Stop at Zona-M

Every year italian families must spend hundreds of Euros in textbooks for every child, while the cost limits set by the government are regularly violated in spite of denounces and warnings from consumer associations.

Normattiva (“active norm/law”) is a new online portal from the Italian Government that “using innovative software technologies creates a reliable, free and complete information service about Italian laws”. Normattiva opened to the public in March 2010. I first heard about it on March 19th. Three days later, on March 22nd, 2010, I saw a post from Flavia Marzano that said: "(now that) Normattiva is online, normeinrete is offline".

If you read Stop!/Zona-M regularly, you already know that “free as in freedom” software and file formats are an essential tool for anybody interested in reducing expenses in Public Administrations, make them more efficient and allow all citizens to control in the best possible way what they representatives are doing (and if you don’t know this yet, it’s time to read the article linked at the bottom of this page!).

On February 11th, 2010 a public rally against the complete privatization of Acea took place in Rome. Acea is the partly public company that manages the water distribution system in Rome and other cities of the Lazio region. The purpose of the rally was

As I already explained in another article file formats are extremely important: unless, at least in Public Administrations (PAs), only open file formats are used, serious amounts of public money can go to waste, important public digital documents may become unreadable and private citizens or businesses may be forced to useless expenses if they want to interact with PAs.

In may 2009 I announced on the P2P Foundation blog what I believe is the first collaborative law writing experiment in Italy: