Easing Migrants’ Access to Public Services: The Palermo’s Hackathon in the easyRights Project

Migrants face many barriers when accessing public services due to their lack of legal, procedural and language-related knowledge. This significantly limits their integration into the local community and civic status. Several studies and practices in the field have proved that co-creation is crucial for innovating and adopting solutions for migrants, increasing their visibility to cope with the needs of local service providers and fostering citizen engagement. The easyRights project aims at combining co-creation and intelligent language-oriented technologies to make it easier for migrants to understand and access the public services they need to use. This chapter presents the experience of one pilot of the easyRights project, aimed at empowering and supporting migrants in enrolling in the registry office of the Palermo municipality. To integrate ICT solutions, a hackathon initiative was organised to transform solution ideas into prototypes. During the 72-hour event, migrants, coders, programmers, social workers and lawyers joined forces to address the challenges migrants faced at each phase of the enrolment into the registry office. The chapter concludes with a focus on the unique outcome of Palermo’s hackathon. It encourages the municipality to reformulate the concept of migrants not as special citizens but rather as potential drivers of innovation processes acknowledging all citizens as a very diverse, fragmented whole, thus enriching the concept of citizenship. The chapter also describes the important role that the use of technology can play in achieving these objectives.