Mission
The National Digital Sovereignty Observatory is a civic monitoring project that measures and monitors the state of digital sovereignty in the Italian Public Administration, according to technical and analytical criteria, with open data and a transparent methodology.
Civic monitoring is a tool of participatory democracy: it makes visible what would otherwise remain opaque. We do not limit ourselves to collecting data — we disseminate it to all stakeholders so that each can act within their own sphere of competence.
Strategic objectives
Measure — Quantify the dependence of the Italian PA on non-EU digital infrastructure, starting with email services and progressively extending to other critical services.
Raise awareness — Disseminate the results to institutions, policymakers, the PA, industry, research and civil society. Each actor must understand the problem in their own language and for their own objectives.
Drive change — Provide objective data that supports informed decisions towards greater digital sovereignty, without ideology but with analytical rigour.
Build community — Create an open community of contributors — technicians, researchers, activists, public administrations — that feeds and enriches the monitoring over time.
Replicate the model — Make the methodology and tools available so that other countries can conduct similar analyses, in the European dimension.
Who we serve
The Observatory is at the service of everyone:
- Institutions and regulators (AgID, ACN, Garante Privacy) — to measure the effectiveness of their policies and identify areas for intervention
- Policymakers — to legislate and govern on the basis of concrete and verifiable data
- Public Administrations — to understand their own position and plan the transition towards sovereign solutions
- Italian and European providers — to understand the size of the market and propose competitive alternatives
- Researchers and academics — to access an open, documented and reusable dataset
- Journalists and media — to report the state of digital sovereignty with verifiable figures
- Civil society — for informed advocacy campaigns and conscious participation
- European institutions — to replicate the model in other member states
A multi-stakeholder project
The Observatory was created with the intention of being a multi-stakeholder project: not the initiative of a single actor, but a common space in which associations, civic groups, technical communities and civil society organisations can contribute, validate the data and amplify the message.
We believe that the digital sovereignty of the PA is a cross-cutting theme, touching on citizens’ rights, transparency, free software, and industrial and European autonomy. For this reason we invite organisations active on these fronts to take part.
The organisations listed below are cited solely by way of example, to illustrate the type of organisations active on these themes that we would like to involve. They do not represent confirmed adhesions, partnerships or contributions: none of them has (yet) joined the project. The list indicates the ecosystem with which we wish to build the Observatory.
- Digital innovation and transparency — e.g. Associazione Copernicani, onData, Transparency International Italia
- Digital rights and privacy — e.g. Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, Privacy Network, The Good Lobby Italia
- Free software and open knowledge — e.g. Wikimedia Italia, Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)
- European dimension — e.g. European Digital Rights (EDRi) and the networks of civic organisations of other member states
Are you an association or a civic group and would you like to join or collaborate? Contact us on GitHub or on the Telegram channel. Only organisations that have confirmed their adhesion will be listed as actual members.
The Observatory is part of a broader European movement to measure digital sovereignty: discover the related initiatives in Europe — the MxMap family and the other sovereignty indices.
Principles
- Transparency: open data, documented methodology, open source code
- Rigour: a technical-analytical approach, verifiable and replicable
- Independence: no ties with vendors or suppliers
- Inclusiveness: accessible to technical and non-technical audiences, in all the languages of the European Union
- Action: oriented towards change, not observation alone
Relationship with MxMap.it
The Observatory uses as its primary data source the MxMap.it project, which collects and analyses the MX records of all domains of the Italian PA registered in the Index of Public Administrations (IndicePA).
MxMap.it provides the raw data; the Observatory contextualises, analyses and publishes it in the form of reports accessible to a wide audience.
Licence
All the content of the Observatory — reports, data, source code — is released under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 licence. You are free to reuse, adapt and redistribute the materials, provided you cite the source and keep the same licence.
Contacts
For information, suggestions or collaborations: