Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

The results of the work to make the activity of the municipal administration more accessible and rapid are illustrated. “Semplice PA” presented, an engine for advanced search within the resolutions archive

Milan, 4 December 2019 – Eleven days instead of the 30 made available by law to respond to a request made by citizens. This is the time it took the Municipality of Milan, in the first half of 2019, to escape through generalized civic access (or FOIA access) which allows anyone to request data and documents in addition to those that the administrations are obliged to publish.

A third of the expected time (11 out of 30 days available), 5 days less than the performance of 2018 (16 days), 7 less than that of 2017 (18 days). With 91% of requests accepted in the first half of 2019, 80% in 2018 and 81% in 2017.

It was discussed this morning in the Congress Hall of Palazzo Reale during the transparency awareness day organized by the Department of Participation, Active Citizenship and Open Data and by the General Secretariat of the Municipality which culminated with the presentation of "Semplice PA", the engine developed by the Department of Digital Transformation and Civic Services for advanced and direct research within the deliberations archive. At the address www.comune.milano.it/ricerca-delibere you can access the search string and enter one or more keywords.

The system shows the total number of results found, the titles, an extract of the document and the possibility to read and download the document in PDF. On the right side of the page there are the topics, cities, organizations, laws, people, addresses and companies that appear most frequently in the search. The councilor for Participation, Active Citizenship and Open Data, Lorenzo Lipparini, and the General Secretary, Fabrizio Dall'Acqua, participated.

"The Municipality offers increasingly advanced tools to citizens, companies and public employees - explained councilor Lipparini - for research, consultation and obtaining data and information on all its activities. In a three-year period there have been over 12 thousand accesses to the documents to which we have responded and over 3 million requests and messages are managed per year. With the new document search engine and with specific visualization projects for our open data, such as the open balance sheet graphs which allow visualize the trend of income and expenses, we now allow everyone to access our information assets even more easily, even without specific skills".

"The event - states Fabrizio Dall'Acqua, General Secretary - was a precious opportunity to inform the city on the initiatives implemented on the topic, but also a moment to raise awareness among everyone, public administration operators and citizens, on the value of transparency , as a suitable tool to encourage public debate, participation and social control over administrative action. The initiative also allowed us to create and inaugurate a network of Anti-Corruption and Transparency Managers coordinated by the Municipality of Milan, which will be able to validly also discuss on future occasions".

In agreement with the National Association of Public and Institutional Communication, the public communicators who participated were awarded 3 credits for the 2020 professional qualification.