The environmental communication on the website of the Italian cities
Among the tools of environmental public communication in urban areas, the website plays undoubtedly a key role in the dissemination of information, environmental data, providing useful online services and documentation. In addition to presenting the city and its environmental policies, the website also plays an important role providing an interface with citizens, facilitating the relationship with the offices that deal with the urban environment, also encouraging the participation of citizens to public life, involving them in the preparation and implementation of local sustainability programs.
Thanks to the ten-year experience in the field of environmental communication, gained in implementing ISPRA's corporate website, the Web Service contributed for eight years to the Report on Urban Environment Quality through a communication research on the environmental information of the websites of a sample of Italian cities. Over the years the sample of analyzed websites has been greatly enriched and were developed several indicators in order to monitor the presence of specific tools, the degree of innovation of government websites, the quality of the information, the navigability.
This publication is intended to provide an overview of the research conducted so far, and includes thematic insights on new tools of Web 2.0: open data, social media and smartphone applications, which represent the new frontier inaugurated by the mobile revolution, which is changing dramatically the public communication towards forms of discussion and collaboration with citizens, particularly in local communities.
The publication is available only as pdf.