1. Latest developments of the data collection system for the next Italian census pilot
Giuseppe Sindoni, Istat, Italy

2. What’s new for the 2011 Population Census?
Use of street numbers in field operations
Business and household geocoding to the census tract
Use of administrative archives
New questionnaire delivery process
Personalised questionnaires
Mail out
New methods and survey techniques
Census areas
Short and long form
Multi-channel collection
Flexible organisation network
Downsized municipal front-office => Stronger back-office
Population-based differentiation
Enumerator guidance

3. Census pilot 25 October 2009 Stratified sample 31 municipalities
About 80,000 households
About 180,000 people
6 survey schemes to be tested on different types of municipalities

4. This presentation
Architecture of the web-based collection and management system
Technical characteristics
Demonstration of the online questionnaire

5. System architecture

6. Online questionnaire demonstration

7. The management and monitoring system
Aimed at simplifying back-office work
Needed to:
manage the day-to-day work of enumerators
monitor multi-channel data collection

8. Management and monitoring system (2)
Main functions:
Census tract status
Summary reports
Operator management
Questionnaire management
Documentation

9. Technical features Three layer architecture
RDBMS - application server - browser
Model-View-Controller pattern
Java Enterprise Edition 5
Servlet + Java Server Pages

10. Final thoughts
Very difficult to assess the right usability issues for the questionnaire
The pilot will probably provide a lot of feedback on user satisfaction, from both households and municipal back offices
A different census strategy, due to potential budget cut, could completely change the final census scenario