Alberto Mucci spotlights the activist group Spaghetti Open Data, which he describes as “one of the Italy’s most important and determined groups in the 2.0 fight against the country’s organized crime networks”:
Last spring the collective met in Bologna for a four day hackathon the at culminated in the “ConfiscatiBene” (Italian for “seized goods”) project: a national database able to gather and organize with clarity and in a single place (this might seem obvious, but it’s really not the case in Italy) a list of all goods confiscated by the Italian authorities from the Mafia.
Before Spaghetti Open Data, accessing such information was nearly impossible. I’ll use myself as a case study to demonstrate how demoralizing interacting with the Italian authorities can be.
If, for example, I decided I wanted to know what type of seized goods existed in a certain region of Sicily, I would have quickly discovered that the data I am looking for is dispersed in scattered regional, provincial and ministerial websites that are nearly impossible to read for anyone without the patience of a saint and a degree in IT from Stanford. Let’s say that after a week of scraping, I got fed up with the databases and decided to pick up the phone. The results would be similar. The Italian institutions fighting against the Mafia usually don’t share the database among each other; rather they operate independently (moved at times by petty jealousies, and internal power struggles) and create situations where the work of different departments overlaps and everything ends up becoming more confusing that it should be.
“Sometime you have this paradoxical situation where, for example, the anti-Mafia police (DIA) in Palermo do not have immediate access to the information they need on another part of the country,” Andrea Borruso, a member of Spaghetti Open Data, tells me during a Skype interview. “It’s ridiculous and totally inefficient.” Why is this so important? Because easy and efficient access to data is key in the fight against the increasingly powerful networks of the Mafia.
And then there’s Mafialeaks.
The Dish 