Francesca is a researcher and consultant working on developing and promoting data sharing at the institutional and community level. She’s currently a digital policy expert and analyst in the national Italian team at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) based at the Italian Government – Dipartimento di Funzione Pubblica, where she oversees the implementation and monitoring of the fifth National Action Plan for the Open Government.
She is a former Policy Leader Fellow 2021-2022 at the School of Transnational Governance – European University Institute with the project “Data Sharing and sustainable openness”. She recently contributed to The Global Data Barometer, writing on data gaps related to climate action and health.
She has coordinated projects as a researcher in the Digital Commons Lab and the Digital Society Center at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento for many years. As a fellow at the Governance Lab (Govlab) at New York University (NYU), she led the joint project Open Data 200 Italy, which analyzed the impact, the social and economic value of open data, and the reuse of public sector information for commercial purposes.
Francesca holds a PhD in Sociology and Social Research. She’s interested in understanding the value of data as an organizational asset in public sector organizations and experimenting with new models of data governance. Her interest in data governance has solid roots in over ten years of work in the (open) data landscape as a practitioner, and consultant for local governments and the national Government, for example, in the OpenCoesione initiative. She’s currently involved in a project, a data collaborative, exploring a new model of data governance and data exchange between public and private stakeholders through a corporate data responsibility approach.
In the past, she has been a research fellow in development sociology at Cornell University (US) and visiting doctoral researcher at the Warwick Business School – University of Warwick (UK).
Active in the Open Knowledge Foundation Network, Francesca coordinated and designed three editions of the Civic Tech School, training sessions, hackathons, and data challenges for local and national governments. She is the vice president of Monithon, an NGO promoting the civic monitoring of government spending.
