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This study is focused on a small village in Tuscany and explores how citizens
evaluate the actions and communication strategies applied by the local government during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study adopted a combination of
qualitative and quantitative methods: semi-structured interviews with local administrators, and a survey with a representative sample of the local population.
The findings show a limitedly articulated yet meaningful relationship between
the central administration and the local one, a positive evaluation by citizens
of the local government's management of the emergency and, generally, good
social cohesion, albeit not fully supported by the engagement of civic cultures
that were heavily restricted by the socially restrictive measures imposed during
the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has fostered the increasing use of digitally-mediated communication, which has substituted a large part of the face-to-face encounters, work, political, social, and leisure activities, made impossible during the long period of lockdown. What did this entail in small villages, in respect to both citizens and local government, where face-to-face communication has been more resistant to digital mediation? This study aimed to explore the changes seen in institutional communication, and more generally, in the everyday life of citizens and their relationship with local administrators during the first lockdown in Italy. The context explored was the small-scale local community of Peccioli (Tuscany), a village where face-to face communication usually played a pivotal role in the interaction between local government and citizens. This small village represents a good point of observation to understand whether, in contexts such as this, there has been a change in the balance between different modes of communication similar to that seen in more urban environments. More specifically, the paper presents the main findings emerging from a study exploring on the one hand, the attitudes and opinions of local administrators regarding institutional communication, and, on the other, the evaluations by citizens of the initiatives and the communication by local government and an analysis of their information behaviors. In the first case, a qualitative approach was used, based on 10 semi-structured interviews with local administrators; in the second case, a quantitative approach was adopted based on a survey conducted with a representative sample of Peccioli's citizens. The main finding of the study revealed the crucial role of word of mouth, thus indicating that, contrary to what is generally believed, not all communication has become automatically digital during COVID-19.

This article aims to contribute to the debate on citizen participation by illustrating, with an operational example, how it may be more effectively achieved using a combination of survey and online social data. We focus on a project the purpose of which was to arrive at a formulation of planning policies based on a sharing process between the council and citizens of the small municipality of Peccioli in Tuscany, Italy. The aim was to increase participation by collecting opinions on long-term projects. The combination of survey and online social data enabled the collection of more accurate insights on participation, providing the municipality with a reliable representation of citizens' sentiments and opinions. This article, although locally rooted, demonstrates how planning authorities more widely can enhance participation by taking advantage of both analog and digital methods.

The purpose of this article is to provide lessons from the field about an Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) project (Participatory Research and Ownership With Technology, Information and Change [PROTIC]) concerned with the use of mobile phones by women in remote villages in Bangladesh. The Bangladeshi government considers that the role of ICT in social and economic transformation is significant for the country's development. International nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) also regard ICT as important but are challenged as how to use them effectively for their programs and how to deal with long-term sustainability, digital divides, gender, and cultural issues. This article considers the PROTIC project as a modeling force for innovation and pressure on established sociotechnical structures. In this analysis, we follow what Donner defines as the "interrelationship" perspective, as applied to ICT4D. In particular, the notions of niche, regime, and landscape will be used to frame the changes that a village-level project may activate or respond to at the micro, meso, and macro levels of sociotechnical interaction. A mixed methods approach has been implemented during the 4 years of the project to monitor its outcomes, including interviews with project participants, reports of monthly consultations and training with villagers, extensive surveys, analysis of the Facebook profile of the project, and field notes and interviews with local NGOs and international NGO staff. Results show that the women villagers have undergone a transformation in attitudes, skills, and practices associated with mobile phone use. Transformations at individual and community niche levels have in turn influenced the conceptual framework of local and international NGOs and have also contributed to the reorientation of other regime actors, such as universities, major NGOs, and the government. Methodological constraints as well as the complexity of conducting international fieldwork with multiple actors will also be discussed.