Periodic Reporting for period 2 - EASYRIGHTS (Enabling immigrants to easily know and exercise their rights)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2021-04-01 al 2022-11-30
Very often, migrants don’t know much of their rights and/or have little capacity to enforce them. They are quite frequently “lost in translation”, especially in the early years of their local experience. The details of key bureaucratic procedures are often onscure to those who have little acquaintance with the new language or little literacy, and have a very modest knowledge and awareness of their rights and duties in the hosting countries and cities: they don’t know how to access existing services (be they dedicated to immigrants or universal, open to all citizens). Language courses, education opportunities, housing solutions, healthcare and social assistance services, family supports (as, for example, family reunion) and insertion in the job market can be inaccessible (and related rights denied) if communication and interaction with institutions are not clear, especially for the most vulnerable groups of migrants.
Cities that attract or lure migrants in large numbers, also bear many difficulties and conflicts attached to integration processes while their leeway of action is constrained. So, 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 “acts of citizenship”, being they the outcomes of discretionary decisions or just complying implementations of mandatory national or supranational administrative procedures. Moreover, superimposed regulations and the existence of margins of ‘manoeuvre’ at the local level contribute to differentiate the concrete “pathways of migrants incorporation” and to create new and substantial gaps between the dimensions of citizenship and integration.
The objective of EASYRIGHTS has been to develop co-creation eco-systems in which actors belonging to the local governance system can cooperate in increasing the quantity and quality of public (welfare) services available to immigrants. The specific aims have been to improve the personalisation and contextualisation levels, empower the prospective beneficiaries of existing services in getting better access and fruition opportunities, and to engage Quadruple Helix stakeholders in joint, purposeful co-creation efforts, facilitated by the use of hackathons. An easyRights "agent" - with the twin meaning of “aggregation of local stakeholders” and “collection of online and offline tools” - has been developed and deployed in four pilot locations (Birmingham, Larissa, Palermo and Malaga). In so doing, easyRights has created promising opportunities to support immigrants in their search for responses to different needs, making them more autonomous - at least to some extent - from discretionary street level bureaucracies, saving time for both migrants and for social service staff and cutting costs for the public administration.
Cities that attract or lure migrants in large numbers, also bear many difficulties and conflicts attached to integration processes while their leeway of action is constrained. So, 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 “acts of citizenship”, being they the outcomes of discretionary decisions or just complying implementations of mandatory national or supranational administrative procedures. Moreover, superimposed regulations and the existence of margins of ‘manoeuvre’ at the local level contribute to differentiate the concrete “pathways of migrants incorporation” and to create new and substantial gaps between the dimensions of citizenship and integration.
The objective of EASYRIGHTS has been to develop co-creation eco-systems in which actors belonging to the local governance system can cooperate in increasing the quantity and quality of public (welfare) services available to immigrants. The specific aims have been to improve the personalisation and contextualisation levels, empower the prospective beneficiaries of existing services in getting better access and fruition opportunities, and to engage Quadruple Helix stakeholders in joint, purposeful co-creation efforts, facilitated by the use of hackathons. An easyRights "agent" - with the twin meaning of “aggregation of local stakeholders” and “collection of online and offline tools” - has been developed and deployed in four pilot locations (Birmingham, Larissa, Palermo and Malaga). In so doing, easyRights has created promising opportunities to support immigrants in their search for responses to different needs, making them more autonomous - at least to some extent - from discretionary street level bureaucracies, saving time for both migrants and for social service staff and cutting costs for the public administration.
The four pilots, despite the early pandemic related constraints, have managed to activate 8 quadruple helix ecosystems for the four selected services:
> LARISSA: Certificate of Residence, Declaration of birth
> PALERMO: Registration at the Registry Office, Job seeking
> MALAGA: Asylum seeking, Job seeking
> BIRMINGHAM: Clean Air Zone (CAZ) compliance in the urban area of Birmingham, Registration to English course
Pilot site representatives have worked in strict collaboration with the three easyRights ICT partners to provide them the documents describing key procedures for service access and the related obstacles and motivations that have been collected and mapped thanks to a wide co-design work carried out in the pilots' contexts. The administrative documents collected, together with the outputs of the co-design activities carried out with users and local service operators, drove the development of eight courses in English, Italian, Spanish and Greek related to the services identified by the pilot cities. A lemmatizer (i.e. algorithm for finding the base form of a word) was developed as well as a tool for IPA transcription for Greek to allow the creation of customized pronunciation exercises for the user to practice correct pronunciation. Already existing tools for Spanish, Italian and English have been improved. A number of new exercise types have been developed, to make the learners more engaged. From the pronunciation side Listen&Speak (pronunciation) and Listen&Write (spelling) exercises for the vocabulary have been developed in the language of the pilots' countries. The exercises are focussed on words which contain sounds that are unfamiliar to the migrant because they do not exist in his/her native language and determined through comparison of the sounds inventories of the native language with that of the target language using a tool developed by NTNU (see https://L1-L2map.hf.ntnu.no).
Also a recommender system has been prototyped based on a chatbot technology that classifies intents and provides a group-based recommendation. The adaptation layer of this technology to the easyRights solution connects with the pathway generator, the WHAT-WHERE-WHEN-HOW framework, that features the pathway according to the name, where to, when to, and how to access a service.
Eight online/in presence hackathons have been organised in the pilot sites, and local partners have worked for institutional embedment of the prototypes selected by the juries, to transform them into usable services: the hackathons solutions have been integrated in the service environments.
The easyRights concept has been enriched and its potential value for European and Member State policy making enhanced by the creation of the Mediation Grammar, a service quality standard developed at the European level, and two Policy Briefs.
> LARISSA: Certificate of Residence, Declaration of birth
> PALERMO: Registration at the Registry Office, Job seeking
> MALAGA: Asylum seeking, Job seeking
> BIRMINGHAM: Clean Air Zone (CAZ) compliance in the urban area of Birmingham, Registration to English course
Pilot site representatives have worked in strict collaboration with the three easyRights ICT partners to provide them the documents describing key procedures for service access and the related obstacles and motivations that have been collected and mapped thanks to a wide co-design work carried out in the pilots' contexts. The administrative documents collected, together with the outputs of the co-design activities carried out with users and local service operators, drove the development of eight courses in English, Italian, Spanish and Greek related to the services identified by the pilot cities. A lemmatizer (i.e. algorithm for finding the base form of a word) was developed as well as a tool for IPA transcription for Greek to allow the creation of customized pronunciation exercises for the user to practice correct pronunciation. Already existing tools for Spanish, Italian and English have been improved. A number of new exercise types have been developed, to make the learners more engaged. From the pronunciation side Listen&Speak (pronunciation) and Listen&Write (spelling) exercises for the vocabulary have been developed in the language of the pilots' countries. The exercises are focussed on words which contain sounds that are unfamiliar to the migrant because they do not exist in his/her native language and determined through comparison of the sounds inventories of the native language with that of the target language using a tool developed by NTNU (see https://L1-L2map.hf.ntnu.no).
Also a recommender system has been prototyped based on a chatbot technology that classifies intents and provides a group-based recommendation. The adaptation layer of this technology to the easyRights solution connects with the pathway generator, the WHAT-WHERE-WHEN-HOW framework, that features the pathway according to the name, where to, when to, and how to access a service.
Eight online/in presence hackathons have been organised in the pilot sites, and local partners have worked for institutional embedment of the prototypes selected by the juries, to transform them into usable services: the hackathons solutions have been integrated in the service environments.
The easyRights concept has been enriched and its potential value for European and Member State policy making enhanced by the creation of the Mediation Grammar, a service quality standard developed at the European level, and two Policy Briefs.
easyRights has proved that access conditions of existing public services can be improved by orienting the immigrants towards a better exercise of their rights. easyRights has implemented ICT-enabled solutions with friendly interfaces to improve the integration of migrants in the hosting societies by informing them about their rights (and obligations) and improving their autonomy in interacting with public authorities and crucial private actors offering life opportunities. easyRights' ‘clients’ are therefore both migrants and public and private organisations like Municipalities, police organizations, foundations, trade unions, NGOs, etc. (which explains and qualifies our Quadruple Helix approach).
By working in this direction easyRights created impact on different levels: the individual level (migrants, actors in the institutions, communities and localities), the institutional level (institutions that are directly and indirectly involved in the implementation and dissemination of the easyRights services and/or offer services relevant to migrants and as well as to their integration) and the level of the pilot communities. This has been already achieved by the work done on 8 services (1st and 2nd cycle of pilots work) and the related ecosystem of institutions, immigrants support organizations, migrants and ICT communities, as well as by the development of the easyRights solution (currently under test) and the creation of the Mediation Grammar finally entering a co-design phase throughout the CEN workshop, i.e. the first institutional step for a standard creation managed by the CEN, the European Agency for standardization. Many institutional, academic and NGOs from several countries are represented among the list of CEN WS participants.
By working in this direction easyRights created impact on different levels: the individual level (migrants, actors in the institutions, communities and localities), the institutional level (institutions that are directly and indirectly involved in the implementation and dissemination of the easyRights services and/or offer services relevant to migrants and as well as to their integration) and the level of the pilot communities. This has been already achieved by the work done on 8 services (1st and 2nd cycle of pilots work) and the related ecosystem of institutions, immigrants support organizations, migrants and ICT communities, as well as by the development of the easyRights solution (currently under test) and the creation of the Mediation Grammar finally entering a co-design phase throughout the CEN workshop, i.e. the first institutional step for a standard creation managed by the CEN, the European Agency for standardization. Many institutional, academic and NGOs from several countries are represented among the list of CEN WS participants.