OpenCoesione Transparency and civic monitoring on Cohesion Policy Simona De Luca Evaluation Unit – Department of Development and Economic Cohesion (DPS), Italy Evaluation Network Meeting Brussels, 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.uk Inforegio Newsroom 23 October 2012 Countries with interactive portals on Structural Funds projects: DK, F, H, NL, PL, IT ional_policy/projects/ map/index_en.cfm

Eu rules on transparency & Open Data , Art. 7 Reg 1828/2006 – Three mandatory fields for online publication: name of the project, name of the beneficiary, total value of the project  Hundreds of Managing Authorities are free to decide how much information is to be published and the format of the downloadable datasets European Transparency Initiative (2008) – Suggestion of some useful details to be published: public payments to beneficiaries at the end of the project, final year of payment, date of last update , Art. 105 General Regulation Proposal - Machine-readable Format (CSV, XML), National Centralized System, User Licence, mandatory fields for online publication (headings & name of the projects to be provided in at least one other official EU language): -name of the project, name of the beneficiary, total value of the project (as in ) -summary of the project, start date, end date, EU eligible expenditure, postcode of the location of the project, country, category of intervention of the project, date of last update (newly introduced).

OpenCoesione published in Italy in July, Machine-readable format ? The transparency on the beneficiaries of Structural Funds in Europe and Italy L. 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 17 th ) to October 31 st : 64,000 visits, 50,000 unique visitors, 3+ minutes average time on the site, 8% from outside Italy

What’s NOW in OpenCoesione? ALL projects financed by cohesion policy monitoring date: EU structural funds + domestic resources for regional policy 549,705 # of projects 52.4 billion Euros - Financing 16.9 billion 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 investments by topic and typology of intervention Direct search of public authorities in charge for programming and other subjects involved in the deployment of projects Direct access to locations through interactive maps and search to discover the number of projects undertaken, the amount of overall investments in the place and the list of projects Top projects listing in home page

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

Civic monitoring Citizens and organizations get involved Uploading user- generated contents

From navigation to raw data More 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 & impact Better 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

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