Synaptic Sugar

It has finally been decided that the multi-million Web portal on Italian tourism, italia.it, about which I posted previously ("Brightest Italian ideas"), is going to be closed. Italian Minister Francesco Rutelli stated yesterday that the current government has not spent a dime on the portal and has tried instead to discover where the responsibilities for the incomplete and non-functional work lay. It is still unknown whether the Italian taxpayers will be able to be refunded some money out of the many millions that somebody spent on this horribly developed project; I’m ready to bet the answer is “no”. Another hope is the government will finally answer the many questions that have been asked all these years, about how exactly the money was spent; but once again, the negative answer is almost a certainty.

As promised, here’s the second bright idea. Perhaps it’s of more interest to my Italian readers, but it may serve as a warning to the others. But let me start from the Beginning.

Initially, I wasn’t sure about how to structure this blog and what topics to post about. Then I just decided to let it flow as it came because, after all, that’s one of the points of blogs; by the looks of it, even too many others have chosen the same approach (no need to give out links here, you all know examples). Like so many others, this blog is not affiliated with any company, doesn’t pretend to be a newspaper, doesn’t have any monetary gain from its own existence. It simply makes use of the freedom represented (so far) by the Internet.

Online newspapers are a different matter, and that should be obvious to anyone. Maybe not so obvious to those (clearly smarter than us) people who work hard all day to come up with fair and intelligent laws in Italy. In the middle of August, when everyone else was on vacation, those people came up with a draft for a law that wants the editors of all publications (or “editorial products”) to be registered at a public registry, after paying a suitable tax, so that they could be more efficiently prosecuted in cases of defamation (to sum it all up). It wouldn’t be much different from the way it’s been so far, if not for the fact that the notion of “editorial product” is brilliantly extended to all those “products” that exist as non-profit, and to those edited on the Internet. Personal websites, blogs, et cetera. To have a blog, you’d have to pay registration fees, go through quite a lot of bureaucracy, and be more easily subject to defamation claims that could make you (literally) end up in jail (please note that, even under the previous regulations, non-profit blog authors have in some cases been tried for defamation — publishing on the Internet has hardly ever been a “Wild West” sort of thing like so many are eager to cry out in outrage).

To the rescue come the Undersecretary of State Ricardo Franco Levi (yesterday) who admits the text is different from what was intended but is sure it will be corrected; and the Minister for Communications Paolo Gentiloni (today), who admits the wording was a mistake and comments (ironically, on his own blog) that he “thought the law proposal merely confirmed the previous regulations” and that he “should have personally read the text, word by word” before approving it. Yes, it was a mistake, no, admitting it is not enough (although appreciated), if your job is to vote on laws that have anything (and in this case everything) to do with Communications. Or, in general, if you happen to be in the Council of Ministers (who has approved the proposal as is, allowing it to go next through the Parliament). Average people who have more typical jobs and make big mistakes aren’t always able to make it all better by just admitting the mistake — keep that in mind.

That’s the latest trend: to come up with a faulty, poorly written and deeply nonsensical law that takes into no account the reality of technology and is criticized by many, and justify it with a “Let’s just do it for now; we’ll amend it later on” (remember what happened with the Urbani law not more than a few years ago, which among so many other things tried to force webmasters to send the contents of their websites on a floppy disk to a National Library every time they were updated “to preserve Italian culture” — newsflash: they have Web crawlers and Google nowadays who can serve an equivalent function automatically — witchcraft!). What happens before it’s amended? Let’s not just do it: let’s instead focus on what we’re doing and pass a law that makes sense to start with, and if needs be amend it later.

Now that so many are protesting against this draft (but I wonder, if they hadn’t, how many others would have come to know about it before it fully became a law), I’m sure it will be corrected. If not, this blog will probably have to move elsewhere, and with it who knows how many others. But it’s all to preserve Italian culture and spur innovation, I’m sure.

Italian Council vice president Francesco Rutelli has recently changed his mind about the highly costly governmental project known as italia.it, that’s to say what was intended to be the ultimate Web portal for tourism in Italy, meant to incorporate enormous amounts of touristic information, a centralized reservation system for most Italian hotels and plenty of other resources potentially useful to aspiring tourists both in Italy and abroad. It would sound good, if not for the fact that the portal itself is unusable for most tour operators, shows plenty of error messages and most of it hasn’t even been completed years after its inception (under previous administrations, in Rutelli’s partial defense), which makes it severely undertrafficked and generally unused.What Rutelli seems to now demand is for whoever is behind the project (is there really anyone behind it?) to do something about it, or just shut it down. This is peculiar, because only a few months ago (in March and again in July) he himself pompously promised that the portal would soon finally be completed and have a purpose (see video above), to justify its gargantuan costs. What will really happen to it now is currently unknown; what this portal really is, is a very ambitious idea, maybe too big to be easily put into practice for even the most efficient of governments, and that was probably never meant to actually work. It should never have been born, and shutting it down is the only logical next step.Or it would be, if only the Italian government hadn’t spent 35.9 million Euro of taxpayers’ money (today, around 51,293,920 US dollars — spent how exactly?), out of the 58.1 millions initially accounted for by the previous minister for technological innovation Lucio Stanca (today around 83,013,280 US dollars — good job!). Dozens of millions, for a website that doesn’t work. Add to those figures the 13 millions (18,574,400 US dollars) used to fund a parallel Inter-regional tourism Web portal strongly wanted by the various Italian regional administrations (which were involved in the italia.it portal at the same time) and that was never developed. On top of that, requests for transparency and clarification sent by communities of concerned citizens have consistently been answered with a cheerful “You don’t need to know the details” by the government. So, nice going, for these last eight years or so. Another one of those bright Italian ideas that make one happy to be Italian (but wait, there’s more coming up next).

V-Day will come in two days, and it seems to have grown to be a worldwide event, present in all five continents and in over 180 cities in Italy (where it originated). I already wrote about it ("V-Day") so this time I will only be highlighting Italian comedian Beppe Grillo’s posts where the main world cities holding the event Saturday are listed. There are also two maps on Google that give a good visual impression of how widespread the phenomenon is, both in Italy and the rest of the world. Congratulations, the topic the event revolves around is worth discussing, and hopefully something good will come out of this.

Edited on September 9 at 1:36 PM to add: The following day, V-Day shows to have been a great success worldwide, with over 300,000 signatures gathered in Italy (at least 50,000 were needed) to support the law proposal aimed at cleaning up the parliament. Attacked as demagogic by many politicians and their personal media outlets, the event and the months spent in preparation nevertheless proved that people DO want to take part in the decision-making process, if offered the possibility of deciding on actually meaningful matters rather than ratifying pre-cooked and pre-packaged arrangements.

The Italian Corte dei Conti (the organism that administers justice in matters of state accounting and public administration) has publicly shown appreciation two days ago for the proposal for a popular law brought forward by comedian Beppe Grillo with the support of thousands of readers of his highly popular blog. The request asks that a new law be passed to “clean up the parliament“, focusing around three main points:

1. No citizens previously convicted or awaiting trial may be allowed a seat in parliament (and thus may not use parliamentary immunity to escape judgment and punishment for any crime). There are currently at least 25 parliamentarians in Italy who have been found guilty, up to the last degree of judgment, of crimes such as corruption and abusing their power;
2. Citizens may serve in parliament for no more than two terms, and the rule should be valid retroactively. Many of people currently seating in the Italian parliament have been there for more than twenty years;
3. Candidates to the parliament must be elected directly by the people through explicit direct preference, rather than by political parties. This also discourages internal scheming and exchanges.

In order for the request to be accepted, at least 50,000 authenticated signatures must be gathered, and September 8 has been chosen as the date to gather them in the main Italian squares and known as the V-Day, according to Beppe Grillo “halfway between the D-Day and V for Vendetta” (the V also stands for a curse word in Italian, and was chosen as the official word addressed to the current Italian politicians).

It’s also possible to join the V-Day by signing up on a special page on Beppe Grillo’s blog, and receive organizational material to help spread the word. A law like this has never been seen in Italy, and it is surely the first time that such a large-scale democratic operation achieves such a wide success (at the time of writing, there are more than 90,000 people who signed up to V-Day). It is definitely a law that Italy needs, and that many other countries would certainly benefit from.