Policy Context and Legal Framework

In line with the EC Communications "Agenda for a sustainable and competitive European tourism" and "A renewed tourism EU policy", Venice Connected project responds to the Lisbon Agenda challenges involving policy makers and stakeholders at EU, national, regional and local levels, in order to define Information Society Policies to drive productivity growth in a sustainable way, to stimulate innovation and to improve the competitiveness of EU economy. The project activities could encourage innovation contributing to unlock business potential, to adapt to globalization challenges and to extend the EU and international market. The City administration addresses the policy guidelines set out in the EC initiative "i2010", in particular improving digital economy ensuring better opportunities for job creation, quality of services and accessibility.

The project takes into account Gothenburg agenda and the needs for social and economic sustainability. Proper Information Society policies can in fact contribute to mobilize actors to share knowledge, to reduce seasonality and congestion, to maintain and enhance local community prosperity and quality of life. Furthermore, shared and coordinated policy frameworks can facilitate a better long term planning and the use of best available knowledge and solutions.

Venice has been working on the definition of a strategic framework based on innovation and web 2.0 philosophy.

Furthermore the city administration, through Venis SpA, its telecommunication and information company, started an innovative infrastructural project to deploy a broadband network with fiber optic and wireless technology.
This initiative will grant an enormous saving on data-transfer and telephony costs providing, at the same time, an innovative network to those who mobility of work. The most of the network will be deployed taking advantage of other existing infrastructures and optimizing the coverage with wireless technology.

Web 2.0 policy has been defined in an "innovation manifesto", which reflects some relevant guidelines for the administration: the network is the space of collective knowledge; web 2.0 generates a useful collaboration process among the users; citizens can become leading actors; productivity growth of public administration is based on collaboration processes; web 2.0 breaks conventional hierarchies; knowledge is the outcome of sharing.

Some new services have been set up in the last months believing that innovations are the driving force behind what will redefine and transform the modern cities, the public spaces and the working environments. The city has been defining a strategic framework called "digital citizenship", aiming at organizing new services in wireless metropolitan areas through integrated communication and collaboration technologies. The main projects are: Argos (Argos is a video-surveillance system for boat traffic monitoring, measurement and management), Baris (Boat Areas Research Information System), Iris (on-line service based on a portal aimed to connect citizens to the local authorities in order to guarantee the urban maintenance of street, green areas, public lighting and intervene on graffiti, irregular waste, irregular parking).

//venice>connected received the national award "Cittadinanza Digitale" (digital citizenship) in May 2009.

Implementation and Management Approach

• The City of Venice is directly managing and coordinating the //venice>connected project. A dedicated team (Sustainable Tourism Project Marketing Directorate) has been created with the aim of managing all the issues related to sustainable and competitive Tourism. This team is independent for the day to day decision-making process and relates directly to the Vice Mayor - in charge of ICT, R&D and Innovation policies and coordinator of the tourism board - for all institutional and strategic matters.
• The partnerships are extended  both to the public sectors providers, controlled by the city administration, and to tourism industry private actors. Furthermore, a partnership has been set up with several national and local promotional institutions (ENIT and APT Province of Venice).
• The whole ICT infrastructure is managed by Venis SpA, a company fully owned by the City administration. Venis SpA is the limited company of the City of Venice Administration in charge of the deployment, the development and the technical management of the ICT network system. Its mission consists in realizing innovative networks, also as a support to the e-government services addressed to all those who live, study, work or visit Venice, even in mobility.

A flexible project organisation with appropriate administrative processes has been set up in order to facilitate:

a) Optimal decisions at principal strategic level, at overall project level and component/partner level.
b) Coordination and delivery of  agreed technical activities and services.
c) Coordination of  legal, contractual, ethical, financial and administrative management.

A risk management plan has been prepared and it will be continuously updated.

Technology solution

//venice>connected interface has been built using the Drupal open platform. This framework allows full content management with multiple language support. The CSS based layout allows accessibility and WAI specifications compliance.A large community working on Drupal project allows scalability and a faster and more efficient system and security upgrade.
The database system is based on Oracle and the communications between the front-end and back-end are performed by webservices.Several components such as 'payment module', 'incoming calendar' or 'services basket' are custom components developed with PHP web technology. This technology has been also used for Backoffice on on-site delivery system.
The whole system has been designed starting from tourists and citizens needs using focus group and user case studies approach integrated with the long experience gathered from previous tourist service experiences in the city.The right balance between open source framework and custom tools (mainly due to security issues and city's peculiarities) gives to the system the flexibility and power needed to perform thousand purchases every week.

Impact

In only 4 months, //venice>connected project has already registered transactions corresponding to an amount of more than 1 million Euros. From the 1st of February to the 4th of June, the web platform was visited by 148 135 unique visitors (mainly from France, Germany and U.S.A.) and the number of visits is constantly increasing with an average of around 1 500 visitors a day.

Furthermore, requests from local private actors to participate in the project are so numerous that it has been necessary to develop a dedicated Directorate of the City of Venice in order to manage all the project implementation issues. At the same time, the project is receiving the interest of a lot of public bodies and institutions at a European level.

These figures demonstrate the big success the initiative is achieving so far. At the moment progresses of the project are analysed by COSES (Consortium for Research and Educational Training), a research study center for the City and Province of Venice, but Venis Spa - the company owned by the City of Venice in charge of the ICT development - is also studying ICT tools and solutions to constantly monitor customers' satisfaction according to the web 2.0 policy adopted by the City of Venice.

All the stakeholders involved will benefit from the project: the City will better preserve its cultural and architectural heritage and, at the same time, will be able to promote less known and visited sights; visitors, beyond the price advantages, will enjoy a less crowded site seeing; Venetian residents will not experience a congested historical center; the City's administration and private actors will be able to optimise the supply of services, according to the visitors' presences.

Track record of sharing

//venice>connected is not an isolated project, but is part of a big initiative promoted by the City of Venice to develop innovatiions in  ICT policies, as stated in the "innovation manifesto" already mentioned. These policies face problems and issues similar to many other European countries and can be successfully transferred to other contexts since the technology solutions adopted are totally open source.

To promote exchange and transfer of good practices at EU level, in fact, the City of Venice submitted a project proposal named I-SPEED in the frame of the second Interreg IVC call for proposals. The overall objective of I-SPEED project is to enable regional and local authorities to foster competitiveness and sustainability of Tourism Economy and to respond to the increasing global competition developing and improving their ICT polices. The partnership is composed by 10 local and regional public authorities distributed all over the European territory that are developing ICT public services and have shown a big interest in the innovative initiatives Venice is carrying out in the frame of Tourism Economy.

The City of Venice is also actively participating to the Knowledge Society Forum (KSF) of the Eurocities network and presented //venice>connected in the last meeting held in Manchester at the end of March 2009. Furthermore, //venice>connected will be presented during the Shangai Expo 2010.

An operative collaboration with the Catalonia Tourism Board, which expressed interest in developing a project similar to //venice>connected, has recently started in order to create a connection between Venice and Barcellona though the integration of the respective on-line booking platforms and the promotion of combined offer of services.

Lessons learnt

• The adoption of Information Society policies is able to underpin the Tourism Economy and can be transferred in different contexts.
• Forecast and manage tourism flows allows local administrations and private operators to improve the quality and the profitability of the services provided.
• A stakeholders involvement strategy should be defined in order to address the needs of the different users.
• Tourists and residents  are very well-disposed to initiatives that promote more sustainable tourism.
• Integration and coordination of services offered by the public sector and the private actors in the frame of the Tourism Economy increases quality, skills and cost optimisation for both. Nevertheless the public administration has to find the more effective way to interact with other actors and be ready to create a flexible management structure.