Andrea Mattioli

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).

Assessing procedural risks and threats in e-voting: challenges and an approach

Performing a good security analysis on the design of a system is an essential step in order to guarantee a reasonable level of protection. However, different attacks and threats may be carried out depending on the operational environment in which the system is used, i.e. the procedures that define how to operate the systems. We are interested in reasoning about the security of e-Voting procedures, namely on the risks and attacks that can be carried out during an election. Our focus is more on people and organizations than on systems and technologies. In this paper we describe some ongoing work that we are carrying out within the ProVotE project (a project sponsored by the Autonomous Province of Trento to switch to e-Voting for local elections) to analyze and (possibly) improve procedural security of electronic elections. To do so, we are providing models of the Italian electoral laws using the UML and we are developing a custom methodology for analyzing threats from the models. Our reasoning approach is based on asset mobility, asset values and existence of multiple instances.

Evaluating procedural alternatives: a case study in e-voting

This paper describes part of the work within the ProVotE project, whose goal is the introduction of e-voting systems for local elections. The approach is aimed at providing both precise models of the electoral processes and mechanisms for documenting and reasoning on the possible alternative implementations of the procedures. It is based on defining an alternating sequence of models, written using UML and Tropos. The UML is used to represent electoral processes (both existing and future), while Tropos provides a mean to reason and document the decisions taken about how to change the existing procedures to support an electronic election.

ICT for Good: Opportunities, Challenges and the Way Forward

ICT seems well understood as a tool and an infrastructure for delivering information and services for the society and for allowing communications through interactions among the service users —mostly, the digital society. Using ICT for ensuring better life requires far more than good infrastructure, ICT know-how and the various techniques and tools in place. If ICT has to address the real problems of the society, it should be at a rescue being environment-friendly, with real and tangible impact, sustainable, seamless, down to the grass-roots and above all with reproducible experiences. In this paper, we introduce a different perspective of looking into and using ICT, which we call ICT for Good (ICT4G). It is about using ICT for addressing problems of societies with low ICT penetration and changing a society’s life for the better. More specifically, based on our observation of current promises ICT gives to society, we discuss ICT4G’s distinguishing aspects, opportunities it offers, challenges it imposes along with preliminary roadmap for its realization. A high-level correlation of what we pointed out with a relevant case study (i.e., the eGIF4M1) is presented.

Managing Requirements for E-Voting Systems: Issues and Approaches

This paper discusses our approach and experiences on structuring and maintaining requirements for an e-voting system we have built and deployed for elections. Issues related to integrating laws and recommendation for e-voting systems, managing different elections and configurations, supporting a spiral development, yielded problems and approaches to help maintain integrity of requirements and a coherent view of the system. Moreover, the relationship between requirements and system architecture is based on finite state machines, that bridge the gap between the laws and the actual behavior of the machine.