[andratwiro]

Government – Citizen interaction.

Specifically, I'm working with a local pro-refugee organization in a densely immigrant populated region in Spain. There's a complex chain of steps that you have to go through in order to acquire citizenship. Only people with access to good lawyers are able to deal with all the bureaucracy of the process, without mentioning other problems (missing obscure expiry dates that reset your process, language-related problems, local government workers not actually knowing/willing-fully ignoring migrants' rights...).

There's a good network of volunteer lawyers working on this issue, but its not scalable. I'm working on a platform that would allow migrants to solve their own situation, by crowdsourcing the knowledge of lawyers on a case-per-case basis and offering a simple interface in their language to track open processes & discovered the ones they need to go through and how.

As an abstraction for this, I've been thinking on how we could improve citizen/government communication. A small use case / example for this could be refugee camps. My previous experience here is that they are small, disconnected communities with a top-down type of organisation towards the camp organisers. It shouldn't be hard to provide real-time tools for connecting both, potentially leading to things like asking for their needs, managing their legal situation, or even allowing for voting & self-governing.

[erikig]

I’m curious, how much of the process is digital and how much of it requires physical presence by a specialist? Also how has this been affected by the COVID crisis?

[andratwiro]

The most important processes require physical presence. The ones that are digitalized aren't a good solution either, as these people might not speak Spanish very well, or they don't have the required digital literacy to access & go through a government website (which is a problem for locals as well). The solution right now is to offer personalized support from volunteer organizations on an individual basis.

COVID has affected quite a lot. Most of the processes have stopped as the government shut down the in-person offices, and now they are slowly reopening... and the situation was already crowded before the pandemic. On the positive side, extradition orders have been temporarily paused.