It has been a celebration day!
On the 1st of March, in the lecture hall of our University, in Messina, we presented Libellula (that stands for Dragonflies). It’s the official starting day for the project we have been working on for the last two years: a laboratory for civic monitoring of local public spending as the first step of a set of reforms to “open the government”.
The University Lecture Hall on the 1st of March
The event was quite a big one (and maybe it lasted a bit too long. Takeaway for next time: no more than two hours!). 200 citizens (among them journalists, students, professionals and business), 10 local and national CSOs, three Sicilian public administrations shared experiences and feedback about transparency and accountability practices. Transparency International Italia, ActionAid Italia, Amapola and Ondata shared with the participants stories about their civic monitoring activities in Sardinia, Calabria and Sicily. High representatives from the University of Messina, the Municipality of Palermo and the Sicilian Region stated their “openness” towards citizens’ collaboration in monitoring and designing public spending and officially committed with us, the participants and the Italian Ministry for Public Administration, represented at out meeting by the responsible for the Nation OpenGov Plan, to implement transparency and anticorruption tools.
From left to right, representatives of civic monitoring projects: Paola Liliana Buttiglione (ActionAid Italia), Paola Dottor (Transparency International Italia), Giuseppe D’Avella (Parliament Watch Italia), Cinzia Roma (A Scuola di Open Coesione), Valeria Ferraris (Amapola)
Our civic monitoring coalition, from Milan to Catania!
For our part, we presented Libellula as the space where to rebuild an alliance between the local government and citizens in Messina. In our city this alliance, made of trust and accountability, at the base of every true democratic context, has been broken and never recovered since many years. And it has been broken because politicians betrayed citizens' trust, of course, but also because civil society didn’t react enough. Civil society missed methodology and sustainability. So, Libellula is not only a laboratory for civic monitoring of local public spending but also a format to build and sustain local civic ecosystem. On the 1st of March we presented the sustainability model of the lab and the civic monitoring methodologies that are being implemented.
WeBudget represents a relevant part of this strategy, specifically allowing storytelling about civic monitoring actions in the city. The app, in fact, allows to relate stories to budget data. Libellula will stimulate stories to emerge, will help to link stories with the local budget data and to advocate for more transparent, better public spending. Libellula therefore mix civic control with narration and vision. In the Lab there will be a match between CSOs and activist’s causes and scholars and high qualified pro-bono professionals contributions. Groups of participant will collaborate to build stories of general interests that will be shared with the rest of the community both online and in the plenary sessions of the lab. Those stories, in our view, have to form the bases to formulate, further on, concrete scenarios of urban development on specific issues.
Francesco Saija, president of Parliament Watch Italia, presents Libellula. WeBudget is a relevant part of the civic monitoring strategy of the Lab.
Libellula is funded, at the moment, till June 2021. We are trying to ensure long term sustainability to show that in Messina, as well as in many other dysfunctional local contexts, unable to effectively spend resources, what is needed is a strong local civil society advocating for a real transition to a “open government ecosystem”.
This is what Libellula aims to be.