Here’s hoping…

Some have called it “a Photoshop sampler” but I think it reminds me of a 1980s TV logo when everyone was just learning the power of computer graphics. Okay, maybe the early 90s to be generous.

Long live the genius of a true artist like Mirò.

The Public Administration just keeps on pumping out useless and illegal waste of public monies to slide in “under the deadline”.

“Damn the citizens, full speed ahead“. This time in the Lombardy Region.

(is that logo growing “fuzz” or do I need new glasses?)

Where to start?Well, hows about the “legge Stanca” which is about to celebrate its 5th birthday soon, the “revolutionary” Italian law (hailed as such at its passing, or rather being passed into law, now it just seems only to have passed onto greener pastures), being amply and completely ignored by one of the Northern League’s strongholds, Regione Lombardia. Text and background colors which make the contents difficult to read (the JuicyStudio’s terrific Colour Contrast Analyser never saw the likes of this site before its official publication for sure). Not one single link to skip the menus repeated on every page. Lots of validation errors typical of CMS (unless you are launching a brand spanking new site in the post-Stanca age, in which case hundreds of other PA Institutions managed to solve the problems before publishing).

Or the complete lack of any mention in the entire site of the word Accessibility?
“Yes Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”, but seeing as he has his own reindeer driven wheel-less chair, we don’t have to make the site accessible to him or hundreds of thousands of Lombardi with disabilities (stima 337000 al 2004¹) or any of the other disabled persons that may have thought to pass through the site of one of Italy’s largest and most populous regions.

Oh, and did I mention that they have cut out any English pages, both from the new site, and the old site (which didn’t have much before, but which now has nothing unless you “habla italiano”).

And don’t forget to turn on JavaScript if you want to navigate the “Policies and Departments”, or if you want to try and search using the internal engine. Otherwise it will seem to do something, but not really do it. How truly governmental and bureaucratic in spirit. Hurrah!

Who do we thank? Looking through the widerweb it seems like the bureaucratically entrenched and Lombardy Region controlled “Let’s keep the money In the family SPA” Lispa, Saatchi&Saatchi, Plurimedia (sorry, cached² as they seemed to have pulled the page incriminating them in this conspiracy), and who knows how many others managed to ignore the Legge Stanca and so should have their contracts rendered null and not receive a penny.

1 ISTAT, sito “disabilità in cifre”

2 Here’s the missing Plurimedia page, in case they deny having played their role of providing illegal materials to feed the CMS:

(oh yeah… Plurimedia’s page about the Lombardy Region seems uncanningly similar to the wikipedia description of the Geography of the Lombardy Region, but they don’t seem to cite the source. So either Wikipedia copied it (in violation of Wikipedia rules on original materials without sources cited) or Plurimedia copied it (in violation of the international copyright laws, considering the copyright concessions which Wikipedia uses requiring citation of Wikipedia as the source). But now that I think about it, what’s another law, more or less, to be flagrantly ignored.

*Probe End: 2008-01-18 08:36:08 GMT
Message: Can’t connect to www.italia.it:80 (connect: timeout)
Return Code: 500
*Probe End: 2008-01-18 08:41:09 GMT
Message: Can’t connect to www.italia.it:80 (connect: timeout)
Return Code: 500
*Probe End: 2008-01-18 08:30:35 GMT
Message: Can’t connect to www.italia.it:80 (connect: timeout)
Return Code: 500

These are the last signals of (non)life of italia.it, recorded by the site monitor already mentioned (Thanks Bruno!).

(Read more in Italian)

by Lorenzo Spallino – www.webimpossibile.net

The formal appeal of Scandaloitaliano requesting that the documentation regarding the bidding and contracts for the portal Italia.it be made available has been denied by the Commission for Access to Public Documents of the president of the Council of Ministers.

The reasoning applied by the Commission lays a grievous limitation on any possible objective analysis of the level of compliance of the Stanca law on accessibility of Information Technologies [first of which, web technologies; NdT], since it hinders any way of checking the conformity to article 4, which penalizes by nullifying the contracts which do not foresee compliance to the twenty-two technical requirements.

Read the rest (sorry, in Italian)

Today, from the email address postacertificata.dit@palazzochigi.it we received the following PDF attachment with the answer:

Response to the Letter to Romano Prodi – DOWNLOAD PDF (in Italian)

It is comprised of two documents.

(read the rest in Italian)

Since when has Vicenza EVER been one step left (East) and three steps up (North) on any geographical mapping projection system?

Anyone that looked at the coordinates (much less has ever been anywhere near the Italian Northwest) would know that they are relatively close to the same Latitude (North-South position, geographically speaking) but over an hour’s travel apart in Longitude (East-West position, geographically speaking). Even the Italian State Railways, known worldwide for their inefficiency, horrible train-sign translations and generalized incompetency have gotten it better than the Italia.it programmers.

Please, get your act together!

Please note the mapping according to Saint Google deMap, the patron saint of mappers since medieval times:

Notice that the traditional North-South-East-West conventions give hardly any difference in the North-South relations between Venice and Vicenza, but create roughly a square between Vicenza and Parma, and that Parma correctly results South of both Venice and Vicenza (seeing as it is almost a degree of Latitude South of both, it is only natural and comprehensible that it be represented that way, or at least one would think…).

Convincing proof: from the time Scandalo Italiano has stopped charging ahead with observations, suggestions, corrections and comments, the site hasn’t gone ahead. Not an inch, or even a millimeter. The translations of the still-in-Italian interface pieces has remained faithfully in Italian.

The news, in nearly a month, has not been updated AT ALL!

The latest news item (at least in the English, Italian and German sections) goes back to April 5. In the Chinese section, it would appear (the dates show in arabic numerals, even if the rest of the text is mostly in Chinese which I don’t understand at all) to have stopped a few days earlier on April 2.

All I can say is: that is one heck of a long Easter vacation, even for a country which takes off an entire month of the Summer to eat gelato and sit under overpriced and ever increasingly expensive beach umbrellas in Coney-island style overcrowded beaches outside Rome whilst no work whatsoever is accomplished (except by the gelato-sellers and beach-umbrella-fee-collectors, of course).

Is it possible they have run out of money already? All the politicians kept saying that there were still tens of millions of euros left available.

At this point, if they don’t actually intend to kept correcting the omnipresent errors and difficulties for the (potential) visitors, maybe the naysayers that called for the closure of the site were the ones in the right.

Yeah, well kinda.

It is curious, the choice of one particular English word they use…

… il Ministro Nicolais e il Vice Presidente Rutelli hanno deciso di procedere nel progetto, incentrato su una reale collaborazione con le Regioni e su un’ attività di promozione del sistema turistico italiano, che vedrà successivamente ampliate le aree dell’incoming e dell’informazione diretta.

Now is it just me, or does the word “IIINCOOOOMING!” in this case ring of war movies, where our heroes are being bombarded by shells left and right, and after a brief respite which is supposed to induce thoughts of the end of this attack and the resumption of the daily drag of military life in war, we hear the whistle of another, one last shell, which in Hollywood always mean that the nicest and most honest of the remaining soldiers is about to buy the big weekend pass in the sky…

I personally wonder what they are trying to say here.

Oh, and how long does it take the “Ministro per le Riforme e le Innovazioni nella Pubblica Amministrazione” to get off their “Sito temporaneo” and stand on their own two feet, and move onto something that they can rightfully claim their own, and for which they are willing to take responsibility? Mah?

(update)

at least this time it hasn’t taken as long for others to notice:
Quando la montagna partorisce un topolino (in Italian) – Michele Cassone
Italia.it, il Governo rispond (in Italian) – Punto Informatico

Just getting started, we’ll try and update later once things get started…

(later)  well a little less enthusiastic than I expected, but potentially the groundwork for future advancement, though tough to tell.
I think there were too mixed expectations and too wide a variety amongst the participants: some expected a concentration on tourism, some on webservers, some on creating a new portal and others maybe just on being part of the “anti-scandal” or having their fifteen minutes.
Oh, well, the organization was exceptional, and the fresh coldcuts and seasoned cheeses were delicious.