An Innovative, Open, Interoperable Citizen Engagement Cloud Platform for Smart Government and Users' Interaction

This paper introduces an open, interoperable and cloud computing-based citizen engagement platform for the management of administrative processes of public administrations, which also increases the engagement of citizens. The citizen engagement platform is the outcome of a threeyear Italian national project called PRISMA (Interoperable cloud platforms for smart-government, http://www.ponsmartcities-prisma.it/). The aim of the project is to constitute a new model of digital ecosystem that can support and enable new methods of interaction among public administrations, citizens, companies and other stakeholders surrounding cities. The platform has been defined by the media as an Italian “cloud” that allows public administrations to (i) acquire and enable any kind of application or service; (ii) enable access to open services; and (iii) enable access to a vast knowledge base represented as linked open data to be reused by a stakeholders community with the aim of developing new applications (“Cloud Apps”) tailored to the specific needs of citizens. The platform has been used by Catania and Syracuse municipalities, two of the main cities of the Southern Italy, located in the Sicilian region. The fully adoption of the platform is rapidly spreading around the whole region (local developers have already used available APIs to create further services for citizens and administrations) to such an extent that other provinces of Sicily and Italy in general expressed their interest for its usage. The platform is available online and, as mentioned above, is open source and provides APIs for full exploitation.