Enabling immigrants to easily know and exercise their rights.The case of MyJourney

There is evidence that the construction of immigrants’ integration and inclusion in the hosting societies, as well as the recognition and management of cultural diversities, are more and more defined and implemented at the local level. There, municipal authorities and other local government bodies play a decisive role in building inclusion as well as exclusion patterns by simply facilitating or making more complex what Isin and Nielsen (2008) call “acts of citizenship”, which include both the outcomes of discretionary decisions and compliance with implementations of mandatory national or supranational administrative procedures. Consequently, immigrants’ integration is challenged by both the diffuse, albeit wrong, feeling that immigrants have about themselves as “illegal citizens”. This acts as an impediment to a broader and fuller exercise of their acknowledged and endorsed rights, fueled by the complexities of international, national and local norms that differentiate its mechanisms across the countries. This paper starts with an introduction presenting the issue of existing services accessibility for immigrants. In the second part, the authors introduce the “Open4citizens” Horizon2020 project and the work carried out for a hackathon event dedicated to the ideation and prototyping of an ICT based solution devoted to facilitate the request for family reunification in Milan. Finally, the article describes “MyJourney”, the solution awarded during the hackathon, which was finalized throughout a collaborative work among the developers, the Municipality and the Prefecture of Milan.