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"How Citizens and Services meet on the Net"
Students from the University of Venice Ca' Foscari: S. Biolo, R. Damiani, M.
Franceschet, S. Nizzetto, V. Sottana, C. Sottovia, A. Zapparoli
November 7th 2002, Montegrotto, Italy
This was a presentation from the students of the University of Venice who were studying to become social workers. This study had emerged from a course they had followed with Leopoldina ‘Production and promotion of community life’. The survey they had conducted looked at communication between citizens and public services.
When they started there was no research on this — two studies have been conducted since then:
- Implementation of Law 150/2000 – a study of 4500 Italian Public Institutions
This found that most councils had a web-site and that larger councils were more likely to have a web-site.
- The study ‘Public Institutions and Citizens: Is Communication Possible’ — a survey of 2406 individuals
This found that education and gender had the greatest effect on Internet usage — e.g. 2% of those with lowest qualifications used Internet. 41% males were Internet users, compared to 27% of females.
There had been a number developments in the in the 90s of relevance here. Two Laws were passed relating to direct access to public acts and to transparency.
The URP, a Government public relations body, had been created. And the Government had issued a customer service charter.
As regards Internet usage, Veneto had the highest percentage of Internet users in Italy — 42% used the Net. Therefore, the students had decided to conduct the survey in Padua (Padova), Treviso and Venice.
The 1st stage has involved a narrow sample of 100 respondents who were both frequent visitors to on-line public services and interested in new technologies — threes were drawn from people who participated in COMPA conference. A 2nd stage involved a sample of 433 respondents.
In the 1st stage the sample participants were highly educated and almost always found what they are looking for on-line. A chart was presented with the various reasons for going to sites.
In the 2nd stage there was a more even distribution by gender and age, while the level of education was lower. 2% had contact with on-line services in terms of running promoting and updating web-sites. 50% had looked at public administration web-sites. The most popular sites were ones relating to public transport (58%) and then universities and councils. 52% had looked for information about services and office hours. Most found sites to be quite useful, reliable and easy to find. The main reason for using them were to avoid queuing in office (time-saving) and to avoid having to travel. 44% visited these sites occasionally. The main sources of knowledge about these sites were friends and acquaintances and search engines. 60% accessed the sites from home. When evaluating public on-line services, 53% were satisfied, 35% thought they were good. The main reasons why they were satisfied were the convenience of the sites, practicality and speed.
The students gave some suggestions for improving sites, including simplifying them, updating them more frequently, providing more detailed information, using simpler language and providing more interesting sites/interfaces.
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