The eyes of all the italian citizens are on the EU Recovery Plan (PNRR), the 200 billion strategy that aims to transform the Country: an unrepeatable opportunity to make a significant step in the direction of innovation, ecological transition and social inclusion.
The project will foster participation and inclusiveness in this strategy: info.nodes will engage local communities to monitor the PNRR implementation at hyperlocal level, with the help of the platform AppaltiPOP provided by Ondata.

ITALY

POP CULTURE team wants to stimulate improvements in the impact that civil society, local communities and journalists in particular, can have during this exceptional stage in the history of the Country.
Italian institutions and public administrations lack transparency and integrity, and for this reason the role of civil society in the next years is crucial.
POP CULTURE will allow citizens to measure and monitor the impact of the Recovery Plan in their region and towns and to find answers to questions like: “What are the public institutions doing to help recover my place? What are the outputs of public investments? How can I follow the implementation process and measure its effectiveness?” POP CULTURE projects will offer solutions, methodologies and help for finding these answers.

POP CULTURE has 3 main targets:
local communities and organisations;
activists;
journalists.

The partners can count on important networks already existing as the campaign #datiBeneComune (https://www.datibenecomune.it/), led by the project partner onData: the campaign asks the Italian Government to open up data of Covid Response, as it aims at enlarging the spectrum of data to be opened and to public institutions to push towards more transparent and participatory behaviors. 50.000 Citizens and 200 organizations that signed the campaign are our first audience.

info.nodes is one of the leading organisations of the Italian Forum of OGP, the multi-stakeholder initiative that gathers many civil society organisations in the fields of public integrity, participation and transparency.

Activity 1: Community engagement” has two main goals: Capacity building and Networking.

1.1 To organise 3 workshops dedicated to journalists (investigative journalists and data journalists in particular) in the framework of festivals or other public events focused on the media sector.

1.2 To promote Appalti POP during public events dedicated to civil society and activism.
Appalti POP will be presented with specific workshops to the organisations of OGP and 3 laboratories in southern regions.

1.3 To award the best civic monitoring projects by 3 local communities and 2 young journalists who participated in the capacity building workshops (see 1.1 and 1.2).

1.4 To establish new informal networks of journalists and activists, through the creation of a virtual space for sharing information, data, know-how, and opportunities of collaborations.

Activity 2 “AppaltiPOP improvements” aims at empowering and facilitating local communities, activists and journalists.

2.1 To improve the dataset of AppaltiPOP, transforming in Open Contracting Data Standards and channelling into the platform the data related to Recovery Plan public procurements .

2.2 To improve the user experience of AppaltiPOP, implementing a more user-friendly approach. The partners will organise a Focus Group with activists and journalists.

Thanks to the POP CULTURE project Italian CSOs, especially local communities and journalists, will have the know-how and a tool for monitoring the public procurements of the Recovery Plan.

POP CULTURE will create the conditions for enanching collaborations between local communities, activists and journalists with the specific objective to empower these collaborations at hyperlocal level.

The project will foster a collaboration process between activists and journalists, improving their dialogue and multiplying their impact.

The broader impact will be the protection of the 200 billion that the Italian Government will spend in the next 5 years from bribers, criminals and organised crime organisations.

POP CULTURE will provide the means and the space to civil society for being actively engaged in the prevention of corruption and misuse of public resources.
Local communities and organisations will be asked to play an active role in shaping the future of the Country, after a long period of “political irrelevance” because of the restrictions (also reflected in the participatory activities) due to the pandemic crisis.The local factor of civic monitoring will be powerful because citizens and CSOs will work on monitoring funds strictly of their interest since investments are localized on their living places.

POP CULTURE will enable all the actors of the Italian civil society to increase their capacity in being relevant in the public debate, providing data and knowledge.

The core project team is composed by:

Davide Del Monte, former ED of Transparency International Italia until december 2020, founder and actual President of info.nodes;

Andrea Borruso, President of onData, the most important organization focused on the promotion of open data culture in Italy.

Andrea Nelson Mauro, Project Manager of onData and coordinator of the development of AppaltiPOP.

Vincenzo Patruno, member of the Board of onData, developer of AppaltiPOP.

Laura Carrer, member of info.nodes, activist and journalist, expert of access to information and transparency.

All the members of the team have a long track record of activities in the field of civic engagement and advocacy in the public interest and they participate to many of the most important civic platform a

Local Events: 6000 euro
(3 Festivals + 1 in Sicily, 1 in Puglia, 1 in Campania)

AppaltiPOP development / improvement: 4250 euro
(Focus Groups for the development of new UI; transformation of data in OCDS; automated channelling of data in the platform)

POP CULTURE Awards: 3750 euro
(3 awards for local communities + 2 awards for young journalists, per 750 euro each)

info.nodes staff: 14000 euro

onData staff: 7000 euro

We would like to receive advices on how to wide the audience of our engagement activities (innovatives comms and narratives); comments and feedback about other tools and idea for empowering communities in monitoring public procurements and public spending.