People shop online, book hotels and flights online. This happens because the data needed to complete these tasks are easily accessible and a lot of websites allows users to query the Web to obtain enough information to be confident. This project aims to propose a framework tailored to extend the internet revolution to public administrations. We decided to focus on economical data, balance sheets from the Italian public administrations. Even though the city of Florence can be considered in step with the times, providing a vast amount of open data, the majority of towns is rather lagging. In most of the cases they just publish the balance sheets in a .pdf format, which moreover it is a scan of the printed version,
resulting in a piece of information that is quite useless in our era, where computers can parse, analyze data, given that it is in a machine readable format. This project tries to provide an idea of a framework that could fill a part of the gap. Firstly we propose a protocol, a way to organize the economical information such that different data from different administrations is comparable. Once the data is organized our final output is a web application that provides information at different levels. There will be the possibility to download the raw data set, to look at visualizations and to play around with data. Knowledge spreading can and must be seen as a way of fostering people critical thinking and reasoning. This does not mean that a common citizen with no experience whatsoever can improvise herself a politician or an economics expert. Nevertheless new ideas, inputs can arrive from more people than usual, and a better awareness of what is going on can prevent the affirmation of populist leaders and ideologies.
Principal academic tutors
Alessandro Campi, Politecnico di Milano, Dept. of Electronics and Information
Academic tutors
Tommaso Buganza, Politecnico di Milano, Dept. of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Tania Cerquitelli, Politecnico di Torino – Dept. of Control and Computer Engineering
External institutions
Regione Lombardia
Comune di Torino
External tutors
Enrico Brambilla, Regione Lombardia
Team A members
Matteo Carlo Maria Aletti, Mathematical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano [team controller and project communication coordinator]
Edoardo Giovanni Colombo, Computer Engineering Politecnico di Milano
Piero Franceschini, Industrial Engineering and Management, Politecnico di Torino
Mariangela Rizzo, Mathematical Engineering, Politecnico di Milano
Davide Sanapo, Computer Engineering, Politecnico di Torino