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on the role of PAs: the administration’s role is to make existing data available and open. “If the private sector is active, businesses will develop and provide more advanced services than the PA would be able to provide”. “In cases where the private sector is less active, PAs should define policies to foster these developments”. In addition, administration should also ensure that there is a local strategy in place, one which is integrated and cross-cutting; with regard to technologies: developing partnership in projects with technologically advanced partners that can provide insight into the latest technology and future trends, can help to avoid mistakes and overcome technology obsolescence-related risks. It may be helpful to always consider and evaluate the adoption of open source solutions at the outset of a project. According to ECITIZEN, visualisation tools (dataviz) can be relevant for some services.
c. Policy development and regeneration Project influence on other local / regional projects. The result of INTERREG IVC projects is positive in terms of influence on other local / regional projects. Different levels of influence can be observed through the following typology: -
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(i) awareness raising, exchange and dissemination of good practice, ideas, and case studies. This is the case of OSEPA on the technical, financial, and legal aspects of FOSS adoption. OSEPA set up conferences, workshops, and study & site visits ensure effectivity thanks to a well-organised dissemination process. DANTE developed the same process and conducted tests of the policy and technical requirements in a rural and mountain territory; (ii) the creation of new projects by transferring ideas or best practices. This was the case for eCREATE; (iii) influence on the local digital agenda. DANTE partners explain that ‘through the pilot, DANTE promoted the benefits in the adoption of ICT tools tailored to the tourism sector in remote areas, thus encouraging the adoption of a dedicated digital agenda to speed up growth and create the conditions for making tourism more attractive in remote areas’. This was also the case for eCREATE, which influenced regional and local IT strategies and for E-CITIZEN through joint events which facilitated the dissemination of results to other local and regional projects in Finland (i.e Open Tampere or the Smart City); (iv) the most tangible influence which shows the success of a project, is the emergence of ‘structuring projects’ that are major projects contributing to structure and organise the territory. In this way, DANTE and I-SPEED were successes. The Net Sentiment good practice of CSI-Piemonte, originally developed to ‘listen’ to tourists needs and feedback was also re-used in the Torino Smart City campaign, to collect information and feedback from citizens on smart city issues such as transport, energy, mobility etc. An indirect consequence of the I-SPEED project has been the development of free Wi-Fi in Italy.
Impact of the project. Four major impacts were identified: One is a contribution to a better integration and use of IT in local public bodies and their practices (E-CREATE, E-CITIZEN); Another is the adjustment of local and regional strategies as well as funding schemes to better suit the needs of regional stakeholders (E-CREATE) and the creation of new digital agendas as was the case in tourism through DANTE; The third is raising the awareness of stakeholders and politicians on the importance of innovation and the way in which it might be managed and organised (E-CREATE, I-SPEED); The last impact was on the reinforcement of participation and e-participation in participating cities. -
Organisation of data management. INTERREG IVC project leaders foster the use of open data. They have introduced a data management policy and they encourage their local partners to develop open data and open source. For instance, DANTE entailed the development of an open source software Content Management System platform that is able to integrate open data. “As part of its policy recommendations to project partners, DANTE also encouraged the Public Administrations involved in the project to support the use of open data and the opening up of further sets of data to the public, as from an economic point of view public data are valuable for all economic operators, be they public or private that invest in IT with increasingly tighter budgets”. Weather forecast information is a good example of sharing data that may 60