This is the presentation I had last week at the Italian Statistical Society Meeting. I talked about how it’s possible to use structured statistical datasets using Json-Stat!

A questo link potete trovare il video integrale del Webinar organizzato da Formez sulle esperienze legate agli Open Data nella Pubblica Amminbistrazione Centrale

http://formez.adobeconnect.com/p5tj0nqlqty/

Qui di seguito le slides che ho utilizzato per raccontare l’esperienza Istat

Here the presentation  I had last 12th March at OECD, Paris

Press Release

How can they be used and what we can do with Open Data? Probably no one better than, citizens, independent software developers, professionals, businesses and all data consumers can answer this question. And it ‘s because of this consideration that AppsForItaly, the Italian Open Data Competition was launched.

Remember that Open Data is (generally ) data produced and published on the Web by the Public Sector and where  reuse is allowed. To get an idea about Open Data in Italy, you can start from dati.gov.it, the national catalog of Open Data. It was launched a few months ago and it is now consolidating to become the ‘”entry point” of public data in Italy. Catalogs are also active as a regional portals. You can visit for instance dati.piemonte.it (the first public data portal in Italy) or dati.emilia-romagna.it. Statistics Open Data are released (in English, of course!) by the Italian Institute of Statistics on dati.istat.it, www.istat.it, demo.istat.it and other thematic web sites.

The aim of AppsForItaly is encouraging citizens to design Web applications, mobile apps, to create visualizations and infographics and  to design databases. Obviously not all people are specialists and therefore don’t have the necessary skills to do that. This is the reason why the competition also  includes the category “Ideas and Projects” where everyone who has a good idea or a project about how to use data can apply.

Is it worth it? You have to remember there  is € 30,000 in prizes provided by the Italian Ministry for Public Administration and Innovation, and  € 10,000 as well as prizes in technology and services  provided by official sponsors. And don’t forget that all proposals will be presented to companies,  communities, the market and  Public Administrations.

To do this, there is still three month’s time. The deadline for submitting proposals is in fact scheduled for Apr. 30th 2012.

All proposals received will be evaluated by a committee  while the event / award ceremony will take place during the first week of March. Stay tuned for all further updates!

The videoclip “Statistically Honky Tonk” won the highly sought-after ‘Most Entertaining Spaghetti Western’ Award in the “Promoting the Practice and Profession of Statistics” video competition run by The Public Awareness Group of the American Statistical Association (ASA).

Here the certificate

and here the video. Enjoy!

Thanks guys! I’m honored!!

Last saturday I talked about AppsForItaly at an interesting event in Bari, Apulia.
BeMyApp is in fact an interesting competition specific for Mobile Apps developement (Android or iOs) with a great and innovative format:
Bring your best idea for an App, then create you own Team to develop it. You have only 48 hours to develop and to release the app in a “highly interactive environment”.

This format was born in S. Francisco, California and went to London, Paris, Berlin before reaching Bari for the first italian edition.   If something is changing in our Country is also thanks to Nicholas Caporusso and his staff.

Ok, Guys! The speech is in Italian!

Open Knowledge Foundation published a blog post I wrote last week  having the title “Open Data, Italy has awoken”. The same post was published also on Government in The Lab, the online magazine for Government and Politics around the World. Thank you guys!