DocsItalia: our contribution to the new PA
In collaboration with Nephila, we have worked on the new platform for the publication and consultation of public documents online, one of the tools of the Italian digital transformation.
Client
Council of Ministers
Industry
Public Administration
Year
2020
The initial situation
The client, in this case, is institutional: it is the Council of Ministers, which has given rise to an important and necessary process of digitization of public administration.
The specific project we collaborated on is DocsItalia, for the Developers.it team: "The place for the publication and consultation of digital public documents." In fact, we contributed to the construction of a portal that would allow the publication and consultation of public documents in a completely new way in our country.
Main technical activities
Development
Implemented activities
The team had to continue the work done by the previous digital team, a work of alignment and advancement of the documentation platform. Together with the partner company Nephila, and under the coordination of a Digital Team referent, we have decided on the Tasks to work on in sprints for a duration of about 6 months.
The project is a fork of “Read the Docs”, a widely used online document software for the generation and deployment of the documentation of many Open Source software.
For DocsItalia we have completed the addition of a hierarchical level, useful for structuring the documentation of the various software managed. We then worked on integrating these new hierarchies into the full-text search, based on an external search engine.
The phases we managed were the analysis of the new features required, the writing of tests to ensure the correctness of the code developed and the production of the additional code or modifications to the pre-existing code in such a way that it was integrated with the infrastructure of Docs Italia already managed by other groups.
Implemented Technologies
Final result
The application has been updated, bringing the repository back to the progress made in the previous months. Also, new functionalities have been integrated for the management of new hierarchies of the Docs Italia documentation with respect to the data structure of "Read The Docs", and the full-text search present in the system has also been integrated.
All the tasks indicated as priorities were completed on schedule, obtaining the expected improvements. The project was completed within the agreed time frame and with great satisfaction for us: we made a small contribution to a big change.
The Digital Team we collaborated with would later become internal to the Public Administration, becoming part of the Ministry for technological and digital innovation.
This work formed the basis for some of the talks given by our CTO, Paolo Melchiorre, at various conferences: EuroPython 2020, DjangoConEurope 2020, Django London Meetup 2020, Codemotion 2020.
