Digital Citizenship Exercises

Andrea Trentini

Dip.to Informatica, Universit

a degli Studi di Milano, via Celoria 18, Milan, Italy

Keywords:

Digital Citizenship, Raising Awareness.

Abstract:

Many years ago the authors deﬁned a layered model that takes into account every aspect of Digital Citizen-

ship. The “Digital Citizenship and Technocivism Rainbow” (DCTR) model slices the topic in eight coloured

levels (network, services, access, education, transparency, participation, consultation, democracy) that can be

used in teaching (to organize course materials) and when analysing “situations” (e.g., public participation ini-

tiatives/actions) to better comprehend intents with “digital citizenship spectrograms”. This model has been in

constant use at the Computer Science department (University of Milan) Digital Citizenship course. An issue

in teaching the course and in explaining the topic to common people is the lack of exercises. During the 2021-

2022 session students were assigned a new type of homework: they had to create exercises to help common

people understand Digital Citizenship. The task consisted in proposing and developing complete exercises

with details about: intended target, difﬁculty level, detailed instructions and so on. This paper describes the

work they produced, with an analysis w.r.t. the DCTR model. The main idea is to evaluate the effort of

inventing exercises at various levels. A signiﬁcant result is that “participatory levels” are challenging when

trying to design digital citizenship exercises.

1 INTRO: THE DCTR MODEL

The term “Digital Citizenship and Technocivism” was

the name of a course adopted in 2010 for the Mas-

ter in Computer Science at the University of Milan.

At the time, when we designed our course, our main

concern was to let our (Computer Science) students

acquire not only purely technological (e.g., program-

ming) knowledge, but also the ability to make con-

nections with the inﬂuences of technologies on every-

day life, in particular on “civic aspects”, in the more

proper meaning of being citizens, i.e., participating

in a socio-political-system: municipality, territory,

country/nation or federation. This awareness repre-

sents the fundamentals to catch most of the many op-

portunities offered by technology, transforming these

opportunities into social achievements (civic partic-

ipation, transparency, etc.), and also to mitigate the

risks exposed by technology (pervasive monitoring

and control, loss of privacy, etc.), moreover we think

it could be very useful to steer (towards success) all

the institutional initiatives about digital citizenship

and digital transformation. Our society is shaped by

information and communication technologies. A con-

tinuous interaction between the events of the physical

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8629-3056

world and those in the digital world require the homo

digitalis to reconsider and reshape its citizenship to

actively interact with this elevated context, where

rights and obligations must be adequately declined

to satisfy both the opportunities and the risks deriv-

ing from digital technologies. These opportunities-

and-risks challenge the very idea of citizenship and

the rights that derive from it. The concept of citi-

zenship itself is changed through digital technologies,

rights and duties are also changed, and we should

consider that not only practices are changed, but also

democracy models and concepts (Moraes and An-

drade, 2015), almost as if Digital Citizenship could

be an abbreviation for “Citizenship in the digital Era”.

We have mentioned rights and duties, risks and op-

portunities... Is there an all-encompassing model to

frame the digital citizenship and technocivism ﬁeld

and describe it in its structural aspects? An architec-

ture, a key to understanding concepts, technologies,

news items? A classiﬁcation system that allows a cor-

rect analysis of the topic? A reasoning tool?

In absence of a satisfactory model in literature,

we deﬁned the “The Digital Citizenship and Tech-

nocivism Rainbow” framework (see appendix A) to

model all the aspects of digital citizenship into eight

conceptual levels (from L0 to L7). The framework

Trentini, A.

Digital Citizenship Exercises.

DOI: 10.5220/0012614200003693

Paper published under CC license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU 2024) - Volume 2, pages 501-508

ISBN: 978-989-758-697-2; ISSN: 2184-5026

501

7.democracy

6.consultation

5.sharing

4.transparency

3.education

2.access

1.services

0.the Net

Figure 1: The DCTR.

is made up of layers ranging from the infrastructure

(networks and services) to the right to be actively in-

volved in the decision-making process. Historically,

in “A ladder of citizen participation” (Arnstein, 1969)

the ladder metaphor was suggested to represent the

path that leads to a comprehensive citizenship (albeit

not digital, since that model was designed in 1969).

The staircase evokes an uphill path that implies a pro-

gressive commitment on behalf of those who under-

take it, but also a realization more and more complete

with citizenship rights as you go up. It quite correctly

models the experience of many people who realize

they have to work hard to become citizens in the infor-

mation society. However, for the purpose of an effec-

tive communication and to provide a more analytical

vision, we preferred to expand the DCTR model pro-

posed in “The access rainbow: conceptualizing uni-

versal access to the information/communications in-

frastructure” (Clement and Shade, 2000) by reﬁning

the levels integrating the work of (Caddy and Vergez,

2001). We looked at other models in recent times but

none of them was as all-encompassing as our DCTR.

For example, the (Richardson and Milovidov, 2019)

covers only partially our levels and mixes different

concepts (such as privacy and active participation)

in the same set. Another “interesting” example of a

model of Digital Citizenship can be found in (Ribble,

2015) where “nine elements of digital citizenship”

are mentioned, but the participatory aspects necessary

to address the issue of digital citizenship were com-

pletely missing. A more recent model (R et al., 2022)

proposed by the EU focuses on the general compe-

tences of a “digital citizen”, but it misses important

topics such as (with DCTR levels in parentheses):

net neutrality (L0, L1), lock-in (L1), proﬁling (L0,

L1), computing agency (L3), crowdsourcing (L5), pe-

titioning/“participatory contract” (L6), participatory

budgeting (L6, L7), voting/elections/democracy sys-

tems (L6, L7), etc.

More details of our DCTR model can be found in

(De Cindio and Trentini, 2014), (Trentini, 2019) and

in the book (Trentini et al., 2020) (in Italian), here we

simply list the eight levels (ﬁgure 1) associating con-

cepts and macro-categorizing them, they are grouped

into “lower” (0-3) and “higher” (4-7) ones (see ap-

pendix A). Technocivism, with an emphasis on tech-

nology, awareness, network properties, standards, for-

mats, software, services, etc. stands as the foundation

for true Digital Citizenship where we talk about par-

ticipatory platforms, citizens’ consultation and partic-

ipation, transparency and voting systems.

1.1 We Need Exercises

In 2021-2022 we have introduced an important nov-

elty in the ﬁnal paper that students must submit to

complete the exam. The added requirement is to de-

vise two/three Digital Citizenship exercises on differ-

ent DCTR levels. First we created a “who does what”

matrix to keep track of any collisions (to avoid stu-

dents with similar proposals), then we tried to broaden

the plethora of proposed exercises as much as pos-

sible, especially on the less “interesting” (for them)

levels. In fact our students tend to prefer lower lev-

els, the more technological ones, this attitude is con-

ﬁrmed by studies such as (Hui and Campbell, 2018).

At the end of some lessons we organized “brainstorm-

ing” sessions to help students creativity and to reﬁne

the set of proposals. The result, still under develop-

ment given that not all students have yet completed

their work, is satisfactory in the sense that more than

sixty proposals have been made (the list in this arti-

cle omits a few that are too generic) covering (albeit

with different numbers) all DCTR levels. It has been

really pleasant to receive so much interested feedback

in line with our expectations, one of them in particu-

lar: “actually professor, having to invent an exercise,

putting myself in the shoes of the one who will lis-

ten to me forced me to think better about theme and I

think I have internalized it better”.

Why should we need Digital Citizenship exer-

cises? From a teacher perspective, assigning exer-

cises is a common activity, but creating new models

takes the teaching experience to an higher level. The

“learning by doing” paradigm could improve teacher

knowledge and could make our students better prop-

agators of Digital Citizenship, they may become the

mediators between the increasingly complex technol-

ogy and the masses of citizens who will have to “run

to stay in the same place” (Carroll and Tenniel, 1984).

The idea is not new of course, see (Constantinides,

2015) and (Aronson, 2011) even if applied to other

ﬁelds. We need it speciﬁcally for Digital Citizenship

because it is not always an easy topic (for the masses

and for the practitioners too!). We actually found few

previous attempts, and in one of them (Suson, 2019)

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502

the Digital Citizenship model resembles ours even if

not really in semantic and organizational terms, but at

least considers the use of exercises in teaching this do-

main. Even in review studies such as (

Ozt

urk, 2021)

no mention of exercises can be found.

Since an exercise should be as “procedural” as

possible, we adopted a template inspired by the

Unix manual (McIlroy, 1987), deﬁning goals, lessons

learned, target, etc. The template is composed of

sections (some are optional), and the exercise author

should ﬁll out the relevant sections in order to de-

scribe a reproducible list of actions to reach the de-

sired objective. These are the sections deﬁned in the

current version:

• exercise title (should be evocative)

• goal (and some intro/context)

• target audience (and prerequisites)

• estimated duration

• DCTR levels (with motivation), tags/keywords

• estimated difﬁculty (relative to audience)

• examples (e.g., screenshots, stories, past experiences)

• needed tools: operating systems, software/apps, con-

nections, etc.

• costs

• detailed instructions

• variations hints

• expected results (outputs)

• lessons learned

• see also (other exercises, follow up)

• mitigations (if the exercise is about acknowledging a

danger)

• author (of this exercise)

• license (open)

• notes (from the exercise author)

During the course we planned some fully dedi-

cated meeting to discuss the proposals. We set up a

cross-contaminated environment, a place for students

to forge ideas, motivating topics and challenge imple-

mentation and cost issues (raised by the teacher). Of

course it was also an opportunity to supervise their

projects, addressing open points and correctly associ-

ating exercises to DCTR levels. In appendix B we list

the emerged proposals grouped by level, the hash (#)

character underlines the main association. The com-

plete repository of all exercises can be accessed at

http://gitlab.di.unimi.it/cdt/eserciziario. Please note

that since one exercise may be linked to more than

one DCTR level we classify into the most represen-

tative one. The exercises with “guide” in the title are

intended as a bit more articulated than simple “do this

simple experiment” instances, they are a sort of “food

for thought”.

2 TWO FULL EXAMPLES

Here follows a sample extracted from the about forty

exercises developed up to May 2022 by the students

for their ﬁnal exam. A full exercise is usually accom-

panied by many example screenshots but since our

focus in this article is to describe it, images were re-

placed by square brackets. The original student text

was translated and edited (but keeping the ﬁrst person

if used), some “uninteresting” (for the purpose of this

article) text has been omitted (and marked as such)

to ﬁt the paper submission size limit. Our plan is to

collect the best ones into a full ﬂedged exercises ap-

pendix to be included in the second volume of our

Digital Citizenship series (estimated publication: end

of 2024). All material we publish is openly licensed

(e.g., Creative Commons).

2.1 “Forging Fake Strava Activities”

• goal (and some intro/context):

Strava is one of the most used sports apps in the

world, where you can share data about your own

workouts and compare them with other users’.

Given the importance and abundance of data that

this application provide, it is also used by many

professional athletes and their coaches to monitor

training progress. But can you really rely on the

data found online? Show how easy it is to tam-

per with a sports recording in the Strava app. This

should make the user generally aware that forging

fake digital data is possible and, in some contexts,

very easy. The user should therefore ask himself:

is the collection of unveriﬁable but indestructible

data (possibly mentioning the Locard principle)

reasonable?

• target audience (and prerequisites): every user of

the Net, who relies on the data on it, should know

that the information found may not represent the

truth

• estimated duration: 10 minutes.

• DCTR levels, tags/keywords: L1 (Locard)

• estimated difﬁculty (relative to audience):

medium, no speciﬁc knowledge is required, but

the number of steps and the precision required

in some of them makes me think that the ex-

ercise may not be advisable for a completely

inexperienced user.

• needed tools: operating systems, software/apps,

connections, etc.

An account on Strava (free version), a computer,

an Internet connection, a software to edit a text

ﬁle.

• costs: none

Digital Citizenship Exercises

503

• detailed instructions (e.g., with screenshots)

[OMITTED FOR BREVITY]

• notes:

“I wanted to suggest manual changes (not requiring

automatic data processing skills) to make the exercise

more accessible to everyone. However, I argue that any-

one with some programming skills could quickly write

a program processing data in a more radical way, for

example by lowering all heart rates by a certain percent-

age (to fake a more trained athlete) or by shortening the

time of distance, so as to simulate a higher travel speed.

Furthermore, to make the exercise easier, we started

from a pre-existing activity, but we could also start from

an empty text ﬁle and, as long as you respect the same

syntax and save the ﬁle with the format .gpx, you might

well be able to create a syntactically valid but com-

pletely forged activity.

There are some cycling teams that monitor the level of

their athletes also analysing the uploaded data: what

we have just seen should therefore make us consider

the risks involved when we blindly rely on the data we

read online.

The objective of this exercise is to make the citizen

aware about the ease of forging digital information.

Furthermore, the transposition of the Locard principle

to the digital world states that information placed on

the Net always leaves indestructible traces. The citizen

who carries out this exercise should therefore ask him-

self: is the collection of unveriﬁable, easy-to-forge but

indestructible data reasonable?”

2.2 “Internet Historical Memory”

• goal (and some intro/context):

The Wayback Machine is the archive of the In-

ternet Archive organization where a snapshot of

a webpage can be saved. These pages can thus

be recovered and read even if the original source

were deleted or changed over time. The exercise

explain how to compare a webpage to an older

version. Next the user is suggested to create a

snapshot of a webpage that the user considers cul-

turally important. The objective of this exercise is

to raise awareness on the importance of the his-

torical memory of the Internet, on the relativity of

the network and on the risk of censorship.

• target audience (and prerequisites): average web

user, high specialization is not required

• estimated duration: 15 minutes

• DCTR levels involved (with motivation),

tags/keywords: L1 - Services with hints at L0 -

Network

• estimated difﬁculty (relative to audience): low

• needed tools: operating systems, software/apps,

connections, etc.

a browser and an Internet connection. PC recom-

mended

• costs: free

• detailed instructions (e.g., with screenshots)

[OMITTED FOR BREVITY]

• variations hints (similar experiments): ﬁnd a

web page that is censored in Italy or that no longer

exists and look for it in the Wayback Machine

• lessons learned:

Know and contribute to the building of the in-

formation heritage of this huge library of pages.

On the Internet, information remains tracked by

the service/content providers. With the Internet

Archive project, users have the ability to trace

snapshots of websites they deem of interest and

retrieve old web pages. This type of historical

memory has a strong cultural value as it allows

you to have a more complete vision of the web

world. If we consider the risk of censorship, this

project takes an even more important role. Fur-

thermore, the user can broaden the reasoning on

the relativity of the network by considering it also

in time space. At different times, the same user

may see the same web page differently or may not

even be able to see it again.

3 CONTRIBUTION

This “didactic experiment” has given satisfactory re-

sults primarily because more than sixty proposals for

Digital Citizenship exercises have been developed,

many of which are practically ready to be published

and used in real contexts. Many students reported

they gained a greater understanding of the topic just

by having to think about how to convey the con-

cepts of the course through exercises for “normal peo-

ple”, so the usefulness of the experiment is certainly

twofold.

The template can be improved, some sections have

been rarely used and others have been interpreted

quite freely (but for now we have not forced a full

adherence to the template in order not to “clip the

wings” to students’ creativity).

The spectrogram in ﬁgure 2 represents the number

of proposals for every level (see appendix B). An in-

teresting aspect to be noted is that the distribution of

the exercises shows how the high levels (L6 and L7)

and one of the low levels (L2) seem the most difﬁcult

to deal with. Moreover, the number of tag (‘#’) oc-

currences (here following with associated DCTR lev-

els) show a strong bias towards the lower levels:

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504

Figure 2: Exercises spectrogram.

19 relativity (L0, L1)

7 crowdsourcing (L5)

6 Locard (L0, L1)

3 learn-to-code (L3)

3 computing-agency (L3)

2 services-digitalization (L1)

2 scraping (L4)

2 petition (L6)

2 digital-identity (L2)

2 device-control (L3)

1 voting (L7)

1 understanding-data (L3)

1 personal-data (L1)

1 opendata (L4)

1 freesoftware (L3)

1 formats (L1,L3)

1 foia (L4)

1 digital-divide (L2)

1 delegation (L7)

It is not surprising that computer science students

ﬁnd easier to cope with arguments closer to their tech-

nical background, and more difﬁcult to deal with top-

ics more related to socio-political sciences. However,

these higher levels in a way “qualify” citizenship and

technology permeates all of these levels. I.e., the most

effort should be allocated in producing exercises for

the “participatory” levels. The challenge is then to

make students aware that their professional skill are

necessary to achieve a more accomplished digital cit-

izenship.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to thank all the Digital Citizenship &

Technocivism students of the academic year 2021-

2022 for their work in proposing and developing ex-

ercises.

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A DCTR LEVELS (WITH TOPICS)

• Technocivism:

(technical-infrastructural levels)

– Level 0 - the network infrastructure: relativity

of the network, non-Euclidean distance, the “best”

route, the Internet is broken, the Locard digital

principle, bits are immortal, DataGate (http://www.

theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-ﬁles), defences.

– Level 1 - online, public and private services: con-

verting to/creating digital services formats & pro-

tocols, fallback, scalability, interoperability, secu-

rity, lock-in, accessibility, “appiﬁcation”, relativity

(again! At the user level), the Locard principle

(again! At the user level), “digital event horizon”.

– Level 2 - access to citizenship services: Maslow

pyramid, digital needs, public services (no discrim-

ination, dutifulness, continuity, universality, etc.),

digital divide, net neutrality, public service propos-

als debate (wiﬁ, cloud, digital identity, devices, etc.).

– Level 3 - education and awareness: threats (ex-

panding technologies such as Internet of Things,

augmented complexity masked by simpler inter-

faces, laws against freedom, anonymization, cryp-

tography, etc., political incompetence, patents, hard

ing agency (Digital “Restriction” Management, pro-

prietary software, Software as a Service, impedance

to “rooting” devices), the unaware citizen, cognitive

digital divide (DESI indexes - http://digital-strategy.

ec.europa.eu/en/policies/desi), Dunning-Kruger ef-

fect, institutional (top-down) defences: national

plans such as Piano Nazionale Scuola Digitale (weak

at best, oriented to technology use rather than real

and deep knowledge useful for a digital citizen),

“grassroots” (bottom-up) defences: learn to code,

right to repair, Free Software (and possibly hard-

ware).

• Digital Citizenship:

(social-participatory levels)

– Level 4 transparency: the “glass house” (Turati),

“noscere per deliberare” (you need to know to de-

cide) (Einaudi), “ex-ante” (before) and “ex-post”

(after) information, transparency (pride or shame?),

opendata, ontologies, objects of transparency, clas-

siﬁcations (Berners-Lee and Davies), resistances,

“webstacles”, scraping, FOIA, communities, pres-

sure groups, mediators, the science crisis, F.A.I.R.

data, civic responsibility (call to arms).

– Level 5 - inform each other and collaborate:

technological evolution of the web (from “publi-

cation only” to “sharing”, “collaborative editing”)

crowdsourcing, “help other citizens” (Wikipedia,

Free Software) “bottom-up” participation grassroots

movements, social action openstreetmap, waze, join

me, ﬁxmystreet, tripadvisor, toiletadvisor (!), trust-

pilot, book/ﬁlm review sites, ushahidi

– Level 6 [consultation] = be heard and consulted elec-

torate crisis, abstention, disillusionment (is “digital”

an answer?), citizen involvement, opinion, consul-

tation, sentiment analysis, participatory pact, social

contract, feedback, fast life cycle, petitioning (e.g.,

http://change.org), platforms (decidim, EU partici-

patory platform, ideascale, ...).

– Level 7 - active involvement in public choices and

policy making: binding “participatory pact”, not ev-

eryone is interested in deciding on everything, hence

delegation, even “liquid”, budget decisions, partici-

patory budgets, e-voting does not offer all the guar-

antees of the analogue/paper version (freedoms from

inﬂuences, secrecy/anonymity, veriﬁability and re-

counting, security), but it certainly has some advan-

tages (lower cost, easy calculation, remote accessi-

bility, etc.), examples (decidim, liquidfeedback, the

“5 star” party platform).

B LIST OF PROPOSALS

• Level 0 - the net

1. DNS (using ‘dig’ or ‘nslookup’ tools), same sym-

bolic name with different results in different net-

works; #relativity of the network

2. ‘nmap’ (scanning tool) different results with and

without a VPN (Virtual Private Network); #relativ-

ity of the network

3. ‘OONI Probe’ (tool), example use of ‘OONI Probe’

software to show and measure indicators about var-

iuos network connections; #relativity, #censorship,

#website-blockage

4. “HTTP vs HTTPS”, by using a “sniffer” (a network

tool such as ‘wireshark’) show that HTTP is very

“observable” (usernames and passwords can be col-

lected easily); #Locard

• Level 1 - services

1. forging activities on Strava, to show how easily a

user can create false activities (e.g., to climb rank-

ings) and upload them to the public site; Locard and

forging of logs; #Locard, #forging

2. VPN and streaming services, to show how video

streaming services offer different lists of media to

different (geo/network located) users; #relativity

3. Instagram ad hoc ads, to show that ads change

depending on the user and or according to recent

searches; #relativity

4. using the same search engine from different devices

(same user) may sport different results; #relativity

5. comparing various search engines in terms of re-

sults; #relativity

6. comparing the same Search Engine (logged, not

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506

logged, cookies cleared, etc.) in terms of results;

#relativity

7. “aleatory” ﬂight prices, show that the exact same

ﬂight sports different prices just depending on the

geolocation of the buyer, maybe linking this analysis

to the BigMacIndex? (Clements et al., 2012); #rela-

tivity

8. “aleatory” Youtube Premium and Strava prices, sim-

ilar to the previous one; #relativity

9. experimenting #relativity using Tor (http:

//torproject.org)

10. are Amazon prices relative to the user? #relativity

11. do services on the web react differently to different

browsers? (yes, of course, and this causes a discrim-

ination of users in accessing those services); #rela-

tivity, #accessibility

12. playstores (Google, Apple, etc.) #relativity (given

a keyword, the list of proposed apps is always the

same?)

13. http://booking.com price #relativity on different

users

14. Google News #relativity, using two or more dif-

ferent accounts using the same keywords generates

different timelines?

15. guide on how to submit a personal data deletion

request; #Locard

16. http://raiplay.it #relativity, it works in Italy only

17. Wayback Machine (http://archive.org/web), vari-

ous uses of the Internet Archive; #Locard, #censor-

ship

18. #relativity advertising on social networks

19. Google vocal recordings and transcriptions; #Lo-

card, #digital-event-horizon

20. create an advertising campaign on Facebook to un-

derstand what types of targeting are available; #rela-

tivity

21. ‘whois’ guide, how to ﬁnd information about a do-

main (or website) owner

22. show examples of the ‘IO app’ (http://io.italia.it)

services available, with comparison to “traditional”

(analog) services to show advantages in using online

services; #services-digitalization

23. understand the usefulness of the ‘p7m’ (digitally

signed document) format; #formats

24. example uses of the Ufﬁcio Postale (postal ofﬁce)

app (e.g., to reserve a place in queue instead of wait-

ing there); #services-digitalization

25. cookies self-defense; #Locard, #digital-event-

horizon

• Level 2 - access

1. how to create a SPID (http://www.spid.gov.it/en) ac-

count highlighting some useful services accessible

through this Single-Sign-On; #digital-identity

2. how to create a PEC (certiﬁed email) account high-

lighting uses (e.g., giving a PEC address to a service

supplier to receive quicker notiﬁcations); #digital-

identity, #digital-presence

3. how to read the Infratel website/report (http://

bandaultralarga.italia.it) to check the availability of

bandwidth in the country; #digital-divide

4. guide on how to verify online the service penetration

of delivery services, to check a sort of “availability

divide”

• Level 3 - education

1. BlackBoxNAND, a black box device that (always?)

behaves like a logical port; #computing-agency,

#device-control, #device-ownership

2. guide on how to mitigate the “ﬁlter bubble” (Pariser,

2011)

3. simple guide to explore the functionalities of your

home router; #device-control, #device-ownership

4. the advantages of F/OSS (Free/Open Source Soft-

ware) through a very small calculator example;

#freesoftware, #learn-to-code

5. a VNC (Virtual Network Computing, a remote

control suite for PCs) tour to raise awareness on

how it is easy to remotely control a computer

(in the case of VNC the controlled computer is

asked for permission, in case of malware there is

no warning/notiﬁcation); #device-control, #device-

ownership

6. Mount Orange School (Moodle) Demo, to learn

about F/OSS platforms in education, inside the demo

any user can experience both the roles of a student

and a teacher in a digital environment; #learn-to-

code, #teaching

7. github/gitlab, show examples of interactions with

an opensource project, e.g., creation of issues, cor-

recting small bugs, navigating through code, reading

the documentation; #learn-to-code, #freesoftware,

#code-is-law

(an advanced version of this excercise could show

the creation of a new project and familiarization with

‘git’ - version control system - functions)

8. Android (smartphone operating system) metadata

management, permission control, etc. #computing-

agency, #device-control, #device-ownership

9. many small exercises in programming with Scratch

(http://scratch.mit.edu); #learn-to-code, #freesoft-

ware

Quoting the Scratch website: “The ability to code

computer programs is an important part of literacy

in today’s society. When people learn to code in

Scratch, they learn important strategies for solving

problems, designing projects, and communicating

ideas.” (Mitch Resnick)

10. guide to password management (with software

tools!), in our era of “data breaches” any digital cit-

izen should know and control who (or what) has ac-

cess to his/her “delegates” (services, devices, etc.),

password managers create strong passwords and can

even check if the chosen one is already present in

public breached databases; #computing-agency

• Level 4 - transparency

1. show/demonstrate what google knows about you

(http://myaccount.google.com/dashboard and http://

myactivity.google.com); #personal-data

2. Google Takeout, download data that Google has on

you and try to examine them, while obtaining the

data is easy (a simple download), reading and un-

derstanding them is trickier since they are in JSON

(http://json.org) or HTML (http://html.spec.whatwg.

org) formats; #understanding-data

3. guide on how to submit an Italian FOIA (Freedom

Digital Citizenship Exercises

507

Of Information Act) to a Public Administration with

or without using http://foiapop.it, explaining useful-

ness and expected results; #foia

4. guide on how to download a dataset from an open-

data site (e.g. http://dati.comune.milano.it) with an

example of a simple computation (e.g., counting or

averages); #opendata

5. how to install and use Keepa (Amazon price tracker,

http://keepa.com) to show that data (in this case ex-

tracted from the Amazon website) can be useful to

lower information asymmetry between the seller and

the buyer; #scraping

6. show the usefulness of http://idealo.it, a system ca-

pable of scraping data (in the form of images and

Comma Separated Values) relating to products on

various sellers’ sites and ﬁnding the lower price;

#scraping

• Level 5 - sharing

1. create a new report on http://www.partecipami.it or

commenting an existing one, PartecipaMI is a city

“issues” gatherer (e.g., road damages, illegal parking

reporting, crime reporting, etc.); #crowdsourcing

2. how to use Waze (http://waze.com) not only to go

somewhere (i.e., as a simple navigational tool), but

also to contribute to information about trafﬁc, speed

cameras, etc. #crowdsourcing

3. how to add information on maps in http://

openstreetmap.org; #crowdsourcing

4. guide on how to use the http://municipiumapp.it

app, check that your municipality has activated the

app from the list of active municipalities and, if there

is one, make a report or a proposal to improve your

territory; #crowdsourcing, #participation

5. Wikipedia errors or tuning, showing how you can

contribute, through your knowledge, to improve

Wikipedia, for example by correcting an error that

has been identiﬁed in an article; #crowdsourcing

6. Google Local Guide: how to upload contributions

to improve and add information on Google Maps;

#crowdsourcing

7. Stack Exchange (http://stackexchange.com), show

how to use the famous collaborative platform, re-

marking user roles and rules (to gain answering and

moderation levels); #crowdsourcing, #collaboration

8. show how to create a #petition through http://

change.org

• Level 6 - consultation

1. show how to create a #petition through the Euro-

pean Parliament platform, remarking the steps and

requirements and the consequences (iter, evaluation

of proposals, #participatory-pact)

• Level 7 - democracy

1. digital/online voting, show/discuss various types of

#delegation (it is not easy to conﬁne this item in a

small excercise)

2. show the “5 star” party (http://www.

movimento5stelle.eu) participatory platform, in

particular the online #voting component “skyvote”

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