Probably the community networking implementation with the most promise (i.e. most used by the community) is done by a group in East Palo Alto, CA called PluggedIn. You can see their beta at
http://community.pluggedin.org/ (ACS 4.x)
The other really good community networking implementation of ACS is http://www.camfieldestates.net/ (ACS 3.x)
Neither of these sites uses OACS... I guess they both had an extra $20k lying around that they wanted to give to oracle. Actually they got their licenses donated, but that means that other organizations can't just borrow their code.
I've been working on Andrew Cohill at the Association for Community Networking (www.afcn.org) to see if we can put together a coalition of folks willing to build a "community network in a box" based on OACS. Any organization could download the software and get up and running quickly.
If you are looking more for an example of a metro network for city governent service delivery (pay parking tickets, etc.), I don't know of any good ACS examples.
The closest one is www.developmentgateway.org (ACS4), which is a good example of a major organization (the World Bank) selecting a tool (ACS) that can be used to service multiple nodes (countries). The same model would work for the Italian cities. The workgroup would develop the core software, and each city can implement, extend and customize according to their needs.
I think the benefits of something like OACS is:
1) Cost of development & maintainence is generally a little lower. You can subtract out the license fees for software, though costs for development, training, support, etc. are the same.
2) The software can be distributed to other cities (Italian & otherwise) without blockages.
3) Once there is a significant installed base, the process of upgrading and extending the application to additional functionality areas is cheap, fast and innovative.
For example, a US city might adopt the software and create an application that helps citizens figure out when their streets are going to be repaired. The Italian cities that initiated the project, would be able to adopt that innovation, since they laid out the technical groundwork for the system. It might be as easy as simply installing a new package into their OACS installation.
Good luck on the sell, I think a really compelling case can be made.
