The computerized social profile is an extremely valuable professional tool for evaluating ongoing social policies and planning future ones. It is a means of sharing social knowledge that gives life to a community of practices in which we can identify good forms of intervention, which is a starting-point for re-launching territorial planning of services. In this way the computerized social file expresses and interprets to the full the principle of participation and bottom-up public welfare policies. This essay discusses both its strong and critical points. only subscribers can see the full article

The Lisbon strategy is a community approach designed to create learning opportunities for one’s national system and that of other countries, with the aim of encouraging the best solutions, selecting the best practices and using indicators as benchmarking. It is a process that has made the idea of convergence a reality, aiming at getting those involved to redefine their strategic and political priorities under the effect of continuous learning. However, it is clear that none of the indicators adopted at Lisbon or immediately after will be reached in 2010. It is therefore a failure that is not limited just to the social area. Using the most recent data, the article discusses the reasons for this partial failure and concludes with some suggestions for possible solutions. only subscribers can see the full article

Since 2004 the Lisbon Strategy has been centred on structural reforms and economic prescriptions, while at the conclusion of the Lisbon summit a different strategy, organized partly around methods open to coordination, had introduced genuine innovation, with the hope of a real acceptance at community level of Europe’s “social dimension”. Since the second Kok Report things have changed. Important later events completely changed the picture, to say nothing of the economic crisis that exploded in 2007-2008. In these conditions we still need to establish the global balance of what is known by metonymy as “Lisbon”. This article tries to trace the main lines of the story. If we restrict ourselves to the social material of the Lisbon strategy, as two symbolic examples show (the implementation of social protection and flexicurity), it has not kept its promises. In the end it has been only a discourse accompanying the economic reforms, against a background of growing importance for community law, and privileges economic freedom over social rights.only subscribers can see the full article

This contribution deals with the importance of process-produced data in government information systems (particularly at regional level), or of the usefulness of linking synergically the information gaps for social planning with the information gaps for bureaucratic purposes. There are two basic criteria behind this method: information-gathering techniques used for censuses and the choice of the organizational unit of service providers (and not the individual user) as the basic unit of observation. The essay also considers the strategic choice of the unit of service provision and unit of elementary observation in activating reliable information flows and the correct placing and evaluating of information tools and data bases on the individual user for case management. The development of social information systems based on information taken from process-produced data also fills in many of the information gaps, that can also be defined at differentiated territorial levels, including central national level, with an undoubted advantage for the trans-regional comparability of data, as well as for reconstructing otherwise incomparable data on a national scale. only subscribers can see the full article