Open Data for the common good: The Services4Migrants hackathon
(Milano, March 2018)
Government data is often mentioned as a commons, a public resource to be made freely available for all goodwill people willing to create real value out of it. During the week-end of 10th&11th March 2018 at the premises of Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, a live demonstration was given of how government data might be exploited for the common good, notably the delivery of better services to regular immigrants applying for family reunification. See more info on the event page at https://www.eventbrite.it/e/biglietti-services4migrants-un-hackathon-per-migliorare-i-servizi-ai-migranti-43354522544#).
With the endorsement of the Municipality and the Prefecture of Milan, the two public bodies in charge of the administrative handling of such applications, a collection of open datasets and procedural instructions — notably available on paper only thus far — has been “hacked” by five young developer teams, including one totally made of foreigners. Those teams have been engaged in an exciting, 30 hours long competition, full of passionate discussions, smart design work, some essential coding, and supported by a lot of food, quite a few (soft) drinks and very little overnight sleep.
Indeed, this is what a hackathon is usually about — so they say — and the Milano event named Services4Migrants was also quite fruitful, as it led to the definition of five innovative mock-ups aimed to simplify the complicated interaction between the city government and the foreign residents.
Below we list some of the interesting outputs from the Hackathon:
“Unio”: The applicant defines and understands, step by step, his own path of family reunification through simplified wizards and information tools. The platform stands as a real personal assistant along entire process: Informing on the suitability of the applicant to start the procedure, providing information on the production and delivery of documents, helping in completing online forms, indicating the contact details of the offices and the relevant bodies.
“4Mi”: The platform is an open source project: all the data used and the technologies with which the platform will be implemen-ted are free and open. The aim is to provide a guide that simplifies the bureaucratic and non-bureaucratic practices that the migrant faces during his stay in the country. Initially the application will implement the “Family reunification” wizard and through this, the migrant will be guided through the steps customized according to his situation (user-specific).
“equaMi”: A platform that shows and explains the steps to follow in order to a family re-unification, shortening the distances between the foreign community and the public administration. It is a dynamic way to support migrants: a model that can be adapted to different places and users and that connect in a simple way users and the institution.
”HiNoi”: wants to help make the procedure as simple and innovative as possible. The user is followed during his bureaucratic process: First he is profiled to understand if the requirements of the procedure are satisfied, then a dynamic and personalized path is created, organized by step on a timeline that can be shared even with relatives abroad. It is a model that can be exported and also tool that works for different profiles: articulated for migrants and mediators.
“TeamBallo”: Is the devel-opment of a guide for family reunification that is simplified, personalized and intuitive, using data in a conscious way to provide useful and specific information. Every single user will be profiled through a simple interactive questionnaire, based on gamification.
Overall, Immigrants asking for family reunification can be seen as a sort of “special” citizens whose rights are more often acknowledged than properly exercised, due to a variety of barriers — not only language related, but also due to the complexity of legal and bureaucratic requirements, sometimes hard to grasp for the natives too.
All the smiling faces we noticed at the end of the coding marathon — both from the teams and the jury members, who awarded three of the five solutions to the next evaluation phase — communicated a diffused sense of “mission accomplished”. And in retrospect, now that the winning team is negotiating with the Municipality the timing and contents of the missing developments to materialize their concept into a working application, we can be proud that the city of Milan has proven once more its capacity of unleashing the best energies and skills of both the public sector and the civil society, to co-create new and innovative responses to societal and civic needs.
Read more about the Open4Citizens project on www.open4citizens.eu ❤
