The Italian project e21
Fiorella De Cindio1, Fabrizio Ruggeri2 and Mario Sartori3

 1 Dipartimento di Informatica e Comunicazione
Universita' di Milano
Via Comelico 39/41 – 20135 Milano (Italy)
E-mail: fiorella.decindio@unimi.it

2 Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche
Istituto di Matematica Applicata e Tecnologie Informatiche
Via Bassini 15 – 20133 Milano (Italy)
E-mail:fabrizio@mi.imati.cnr.it
Tel. +39 0223699532 fax +39 0223699538

3 Pafin 91 
Via G. d’Arezzo, 4 - 20145 Milano (Italy)
E-mail: m.sartori@progesam.it
Abstract 

 In the context of a “Call for selecting projects to promote digital citizenship (e-democracy)” issued in 2003 by the Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technology, 10 municipalities in the Lombardia region (the one with Milano as its capital), some of them with previous experience in managing a community network, have presented a project (called e21) for empowering, through a suite of ICT-based applications, the participation methodology consolidated for carrying on local Agenda 21 projects. All the ten Municipalities have signed the Aalborg chart and are committed in involving citizens in sustainable development projects and activities. Several of them already started to undertake the typical local Agenda 21 process, consisting of (in short):

-drawing the state of the territory;
-identifying the most critical situations (such as traffic or pollution caused by a specific production);
-envisaging sustainable solutions to these critical situations; 
-choosing which ones of the envisaged projects can be implemented (evaluating priorities and available resources);
-implementing the selected projects, monitoring the implementation and the results.

All these steps are carried on in a participatory way, involving the local community (citizens, individually and/or through their associations; schools; the local economy representatives). However, until now, the use of ICT has been marginal (a web site with some FAQ, some documents and a public forum), and people participation, usually high at the beginning, often tends to decrease basically because of problems such as the lack of time (“there is no hour in the day convenient for everybody for meeting”) that a careful use of the ICT could mitigate. 

In the project we will study the use of a variety of e-democracy and e-participation tools in (local) governance. Which technologies are useful in which phases of local governance, and under which conditions? These conditions are related to the process of policy formulation and decision making, but also to the more general organizational possibilities and constrains with respect to ICT use: knowledge, skills, and the exiting local ICT infrastructure.
In the project, we will apply a set of e-democracy and e-participation tools in real life policy formulating and decision making processes for local sustainable development, known as local Agenda 21. These tools are designed to increase “civic intelligence”: the possibilities of participation by the all relevant local actors (citizens, NGO's, companies, and government), and the possibilities to share, increase and exploit local knowledge resources. 
Besides the ten Municipalities, the project e21 involves civic networks, research institutes and universities, private companies from the Lombardia region. 
In this framework, some partners (e.g. the Department of Informatics and Communication of the University of Milano and the Milano Civic Network (RCM)) will be engaged in designing and developing an online environment for supporting the Agenda 21 projects running in the ten Municipalities, by supporting offline participation with online facilities, namely a free dialog area enriched with tools for finalizing discussions to a shared decision and to weight opinions emerging from the online discussions. The same partners, in cooperation with CNR IMATI (the Italian node of the European Science Foundation project TED (Towards Electronic Democracy)), will try to complement existing ICT procedures for managing online discussions (e.g. e-Liberate by Schuler, 2005) with e-negotiation procedures developed within the TED project, mostly by the Spanish group at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos. 

In the talk, the goals of the project, to be launched in summer 2005, will be illustrated, stressing the contributions arising from the TED project.