“Linea Amica” – the integrated contact center of Italian public administration – is opening up and crowdsourcing a set of data underlying its information services to local communities. Everyone can adopt a record of the dataset and help the government solve major data quality issues.
An interesting initiative, with an unusual marketing approach, was launched last week by FormezPA, an agency of the Italian Government: Linea Amica – the official integrated contact center of Italian Public Administration – is giving the data up for adoption. This is the message displayed on the webpages of RubricaPA, a specific service that allows users to find and locate a public agency by searching among thousands of national, regional and local authorities. The service is now letting the users modify the underlying data by submitting more accurate or updated information on an agency location, telephone number or certified email.
The process is simple. You modify of a set of data through a form, then your suggestion is evaluated by the staff, and, if accepted… you have now adopted that specific data. This means that the staff at the ministry considers yourself somehow responsible of that data and its change over time. Something that may (or may not) create a sort of a personal bond with the data itself. Or even an act of love, quoting from Alberto Cottica’s definition of social network.
RubricaPA started to publish open data on public agencies addresses, fiscal codes and certified emails in October 2010 under the Italian Open Data License v1.0 (which is built on Open Data Commons and Creative Commons BY-SA), a step forward of national government towards open data. But the dataset, created through a matching of data from different sources (official statistics, central registers, old similar projects), is flawed by data quality issues and missing values. Some information is outdated or inaccurate, sometimes conflicting. That is why a little help from the crowd may become crucial. In fact, this is the first time that a central and official service sponsored by the Ministry of Public Administration resorts to crowdsourcing techniques to face major data quality issues.
The question is: who should be interested in helping “Linea Amica” improve its information services? The promoters hope to actively involve local public servants and citizens who care about their local community and want a major state-wide service such as Linea Amica help line to use the correct information. “This is my data, I should care”.
We will see if this kind of love is enough to get the right level of participation.