Geographic Area
EU-wide
City
Larissa, Malaga, Birmingham, Palermo
Language
English
Type of Information
Organisation
Contact Person
Anastasios Vasileiadis
Project Start
01/01/2020
Ongoing Project
Yes
Project End
30/06/2022
Summary
The easyRights project is working to develop a co-creative ecosystem in conjunction with AI technology, in which different actors belonging to local governance systems can cooperate to increase the quantity and quality of public (welfare) services available to migrants.
Bringing together migrants, the public sector and private organisations, easyRights will develop a platform to provide personalised, context-aware information to its users, taking into account background, demographics and language skills.
easyRights is a consortium, comprising fourteen partners from seven different countries: Austria, Denmark, Greece, Italy, Norway, Spain and the UK. The pilot platform is being developed in four of these countries.
Issue/Challenge and Goal/Assumption
Issues and challenges:
Research into migration tends to focus on the factors that affect people’s decisions to leave their country and become migrants. Only to a lesser extent have other migration issues been studied, such as those concerning the integration of migrants and their families into unknown, diverse, distant and sometimes hostile societies.
In this context, two key aspects will be explored within the easyRights project:
- the ways in which migrants’ integration is challenged by the complexities of international, national and local norms across different countries;
- exploration of methods to alleviate common, negative self-perceptions on the part of migrants, such as that they are ‘illegal citizens’, which often prevent them from comprehensively exercising their acknowledged and endorsed rights.
Project goals:
The specific aims of the project are to improve the personalisation and context-awareness of existing services through the easyRights platform, to empower the prospective beneficiaries of existing services to secure better access to and make better use of opportunities, as well as to make use of hackathons to enable the co-creation of service support solutions using easyRights technology. It is expected that these solutions will facilitate the assimilation of migrants, contributing to happier and more successful lives in their new communities.
The objectives within these aims are: 1) the improvement of language skills; 2) the enhancement of communication; 3) the increased accessibility of information; 4) the development of a shared understanding; 5) the better connection of migrant support systems.
How does it work
The easyRights project’s main activities include:
- codifying and structuring project results into an innovative ‘Mediation Grammar’ designed to become a new international standard;
- establishing, managing and monitoring eight ‘Quadruple Helix communities’ in the project pilots, tackling the simplification of eight distinct procedures (in Greece, for example, the two procedures involved are the certification of nationality and the certification of residence; in the UK the focus is on inclusion of migrants in public consultation and creating a standardised English learning system across the city);
- the organisation of eight hackathon events (one every 12 months; two per country) in the four pilot locations of Larissa (Greece), Malaga (Spain), Birmingham (UK), and Palermo (Italy);
- delivering personalised and contextualised ICT services to the project pilots and their participants;
- evaluation of the policy learnings and impacts as well as their replication potential.
Results
The easyRights project is ongoing. It has produced the following results so far:
- Ontology tree with topics and entries;
- Technological ‘state of the art’ and mock-up solutions;
- Pilot agendas;
- Data management plan;
- The ‘easyRights Mediation Grammar 1’;
- The ‘easyRights Mediation Grammar 2’;
- Report on pilot phase;
- Co-creation and governance activities 1;
- Report on pilot co-creation and governance activities 2;
- Hackathon guidelines;
- First hackathon report;
- Second hackathon report;
- Requirement analysis.
Evaluation
The project has created a unique appraisal structure with diverse learning measurements to identify its social, individual and institutional results. This structure coordinates both logical and local indicators for viability, productivity and quality. Trial estimations will be made at the city level, prompting dynamic and precise mappings of effects, including culturally, morally and business-significant viewpoints.
Who will benefit?
- Businesses and social innovators;
- Migrants involved in the project pilots;
- Local policy makers involved in the project pilots;
- National policy makers in the field of immigration;
- The European Commission;
- International organisations and networks;
- Knowledge and research-oriented institutes in the field of immigration;
- The general public.
Source of funding and Resources used
The easyRights project received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme, under grant agreement number 870980, to the amount of € 3 519 000.
Source: European Website on Integration
