I think that we can start. So good morning, everybody. My name is Stefano Marchetti. I am one of the founding partners

of Retartol Technology, a web company based in Ferraro in the north of Italy. In Retartol, among other things, I deal with project management. To summarize the project and this talk, I can say that Reggione Milioramania, a public body from the north of Italy, designed and implemented

a participation ecosystem. In this ecosystem, you participate plus, you participate means I participate, is the Plone-based tool enabling citizen authorities as well as other stakeholders to contribute to the policies of the Reggione Milioramania

by discussing them in virtual town squares, obviously powered by Plone. In this talk, I will discuss a participation and policy. A participation, as Wikipedia says, is the use of information and communication technologies to broaden and deepen political participation

by enabling citizen to connect with one another and with their elected representative. So participation can be seen as a part of e-democracy. And e-democracy means the use of ICT technology by governments in general within any

of the political processes of states, region, and local government. I will also talk about policy. A policy is a plan of coordinated action that can guide decision, implement programs and plans in order to achieve the society's

and country's development objectives. The policy is one of the tools that the institution use to guide the decision making, processes impacting of the big issues. For example, environment, waste, energy, and so on.

A little service note, before we get to the Plone project it is important to illustrate the design or rather co-design phase which in project such as this is a key issue. The project is centered on the theme of participation.

The project itself was carried out in a participatory way. So I will start with the history of this project. The project involves the territory of Emilia-Romagna, an administrative region of northern Italy with about 4, sorry, 4.4 million citizens. Emilia-Romagna is one of the richest,

most developed region in Europe and has the third ITAS GDP capital in Italy. The project was commissioned by regional Emilia-Romagna, a public body whose entire portal and internet infrastructure is based on Plone and has been a member of Plone of Italia initiative

for several years. The regional Emilia-Romagna has been developing a democracy since the 2004. Some of you may not know Italian geography but I think that most of you know something about our beautiful region. Probably you know our Balsami, Weininger,

maybe our Ducati or Valentino Rossi, maybe our Bortadella or Pavarotti or maybe the ham from Parma or probably Ferrari or probably Parmesan. I mean the real one, not the imitation.

So okay, I think it is enough or I will get hungry. So the project general goals included creating a web space to facilitate the participation of citizen, giving visibility and transparency to regional policies,

opening a channel to listen and dialogue with citizen and the last goal is to completing an ecosystem of communication on the participation. The general idea was that the region should make a very bold platform that hosts virtual town squares. The squares are flexible and customized virtual spaces

inserted into a single core and platform that encourages citizen and administrator to bring out a relevant topic, connecting them with the policy under the region jurisdiction. Who are the targets of the project?

Mainly they include the citizen of regional Emilia-Romagna of course, public administration such as the region itself and local authorities from its territory, knowledge operators, for example, university and research center and other, for example, social partners, trade association and so on.

We can say that in this project, the three main actors of the participative processes are the participant, the citizen, the regional policies and finally virtual squares where the discussion take place. We come then to the design phase.

As I mentioned, the design process has been a key aspect of this project. So it was crucial to find a team with the soft skill necessary for such an ambitious project. What we needed was the right mix. The team that's carried out the project at different responsibilities and backgrounds.

First of all, people skilled in project management of democracy and communication project. Then expert in the field of interaction design, user experience analysis and modeling. And technical people including web designer to implement the system in plan. This is our internal team.

The project went through several phases. In particular, analysis to define the objectives of the project, brainstorming to study other similar project, system design from the interface and development point of view.

Implementation of a browsable prototype. The development of the production system, of course. And finally, the launch of the production system. Looking at the times, the project started in December of the last year. And the deadline was July 10 this year. The development was completed

in about eight weeks from May to release. On the vertical axis, you find the kind of activity carried out. In particular, analysis and coordination by the internal team. Considering the difficulties encountered by the region in similar past project,

it was important to choose the pivotal points through participatory planning involving also project users. In particular, as you can see or imagine, displayed on the left, you can see the co-design by the internal team and focus groups

with other people outside our team. The phase of co-design was carried out by the internal team in several phases of the project. As you can see from the initial analysis to the development through design and prototyping of the system.

A key part of the project, which I will explain in a moment and displayed above in the graph, are co-design activities taking place in focus group style meetings with several stakeholders from outside the team. We could have started directly. The team was prepared, strong and numerous enough to proceed, but we choose to take the time,

a lot of time, to listen to people. This typical agile approach, which we use and will continue to use in the future of the project, is therefore an iterative process cycling through the stage of our design, build, and again evaluate.

The first phase of the project was the initial analysis. We had to define our concept. For this reason, at the beginning, the team made an internal activity of pure brainstorming. We had so many open questions. For example, what are the objectives of the project? Who are our users, our stakeholder?

What does the participation mean for our stakeholder? It was an open question. How do we integrate with social networks? Which tool do you have to provide for the platform? We carried out three main meetings, all of them made by the internal team. The first meeting was in January.

We started completely from scratch, trying to remove preconceptions from our minds. And we had many ideas, but we needed to get quickly to a summary. The last meeting was in February. We had more and more ideas, and of course, more and more espresso

to summarize our idea. We have to move on. At the end of this phase, we have come to define three main concepts, five possible formats, and the way of conducting the focus group. In particular, which question to the participant?

We are here. Before getting into debate of co-design with a stakeholder, we tried to understand what other participation projects do. So, in this phase, we analyzed some among the most interesting participation project, both international and Italian. We deemed to observe the different initiatives proposed,

in particular, regarding of Italian regions. We included only site about concrete project of participation and involvement of citizen. In total, we analyzed 60 international project and seven Italian practices, and all of the other 19 Italian regions.

The description of the analyzed project aimed to bring out the tools used, then the service provided, and their target audience. Then we came to the focus group phase, as you can see. As said before, we choose to dedicate time,

a lot of time, to listen to people. Our stakeholder, our citizen. With regard to the method, we shouldn't forget that it's not simple to make co-design and user-centered design within the public sector, because the public sector tends to communicate with the public in a unidirectional way, by providing structured spaces.

For example, fill the form in three copy, at least in Italy. I don't know how it works in Brazil or other country. So, the participation involves dialogue, listening, and openness. This means starting from people of real needs, and then design, build, evaluate iteratively,

to learn where and how to improve. The collaborative design was carried out using qualitative assessment. In particular, the meetings were conducted in a focus group style, bringing together a small group of people who are asked to investigate and develop

a comparison about a specific theme with specific job-related question. This method of group work is based on comparison and on the self-responsibility of the participant. The attention is focused on shared objectives and idea.

The goal is to get the requirement and design idea, this is the real co-design, from the participant. The project should, in fact, meet the needs of different type of users. It was crucial to involve different stakeholders, so we organized four focus groups with a total of 35 people.

The first group was made of communicators, designer, journalist, and expert in digital and classic communication. The second group was held with counselor and municipal leaders. The third meeting was held with citizen, representative of association.

The last meeting involved communication officers of the Reggio Emilia Romagna. The focus groups were held during two months, from February to March. Then, the wish list that emerged from the focus group said, useful credibility of the site are crucial for our project. The site should be hub for policies on complex topics.

Feedback, technical and political, should be provided for any proposal received from outside. Also, traceability and the common proposal is needed. The language should be fresh, easy to understand, customized for individual categories of stakeholder.

And a mix of channels, such as blog, infographics, video interview, and so on, should be provided. Then, a tough issue. After the focus group, before designing the first makeup,

we discussed with the IT department of the Reggio Emilia Romagna, who is responsible for developing and managing software within an organization of over 4,000 people. Our application is a part of a quite regulated technology context, where any new site must comply with the guidelines

that outline the way from many perspective, both communicative and technological. For example, there are guidelines prescribing how to arrange the content, what color you can use, which software model you can use and customize. And in addition, the site of participation

was a part of an installation already containing 25 other sites. I will not hide that one of the most difficult aspects of this project was to handle the right compromise between the IT department's need and the requirement emerging from the internal analysis

and focus group. So we did analysis, benchmarking of other sites,

talk with different stakeholders, talk with ICT. We were ready to build on our work. We were in April. We arrived at the system design stage, non-graphical. Our aim was to create the first prototype very quickly. Please note that this picture is not from Flickr,

but from our whiteboard, so. Best, but take a look. We must design very carefully, and this mean also take into account the context in which a tool is used. It is important, repeat after me.

Don't fall in the trap of seeing the application regardless of its user use context, so be careful. Then we as internal team tried to get to define the main outlines of the prototype without getting into the real layout design. To get this effect, we made the prototype

in the form of a mock-up. In order to have the highest number of user feedbacks, the idea was to get to a partly browsable prototype so that we would be able to test it with the real users but we needed the right tool to help us in our task. Our choices was UX Spin.

Who knows UX Spin? Okay. UX Spin is an online tool to build the UX design. It is not just a way of framing up. In our project, we need to collaborate with teams, client and stakeholder to exchange ideas,

discuss a solution, and study the design from different perspectives. The prototype, as you can see or you can imagine, okay, it is washed, but the prototype that you see, I will not go into detail, shows that the main routes, show the main routes and they light the areas

whose path has not been developed. Test users are invited to explore and read the information contained in the object of the interface, making hypothesis about their function. In this exploration, they are invited to comment on the prototype component.

We were interested in a qualitative feedback and not quantitative feedback. The aim was to inform the design team on any items of interest, limits of the current proposal. With the prototypes, with the type of prototype, comes the name. The name actually was born several years ago

with the old participation platform. The name was a participant, Pew, with mean, I participate. The plus indicates the evolution from the old platform. So we ended up with a navigable prototype. It is time to figure out what the user think.

So we made, we then made user tests. Most tests were done face to face with some stakeholders who participated in the focus group. Our tests were done remotely. In addition, we also used questionnaires to get specific answer on specific aspect

of the prototype. We also prepared a video to explain the prototype to the tester, and in this way, we got a lot of feedback and many comments. 30 users responded, proposing a total of 150 observation. Some comments were just, I like it.

Others were, you did a good job, but would you please fix also this part? This kind of comment were what we needed before starting the real implementation. So to summarize the results from the user testing, we can say that the basic idea of squares

is considered very interesting. So there were no clearly negative judgments against the concept. The platform is clear to most of the participant. Citizen prefer social authentication like Facebook, Twitter, and so on. Participant want to have information also on local event.

Citizen want clear information on policies and participation processes. Participant also give us useful indication for redesign, in particular, on the clarity of labels and description. So we finally arrived to the development phase.

We were in May, and the deadline was approaching very fast. It is time to put everything together, the analysis, the concept, the focus groups, the prototype, the user's feedback, taking into account also the constraint from the IT department.

Here, you can see our first proposal. Okay, it's a joke. The design was not made for flight on fancy, but by coming to terms with the standard of preexisting interaction, such as not having a navigation menu. So our job was very difficult to achieve.

We start to work both on the graphic layout and on the plan stuff. Without going into detail, what you see on the screen, more or less, graphic drafting, the on page, the virtual square, and the policy. For graphics, we needed to involve the whole team

and also the IT in order to come to a quick decision, so we needed another collaborative system capable to give very clear indication to the graphic designers. The tool we choose is Envision. Envision is an high fidelity prototyping and collaboration tool. What you see is one of the proposal of on page.

I don't want to see in detail, but in red you see the various contextual comment on the system. The tool was greatly appreciated by the team. Okay, who are our users?

In the design, we have to take into account the users of the portal. There are anonymous users, obviously, who visit the site, consult the open squares, but they cannot make comment. Authenticated users may participate in the squares, commenting on the content, participating in forums, and in general, they can use the tools of the square.

Editors are users who manage the editorial content, editing content, moderating comments, and so on, on content, forums, and so on. Managers are users who have all the powers of the editors and they can decide who can enter in a square,

who can edit content, set the on page, and change the permission locally in the square. Okay, here we are. You can more or less imagine the overview of the on page

of the system of IP plus, the name of the platform. Looking in more detail at the on page, especially on the top, you can see the element that emerged from the dialogue with users. In particular, the part for subscribing to the system,

the space that summarize the three step to participate, and open squares. In the second part of the on page, there are other squares shown with more space in the top of the screen,

and the integration with social network. In fact, the communicative goal to achieve is to reach different channels where dialogue can be found. From the management point of view, the on page uses heavily ported page, a module used already in the site

of the Reggio de Mille Romagna, and thanks to ported page, you can set in details the various block of the page. This is the detail of the square. It is the space where participation take place on a specific theme. In this example, we see a square

where the problems of geographical areas, such as flooding, water quality, and ecological quality of rivers are discussed. In general, a square shows different information. In particular, duration. That means how long one can discuss on a square.

Who is the target audience of the square? Association, company, citizen, agency, and so on. The policy being discussed by the square. Description of the subject of the square. At least a set of tools we will explain in a moment.

And how would you manage a square? What you see is what the manager has at his disposal. First of all, a square is a folder type. The square contains additional contents, and there's a number of fields.

From the image used for the cover to the closing date of the square, the date beyond which is no longer possible to participate, and so on. In the middle of the square, there is an information dashboard showing, in this case, latest news. The last documents created.

Last discussion from the forum. And in this case, multimedia galleries. Also, the dashboard of the square is made with portal page. When you create a square, a set of predefined, already configured portal are automatically created.

The first line containing the news is made with a collection portal with custom view, and documents and multimedia galleries are made in a similar way. Each square has a number of possible tools, as you can read, and the most suitable ones are activated. Each participant chooses which tool

to use to participate in the process. When you create a square, then spaces for all tools are automatically created, from the log to documents, from the forum to media galleries, and so on. I will not bore you with a description of all the tools.

Some tools are normal folders, so perhaps with a special view, such as document. For other tools, we have identified the best solution, often already partly existing plan. For example, blogs. As you can see or imagine, on this screen, we use collective blog view. For the news, we use standard news with a basic view,

so nothing strange. For the media gallery, we use the retart tool video, our product, with the blown tab nail view. And also, for the other tools, we looked for the best cost benefit ratio. We have seen how to square works,

and now let's take a better look at how the policy was implemented. On a policy, you can open several squares. Each policy has a specific color, which is then inherited by the square inside. This is important from the point of view of communication. A policy has an introduction and shows

the list of all active squares, as you can see. Also, the policy uses ported page for the page layout. Then, one of the key issue for managers and editors of the square is to be reactive and respond quickly, very quickly, to users.

So it is important to be informed about what is happening on the system, real time. For notification, we mainly use the rules of plan, you see on the part of the screen. We use them to inform the editors and manager via email, typically, when something happens in the various areas of the square,

and then when something happens on news, documents, and so on. Some special notification has been developed, in particular, for the first access to each new user, and then a notification for deleted comments. In addition, in order to provide timely update, in this case, to the citizen,

we have also provided the mechanism for their notification. Notification are separate for each square. Participant can set separately, but notification for each type of content. One of the main issues of the project, also clearly emerged from the focus group,

is to give the users an easy subscription mechanism. For this reason, we could base authentication on such a network. How does plan manage authentication? As you probably know, plan uses PaaS to authenticate. PaaS is a pluggable system,

and there are several plugins for authentication with social networks. These products are focused on authentication with a single social network, but IP plus, our platform, requires authentication with different system. There are other excellent system that unify access to social network. For example, generating gauge.

But there is the question of personal data management. The question is, where are personal data stored? The privacy issue is a critical item for the public administration. So our choice was Verus. Do you know Verus as authentication system?

No? Verus became the best choice when there are strict privacy requirement. We are not bound to an external service provider, and we can manage a known authentication system. Verus also is open source. Verus simplifies complex authentication protocols

by providing a simple, consistent API. Verus integrates with most web application, regardless of the language used to write the website. Verus is a product written in pyramid, so it's not a blown up product. Verus can be executed as a service,

or can be inserted in a WSGI stack. It normalize identity information from different provider sources, for example, OpenID, Google, Facebook, and so on. And it is very important,

it speak, support the standard portable contact. Verus is a pluggable system. Each supported OAuth provider is a plugin. It is possible to add the new plugin, including those from custom authentication system.

How does Verus work? As you can see in the first step, website send a post to the OAuth provider URL with an endpoint that user should be redirected back to. When authentication is complete, and includes any additional parameters that the OAuth provider requires.

At the second step, when the OAuth provider finishes the authentication, the user is redirected back to the endpoint specified with the post, which include the user's authentication data. The problem is that there was no pass module

to integrate with Verus. We then made a new module, now released on GitHub. The module obviously requires an active Verus service. The pass module reads the data in the portable contact format and passes them to Plone.

Depending on the provider, Plone user field are populated with more or fewer data. For example, Twitter does not provide the email, Facebook does not provide the photo, and so on. We also changed the behavior of users in Plone. Some data, thanks to Verus, come from social network,

while others are directly available on Plone. Let's come to the result that we obtained. As a development team, we worked hard. It was difficult to meet the many constraint by the ICT department. At the end, we have developed a number of things.

The stuff developed by us is on the left, and on the right, you can see the stuff from PIPE. You can read them later, also I share, so. In a little more than two months, this summer, we have start on IP Plus, four squares,

belonging to four different policy. IP Plus itself had its own square, since the beginning, to collect feedback from users. There were around 250 registered users, and considering the period of summer vacation, it seemed a good start point.

One of the reward of the IP Plus is that he won, agreed, prestigious national award in the special section dedicated to open data and participation. IP Plus overcame other 15 national projects, three of which are from Reggio de Milomani.

The lesson we learned, it is important to involve stakeholder right from the start of the design process, to quickly collect their constructive criticism and warnings about existing constraints, technical, editorial,

organizational, and so on. Don't be afraid to find out that citizen look to public organization in a different way from people inside the organization. And it is important to highlight positive feedback from people, and the other lesson is that plan really rocks, so.

For the next step, the approach that we used and that we will continue to use is an iterative process so that the phases of design and build evaluated are repeated. So now we are evaluating the outcomes and user feedback

in order to improve our system. Now we are restarting the cycle of design and build. In particular, we will give more attention to the use of IP Plus with mobile devices. In other words, we will take the system to the places where face-to-face meeting and physical participation happen.

Oh, okay. This is another story, but okay. Any questions?

So you used a lot of open source plugins, but is the whole site and the Squares concept open source so another government could install it and use it? The idea is that to reuse and share the solution

to other local government. Also because our region start to collaborate with the Ploungov Initiative. So the idea is to make a package distribution, special build out to put all the stuff together

and share with other public bodies. Other questions? Okay, thank you.