Aaron Ciaghi

VLPM: A Tool to Support BPR in Public Administration

Representing a law defining some procedures by means of workflow diagrams has various advantages: it facilitates the understanding of the actual meaning of its text, it helps to build a shared vision between law-makers and officers of the Public Administration, and it provides an easier way to analyze and make Public Administration procedures more efficient.To keep the model understandable and maintainable, however, the need soon arises to keep traceability between the workflow diagrams and the laws from which the workflows are derived. Moreover - since the public administration processes are defined and regulated by laws - when the workflows are the target of a re-engineering activity, such traceability information becomes essential to identify what laws need to be changed to implement the new procedures.This paper presents VLPM (Visual Law Process Modeler). It is a tool that addresses some of the issues mentioned above and that we have used to model the laws regulating the introduction of an electronic election in Friuli Venezia Giulia, one of the Autonomous Regions of Italy.VLPM is built on top of the UML Visual Paradigm tool and it is freely available (http://ed.fbk.eu/vlpm).

Crowdsourcing ICTD Best Practices

A large number of projects in ICT for development include software development to a certain degree. A review of the literature highlights how most of these projects ultimately fail to be sustainable. In this paper, we expose our views on the need for a more structured approach to software development in ICTD and we present our plan to collect best practices from software project managers through a crowdsourcing web portal. This will provide input to a broader study that aims at adapting existing software development processes to the ICTD context.

Improving Public Administrations via Law Modeling and BPR

Semantic Web technologies can be used to produce conceptual representations of legal documents and to perform reasoning on the information that they contain. At the same time, Business Process Re-engineering is being applied more frequently to optimize the procedures of Public Administrations. While the existing literature on tools and methodologies to analyze, model and manipulate legal documents is extensive, there is a lack of a comprehensive tool that allows for a complete analysis of laws in all their aspect. In this paper we propose the design of a modeling framework to support the law-making process, facilitating the participation of people without a jurisprudence background to the editing of regulations.

Social Accountability for Mozambique: An Experience Report from the Moamba District

Empowering citizens in making Governments more accountable and transparent in the services they provide has gained more attention in the last few years both in the developing and in the developed world. At the basis of any such exercise, information and data collection activities play an important role. In this paper we report on a pilot we conducted in collaboration with the Ministry of Education of Mozambique, the World Bank and the Maputo Living Lab to collect data about various procurement indicators of primary schools in the Moamba district of Mozambique. For this purpose we developed a data collection platform and a mobile application to conduct field work.

Hacking for Southern Africa: Collaborative development of hyperlocal services for marginalised communities

This paper describes a collaborative experience in the initial development of hyperlocal services for marginalised communities in Southern Africa. Problems specific to urban, peri-urban and rural contexts were identified in collaboration with local community members and NGOs in South Africa and Angola. Selected topics were presented to a group of volunteer developers for initial proof-of-concept application development at an event hosted in Italy. The volunteers produced 6 prototype applications that were demonstrated at the end of the event to a panel of experts and members of one of the interested rural communities.

Beyond food sharing: Supporting food waste reduction with ICTs

Guaranteeing food security is key in improving the quality of life of citizens at all levels of society. The recent economic crisis has increased the number of people living in conditions of food poverty, especially in developed regions. Consequently, the reduction of food waste has become an international trending topic. Despite a growing awareness of the importance of reducing waste and managing food surplus, the role of ICTs in this domain is still unclear and rarely documented. In this paper, we describe our almost 5-year experience in developing and experimenting ICT tools to recover food surplus at different stages of the supply chain and we outline the way forward for an integrated set of ICT tools to reduce waste from producers to households.

SAMo: experimenting a social accountability web platform

The need for transparency and quality control of public services is crucial for a sustainable development of underserved communities. Information and data collection play a significant role in the efforts that NGOs, governments and international institutions are carrying out in this direction. In this paper we describe a platform to conduct assessment campaigns of the quality of public services and its experimentation in the rural district of Moamba, Mozambique.