Slow march towards digitizing Bologna
Finally, Bologna city council has launched an initiative to roll out technological advances across the city – at least in theory anyway.
For the local Bolognese business leaders this is a positive step for 21st century commerce, however, a laziness attitude here permeates business circles. People expect others to do the dirty work here while at the same time, sit back and wonder why many other countries forge ahead using technology to promote their own interests.
Simply put, everyone else rolls up their sleeves and gets to work, instead of waiting on a big, bureaucratic system to do the job for them. Governmental bodies enacting new reforms is like watching an oil tanker turn 360 degrees – it takes forever.
Businesses here need to enforce their own set of standards for implementing technological tools rather than always waiting on the Comune di Bologna. The fear of trying is greater here than the fear of failure.
We’ve written a million ideas on the why’s, how’s, when’s, where’s etc to kick start a Bolognese revolution! Here is just one of them and another reason why here.
Case point: The BBC has just published a great story on how Sweden is tackling, or rather, attempting to promote their country.
As part of what the country is calling “the world’s most democratic Twitter experiment”, a different Swede takes sole control of the nation’s official Twitter account each week, sharing their daily experiences and opinions and recommending things to do and see where they live.
BUT, it’s the people who are leading this huge experiment, not the government. It’s the ordinary people who are following, tweeting, re-tweeting, @mentioning and generally influencing where they are going with it all.
Why can’t we have some of that citizen-driven based attitude here?!