OpenCoesione: Transparency and civic monitoring on Cohesion Policy

OpenCoesioneTransparency and civic monitoring on Cohesion Policy

Simona De LucaEvaluation Unit – Department of Development and Economic Cohesion (DPS), Italy

Evaluation Network Meeting Brussels, 22-23 November 2012

Open Data on public funds

Availability of Open Data (machine-readable) on projects funded by public resources helps in:

• fostering transparency in the use of funds

• improving decision making and policy design

• encouraging the creation of new tools and services for citizens

• increasing involvement of stakeholders in ensuring efficient and effective use of funds

Is Europe ready?

farmsubsidy.org

Recovery.gov

eufunds.ftdata.co.ukInforegioNewsroom23 October 2012

Countries with interactive portalson StructuralFunds projects: DK, F, H, NL, PL, IT

http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/projects/

map/index_en.cfm

Eu rules on transparency & Open Data

2007-2013, Art. 7 Reg 1828/2006 – Three mandatory fields for onlinepublication: name of the project, name of the beneficiary, total value of theproject Hundreds of Managing Authorities are free to decide how muchinformation is to be published and the format of the downloadable datasets

European Transparency Initiative (2008) – Suggestion of some usefuldetails to be published: public payments to beneficiaries at the end of theproject, final year of payment, date of last update

2014-2020, Art. 105 General Regulation Proposal - Machine-readableFormat (CSV, XML), National Centralized System, User Licence, mandatoryfields for online publication (headings & name of the projects to be provided inat least one other official EU language):- name of the project, name of the beneficiary, total value of the project (as in

2007-2013)- summary of the project, start date, end date, EU eligible expenditure,

postcode of the location of the project, country, category of intervention ofthe project, date of last update (newly introduced).

OpenCoesionepublished in Italy in July, 2012

2011 2012

Machine-readable format ?

The transparency on the beneficiaries of Structural Funds in Europe and ItalyL. Reggi, Materiali UVAL, Issue 27, 2012

What’s in OpenCoesione?

Information about projects undertaken for implementing regional policies:

• description• funding (amount and sources)• locations• thematic areas• public/private subjects involved• deployment timing

Highlights of data provided

Access to web portal since launch (July 17th) to October 31st :

64,000 visits, 50,000 unique visitors, 3+ minutes average time on the site, 8% from outside Italy

What’s NOW in OpenCoesione?

ALLprojectsfinanced by cohesionpolicy

monitoring date: 30.6.2012

EU structural funds + domestic resources for regional policy

549,705# of projects

52.4billion Euros - Financing

16.9billion Euros - Payments

Surfing OpenCoesione (LIVE DEMO)

Total projects and funds by overall cohesion policy or within user’s queries

Interactive graphs for immediate distribution of investments and number of projects by topic, location area, typology of intervention

Easy overview of distribution of investmentsby topic and typology of intervention

Direct search of public authorities in chargefor programming and other subjectsinvolved in the deployment of projects

Direct access to locationsthrough interactive mapsand search to discover the number of projectsundertaken, the amount of overall investments in the place and the list of projects

Top projects listing in home page

Projects at a glanceDetails included in a single page (available only in Italian)

Civic monitoringCitizens and organizations get involved

Uploading user-generated contents

From navigation to raw dataMore information for specifically skilled users

Monitoring Data are updated every 2 months by Managing Authorities and are made available in OpenCoesione approximately 3 months after the reference date

User license Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike (CC BY-SA)

Improving the quality of information available to national community

when making decisions

Promoting citizens’ voice and getting civic partners involved

in the decision making process

Expected result & impactBetter monitoring towards better spending & better evaluations

Better spending: efficient and effective usage of resources and destination of funds consistent with people’s needs

Better evaluations: broad range of analyses and evaluations based on

public data on projects

Thank you for your attention

www.opencoesione.gov.it

opencoesione@dps.gov.it