Alice Fubini presents insights on how two Italian civil society organizations are tackling (data) institutional opacity

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The paper titled "Do current paradoxes require innovative strategies? Fighting from below institutional (data) opacity in the era of platformization and datafication" will be present this Frirday at the Annual Conference of the Italian Association of Political Communication on “Beyond digital political communication: platforms, algorithms and automation”, hosted by the University of Torino, 8-10 June. 

The innovative and disruptive impact of an ever-evolving process such as digitization has wide-ranging consequences on the public sphere and on the dynamics between top-down and bottom-up collective actors. The so-called platform (Van Dijk et al., 2018) and datafied societies (Schäfer and van Es, 2017) are raising new challenges also for transparency and accountability issues. Indeed seems that one of the main paradoxes of the digital era is the increase of institutional opacity in terms of the availability and accessibility of public data. Moving from these (new) challenges, the research assesses how civil society organizations contrast institutional opacity in a contingent and emblematic scenario, such as the one of the post Covid-19 crisis. Adopting a comparative qualitative case-study research design, the paper explores the strategies adopted by two Italian grassroots collective actors involved in monitoring governmental authorities during the development of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan - PNRR, trying to unpack the role played by data-related practices in the fight against opacity. 

Results show that both CSOs exerting pressure from below to facilitate that government activity (on the PNRR funds) are made public to citizens improving vertical accountability (Bauhr and Grimes, 2017), and in doing that they adopt different strategies, which are only partly combined: (1) Foster the origin and development of civic monitoring communities at the local level. (2) Implement (open) databases and develop data-driven platforms, i.e. OpenPNRR. (3) Produce news articles based on data journalism practices, based on public data and/or their own data-driven platforms. (4) Publish news claiming lack of public data in terms of availability and/or accessibility. (5) Adopt FOIA or other legal instruments to obtain public data exerting pressure on public institutions. (6) Join advocacy campaigns to quest public data. If the latter strategies seem to draw on a more traditional repertoire, the others contain more innovative elements, mostly introduced by one of the initiatives under investigation.: on the one hand, the production of news articles in the form of “informative activism” (Fubini, 2023), which partly relies on and partly fuels the creation of grassroots data-driven platforms. Even more innovative, the latter strategy seems to bring back the possibility of building (technological) infrastructures for monitoring purposes that foster the interactions between citizens and the state (Pyrozhenko, 2015) going beyond the idea of “government as a platform'”(O'Reilly, 2011) to include the effort of some grassroots actors who also develop data-driven platforms to increase transparency. 

Further information on the Annual Conference of the Italian Association of Political Communication can be found here.