The initial idea came from an initiative by the mayor in Riace, famous for having given new life to the Calabrian town thanks to the presence of migrants. "The news really struck us," Giuseppe Blasi, Welcomaps co-founder, told ANSA. After a careful analysis of data and some brainstorming on "how to develop a positive culture of welcoming" in Italy, the founders decided to geolocalize best practices. They decided to use "an open approach, describing and mapping stories of integration transversally". In that way, they included not only stories of reception in individual towns, but also good initiatives by organisations, associations and cooperatives, including cultural, sport, and training programmes, which the founders called "real models of integration".
Welcomaps is made up of intuitive features, with a map for viewing reception initiatives and a search feature using tags. Blasi said it's a way to help people meet. "If I'm an association that works in migrant assistance, I can see who does the same thing and contact them for suggestions," he said. Blasi said Welcomaps sees migrant flows as "an opportunity, for an Italy that is depopulating, to integrate people and transform the country into a new Silicon Valley, where in fact 60% of IT companies were founded by second-generation migrants". He said with Italy's history of emigration, the country should be "one of the nations most willing to put itself in these people's shoes". The project began with the founders gathering the first initiatives.
"There's a lot of fake news going around, and we did the work of fact-checking," Blasi said. After collecting various projects, Blasi said awareness of the project grew via social media and users began sending in examples of stories.There are currently tens of initiatives gathered on the map.Blasi said in the future, thanks to Welcomaps, "a network could be created of organisations that work in this field, in order to allow for exchanging know-how, interactions, and shared projects". Everything is "up to the people's decisions", he said. "We created this network as a way to enable the creativity of individual organisations and to give visibility to something that often, in the confusion of news, goes unnoticed and unknown," he said. With this network "one can see that there are others who are walking in the same direction, and giving visibility could start a mechanism of emulation". (An image from the map of the Welcomaps project)
