  This paper introduces an open, interoperable, and cloud-computing-based
citizen engagement platform for the management of administrative processes of
public administrations, which also increases the engagement of citizens. The
citizen engagement platform is the outcome of a 3-year Italian national project
called PRISMA (Interoperable cloud platforms for smart government). The aim of
the project is to constitute a new model of digital ecosystem that can support
and enable new methods of interaction among public administrations, citizens,
companies, and other stakeholders surrounding cities. The platform has been
defined by the media as a flexible (enable the addition of any kind of
application or service) and open (enable access to open services) Italian
"cloud" that allows public administrations to access to a vast knowledge base
represented as linked open data to be reused by a stakeholder community with
the aim of developing new applications ("Cloud Apps") tailored to the specific
needs of citizens. The platform has been used by Catania and Syracuse
municipalities, two of the main cities of southern Italy, located in the
Sicilian region. The fully adoption of the platform is rapidly spreading around
the whole region (local developers have already used available application
programming interfaces (APIs) to create additional services for citizens and
administrations) to such an extent that other provinces of Sicily and Italy in
general expressed their interest for its usage. The platform is available
online and, as mentioned above, is open source and provides APIs for full
exploitation.
