From North to South: A 90-Day Tour of Italy on the TECH4ALL SmartBus

Technology can be a great boon to the world and an effective tool that can offer people and companies so many possibilities and opportunities once they are aware of its advantages.

In April 2022, I had a pleasant face-to-face talk with Laura Di Raimondo, General Director of Asstel, Italy’s telecoms industry association, after one of the Workgroup meetings. During the conversation I shared the idea of promoting people’s awareness of digital tools, privacy, and cyber security through our TECH4ALL SmartBus initiative, as we at Huawei had already done in other countries in Europe.  

Physically, the SmartBus is a long vehicle that contains content platforms and digital tools, and is able to travel on a road tour, moving from town to town. It is capable of hosting people on board and can serve as a digital classroom to local communities. We knew that building an ecosystem around the SmartBus was the key to the success of the initiative. Laura Di Raimondo was fascinated by the idea of the Huawei TECH4ALL SmartBus and the potential that would come with it. She offered to provide support and patronage for the initiative, and promised to help get other partners and stakeholders from the information and communication technology (ICT) industry involved in this endeavor. She immediately picked up the phone to introduce me to Rosy Russo, founder of Parole Ostili, an association headquartered in the north of Italy that is very active in the domain of digital education and communication for the national school system.  

It all started from this phone call. In a few days we had a meeting in Rome, where we laid the foundation to make this beautiful experience – a SmartBus tour across the country – possible. The journey began! 

In the beginning, the project seemed to get off to a chaotic start. It was complicated because we had to keep a large number of factors under control when it came to the design, construction, and operations of the bus itself. I had studied plenty of materials from the other SmartBus projects in Western Europe together with my colleague from the ecosystem team, Linda. This study immediately put the situation in perspective, which was very helpful for us in dealing with this very ambitious and challenging project. Moreover, we took pride in what we were doing, and we felt good to know that we were contributing to the country and local communities. This motivated and drove us towards our ambitions and goals.
 
Building the ecosystem 
 
For our SmartBus initiative to be a success we needed to have support from the authorities, sponsorship from private entities, and patronage from institutions. In other words, an ecosystem for the SmartBus was really needed. 

We decided to go and talk directly with the National State Police – specifically the department responsible for post and telecommunications. First of all, the State Police is the principal Italian police force for the maintenance of public safety and security. As well as the security of all motorway, railway, and waterway networks, they are also responsible for the security of digital networks. They are a very well-known authority in Italy, and the first to promote a special program based on a mobile truck touring the country to bring more awareness of the risks and threats coming mainly from social networks, such as cyber bullying, to the young generation. The head of the Police, Post and Telecommunications Department understood the value of our proposition and was very happy to have a company like Huawei willing to help people better understand the risks related to digital networks. Later, the Italian State Police officers would be present at five stops of the SmartBus tour to support us by providing extra content to our digital network risk awareness lectures. 

We have also been looking for sponsorship by private entities and patronage from public institutions. In the beginning it was a very tough situation, with very little response from our prospective sponsors. But we moved on. We arranged more meetings with them where, face to face, we explained to them the importance of the project in detail and highlighted the value of the initiative. And our efforts paid off at last. We received patronage from five regional governments and the majority of the 14 towns where the SmartBus stops had been scheduled to happen en route. 

Fondazione Piemonte Innova, a partner foundation based on public and private partnership active in promoting the competitiveness and growth of companies by the use of technology as a strategic development factor, also decided to join our ecosystem.  

Planning the tour 
 
I said to myself that maybe I could use my personal experience to plan the bus itinerary in the territory. As a motorhome driver, driving tours are my hobby in my free time. I am used to making roadmaps and planning trips across Italy and other parts of Europe. So, it was natural for me to feel good about planning the route for our SmartBus tour. I approached it region by region, town by town. 

In my plan, the overall tour itinerary started from Turin in the north of Italy and then moved on to the center and the south of the country, with Naples as the final stop. All stops had to be designed in such a way as to make it possible for the SmartBus driver to drive the vehicle based on a specific calendar with fixed dates, which could then move on national highways and municipal roads safely and stop at the fixed locations where the waiting students and teachers got to participate in the activities as scheduled in advance with all schools. 

We had team discussions, which were useful for adjusting the strategy. And we concentrated our efforts on small towns normally never reached by this kind of initiative. We just kept the cities of Turin and Naples as major stops. In the former, we planned to hold the inauguration ceremony to kick off our journey. In the latter, we would complete it with a final event at the end of the tour. 

In terms of the target audience, the top priority was given to strengthening the awareness of young people, especially middle school students aged 11 to 14. Among them, education in digital risks and threats is still at a very low level or completely absent. 

We decided to incorporate an amazing experience into the SmartBus, designing it as an interactive digital classroom with seats around a big table and Huawei tablets installed in each position. Large screens were installed on the walls.  

We felt that a traditional lecture session would have been boring. So, a trainer was available to capture the attention of the students by explaining to them the course content using not only slides, but also engaging videos and multimedia from the screens. All tablets available onboard were equipped with a dedicated web app to let them interact with the trainer – asking and answering questions in a more spontaneous way. This type of easy communication carried out with words and examples close to the students’ world has really been another winning element of this project.  

It was great to see the level of interest and enthusiasm shown by those taking part in the SmartBus activity. 

At the same time, we tried to involve citizens on the way so that we could collect feedback from the adult population living in the territory, including school teachers, students’ relatives, families, and elderly people, who might be curious about the operations of the SmartBus. 

On the SmartBus tour, I received a call from the Head of Institutional Affairs from a certain carrier who, in agreement with their External Relations and Sustainability Officer, confirmed that they were available to support us during our tour. They would, specifically, offer us sponsorship and resources that could be used to help bring people on board, and they would also arrange free talks on innovation topics on board the SmartBus, especially during the afternoon sessions with adult citizens. 

I was more than happy that we were finally going in the right direction. 

Morning classes take place every 45 minutes

Overcoming challenges and difficulties along the way  
 
It was a difficult task to obtain municipal permits and authorization to move the SmartBus in town and find the proper parking space in the downtown of the city not far away from schools. It was especially the case when we were trying to meet the SmartBus space and weight requirements, with our trip plan – or itinerary – based on calendar days, public holidays, and special events and occasions in each town at the same time. We had to conduct surveys in each town location and apply to the municipality offices for authorization. In the end, the majority of locations were generally authorized by the local authorities, and we were delighted to see that our expectations were usually met – we had expected to have a highly visible and safe location in town that was easily accessible by all visitors. 

Convincing regular citizens to come on board for the afternoon sessions was another real hard task to deliver. Adults are more likely to assume that they know everything about digital matters and related risks. Psychologically it is also hard to ask them to test their capabilities in a class, as they are more often than not afraid that they may get a low score and look bad. On some occasions during the tour, and to our great surprise, some citizens showed SmartBus personnel on their smartphones some real cases of cyber fraud from man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. 

In other situations, the students who had experienced the bus in the morning returned with their relatives or grandparents in the afternoon to show what they had been doing in class earlier in the day. 

The web app available on the tablets has allowed us to record the awareness level of each individual student and adult living the SmartBus experience each day. Each individual session was planned to provide immediate feedback with result scores to the user and an overall report to the class teachers based on actual performance. The system in use was designed to collect all results in a data lake under the control of our educational partner. 

Conclusion

We are proud of the ecosystem that we have been able to create around the Italy SmartBus, an initiative that has been publicized using all available channels.  

The tour lasted 90 days from April to June 2023. The success of the initiative was the result of a great team effort. We were able to engage over 4,500 students and nearly 600 citizens during the whole tour that consisted of 15 stops in five regions across Italy. One final additional stop was also arranged in Trieste, north of Italy, when the bus was on its way back to our base in the Netherlands. In this way, we were able to attend as an official partner the annual Festival of the Parole Ostili Association, our main content partner for this initiative. 

It was absolutely amazing to see the faces of the students who were excited to get on the bus and discover a brand-new digital environment so different from their class experience every day. Some said that they would never forget this experience they had in such a comfortable environment with so many interesting things to see and touch. From the thankful words of their teachers, we could tell that our bus had really given them an example of how to incorporate digitalization into their educational programs. A gap report was created on the basis of the SmartBus activity, and would be a good starting point in helping pupils to improve their digital awareness. 

As a most memorable experience, we saw the smiling faces of the children happy to have joined us in embarking on a wonderful experience! 

Apart from two major ceremonies and some visits to institutions on the SmartBus, we planned an important final session where we shared best practices and presented our results in a final report in front of the central government agencies. We succeeded in arranging a handover session to some key institutions at the Senate (chamber at the Italian Parliament) with the attendance of high-ranking representatives from the Ministry of Education, Agency for National Cyber Security, Italian Data Protection Authority, and State Police - they publicly appreciated and endorsed the initiative and expressed hope that this experience could be continued in Italy. 

Learn more about Huawei's digital inclusion initiative TECH4ALL.

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Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.