasised that it is all about openness: no restrictions on the usage of the data beyond attribution, running on open source software and transparency about data usage. [
Joshua Gans (University of Toronto) analysed some of the motives for knowledge contribution – e.g. money, award and recognition, ownership and control, intrinsic motivation, etc. – and addressed other issues like the design and technology problems which could be as important as social norms. He talked about designing for contribution and the importance of managing guilt: since there is a concern that data should be accurate and almost perfect, less data is contributed, so a well-designed system should enable the possibility of contributing imperfect pieces (like Wikipedia and open-source in breaking down contributions). This should be ideally combined with an element of usefulness for the contributors – so that they are getting something useful out of it. He called for providing an easy way of sharing without the hassle and all the questions which come from data users since there are “low hanging fruit” datasets that can be shared. [
Gert Wagner (German Institute for Economic Research DIW) spoke in his capacity as a Chairman of the German Data Forum, an organisation which promotes production of data, data re-use and re-analysis of data. He pointed out that there is no culture of data sharing in economics: “no credit is given where credit is due” and incentives should be promoted for sharing economics data. So far just funding organisations can enforce data sharing by data producers, but this only happens at the institutional level. For individual authors there is a little incentive to share data. As ways to change this culture, he suggested that there is a need to educate graduate students and early career professionals. In the German Socio-Economic Panel Study, a panel study of private households in Germany, they have been applying the Schrumpeter’s principle: where producers who innovate must educate the consumers if necessary. Along with the workshops which educate the new users in technical skills, they will be also educated to cite the data and give the credit, where credit is due. [
Daniel Feenberg (National Bureau of Economic Research) gave a brief introduction about NBER, which is a publisher of about a thousand working papers a year, more than a third of which are empirical economics papers of the United States. There is the option to upload data resources in a “data appendix” which are put on the website and available for free. Very few authors, however, take the advantage of being able to publish the data and are also aware that they will get questions if they make their data available. He mentioned that requiring data sharing is only something that employers and funders can mandate and there is a limited role for the publisher. Beside the issues of knowledge sharing design and incentives for individual researchers, there is also the issue of governments sharing data, where confidentiality is a big concern but also where politically motivated unscientific research may inform policy in which case more access and more research is better than less research.
John Rust (Georgetown University) indicated that the incentives for researchers might not be the biggest problem, but there is an inherent conflict between openness and confidentiality and there is a lot of economics research which uses data that cannot be made publicly available. While companies and organisations are often sceptical, risk-averse and not aware of the benefits of sharing their operations data with researchers, they could save money and make profit by research insights e.g. especially in the field of optimising rental and replacement decisions (see e.g. seminal paper by 
Amy Pienta (The Interuniversity Consortium for Political and Social Research – ICPSR) presented some context about the ICPSR – the oldest archive for social science data in the United States, which has been supporting data archiving and dissemination for over 50 years. Among some of the incentives for researchers to share data, she mentioned the funding agencies’ requirements to make data available, scientific openness and stimulating new research. ICPSR has been promoting data citations and getting more journal editors to understand data citations and when archiving data also capturing how data is being used, by what users, institutions, etc. The ICPSR is also currently developing open access data as a new product, where researchers will be allowed to publish their original data, tied with data citation and DOI, data downloads and usage statistics and layered with levels of curation services. 
Mercè Crosas (Institute for Quantitative Social Science, Harvard University) presented the background of the DataVerse network, a free and open-source service and software to publish, share and reference research data, originally open only to social scientists, it now welcomes contributions from all universities and disciplines. It is completely self-curated platform where authors can upload data and additional documentation, adding additional metadata to make the resource more discoverable. It builds on the incentives of data sharing, giving a persistent identifier, generating automatically a data citation (using the format suggested by 
Joan Starr (DataCite, California Digital Library) talked about DataCite – an international organisation set up in 2009 to help researchers find, re-use and cite data. She mentioned some of the most important motivations for researchers to share and cite data e.g. exposure and credit for the work of researchers and curators, scientific transparency and accountability for the authors and data stewards, citation tracking and understanding the impact of one’s work, verification of results and re-use for producing new research (See more at 
Brian Hole (Ubiquity Press) talked about data journal or encouraging data sharing and improving data citations through the publication of data and methodology in data papers. He emphasised that while at the beginning of scientific publications it was enough to share the research findings, today the the data, software and methodology should be shared as well in order to enable replication and validation of the research results. Amongst the benefits of making research data available he mentioned the collective benefits for the research community, the long-term preservation or research outputs, enabling new and more research to be done in a more efficient way, re-use of the data in teaching, ensuring of public trust in science, access to publicly-funded research outputs, opportunities for citizen science, etc. The publication of a data paper where the data is stored in a repository with a DOI and linked with a short data paper which describes the methodology of creating the dataset could be a way to incentivise individual researchers to share their data as it builds up their career record of publications. Additional benefits of having data journals is having a metadata platform where data from different (sub-) disciplines can be collected and mashed up producing new research. 
Michael McDonald (George Mason University) presented some updates on 
