Every year, hundreds of thousands of applications for residence permits are submitted in Italy. Many are rejected, archived, or simply lost not because of their substance, but because of procedural errors: the wrong form, a missing document, an appointment booked at an office that does not handle that type of request. The information needed to avoid these mistakes exists. It can be found on ministerial websites, in prefectural circulars, and in municipal FAQs. But it is often available only in Italian, scattered across different sources, sometimes contradictory, and frequently updated later than the rules it is supposed to explain.
It is precisely in this space – between information that exists and the person who cannot find it – that a series of digital tools has emerged in recent years, developed by the third sector and by private social initiatives. They have been built by those who remain outside the public administration but see the opacity of its processes from close range, and who look to technology as a way to avoid being overwhelmed by its effects.
Chatbots, interactive maps, multilingual guides. They have been created by lawyers, master’s students, and third-sector organizations. Technologically, they work. But to what extent can they provide a stable substitute for an institutional function? And is there a risk that new technologies become an excuse not to change old practices?
TAKEAWAYS
From Personal Disorientation to Sportellino
When we look at some of these examples, they do not simply provide answers. They open up new questions, narrowing progressively towards the core of the problem. The first example follows Viktor Seibert, a young researcher who arrived in Rome from Berlin for a master’s programme. He spoke Italian, was a European citizen, had a phone, and had an internet connection. Yet it took him weeks to understand where to go, what to bring, and whom to call for administrative procedures that should have taken only a few days.
Out of that experience, in July 2025, Seibert created Sportellino: a digital assistant available through WhatsApp and Telegram, with no registration required, able to answer questions about Italian bureaucracy for foreign nationals in more than forty languages.
What distinguishes Sportellino from a general-purpose assistant is its architecture. It does not freely browse the web. Instead, it queries a closed database, built and updated by the team using official sources: ministerial portals, municipal websites, and current legislation. When a procedure changes, the database is updated. When rules vary from one municipality to another, local information is added thanks to volunteers based in Milan, Naples, and Bologna.
“The most frequent questions concern asylum applications, family reunification, residence, and identity cards,” explains Alexandra Georgescu of Buonsenso, the association that provides the legal structure around the project. The most commonly used languages are Arabic, English, French, and Bengali. In less than a year, the service has answered around 75,000 questions from more than 10,000 people.
The project has received the patronage of the DISSE Department at Sapienza University of Rome. The formal endorsement of the Municipality of Rome is currently being finalized. In May 2026, Sportellino received the “Cambiare – The Art of Changing the World” award, promoted by Roma Capitale, in the category of Rights, Equal Opportunities and Anti-Discrimination. The team is made up of twelve volunteers. Its economic sustainability depends on national and European calls for funding.
Seventy-five thousand questions are also a dataset. Not a dataset of personal information – which is not collected – but of systemic deficiencies: which procedures generate the highest demand for help, where people get stuck, and in which languages the most complex questions arise. “The goal is to be able to work with public bodies and report these difficulties back to them,” says Georgescu.
For now, that data remains within the association. There is no indication that any institution has requested it. The Buonsenso team recognizes its value and is considering how and when to make use of it in a way that benefits society without producing “side effects”.
The Tech-Enabled Private Social Sector
Sportellino has a distinctive history and form, but it is not the only effort made by actors outside the public administration to support migrants as they navigate the complexity of Italian bureaucracy.
Another example is JumaMap – Services for Refugees. This website provides a national map of services for asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection, managed by ARCI with the support of UNHCR. Unlike Sportellino, it is not a chatbot. It is a geographical orientation platform that helps users find the nearest service, from legal assistance to Italian language courses, from reception facilities to psychological support.
It is available in seventeen languages, including Wolof, Tigrinya, and Amharic. It is accompanied by a free helpline for asylum seekers and refugees – 800 905 570 – which has been active for more than ten years and provides mediators in thirty-five languages.
Then there is SOS Permesso, an interactive guide to residence permits, created by Alberto Pasquero, a lawyer based in Turin and a member of the Association for Juridical Studies on Immigration, ASGI, together with a group of female lawyers and legal practitioners. It maps forty-one types of residence permits, detailing required documents, costs, and procedures. It offers interactive tests to help users understand which permit they may be eligible for, or whether a renewal is possible. It is available in eleven languages and was updated on 28 May 2026.
These three tools have been developed independently and are sustained through internal resources or project-based funding. They are not the only examples, but they point to a common trend: technology is being used to fill a gap left by institutions in access to services for migrants.
Chatbots, interactive maps, and digital guides do not replace the public administration. But they compensate for its everyday shortcomings by making fragmented and difficult-to-navigate procedures more understandable.
Their existence, however, raises a broader question. If tools created by the third sector are attempting to perform a function that institutions do not guarantee, to what extent can they be considered a solution? And what remains beyond their reach?
What Technology Cannot Translate
It is from this perspective that Fabrizio Coresi, migration policy expert at ActionAid International Italia, looks at these initiatives. He does not question their usefulness. On the contrary, he recognizes that they often work well in responding to concrete and immediate needs. But they also carry an inevitable risk: leaving out everything that is decisive in the process of integration into a society different from one’s society of origin.
“What is needed is not merely linguistic translation,” Coresi observes. “It is a translation of cultural codes, of how institutions and society function.” A chatbot can indicate, in forty languages, the correct address of the relevant local health authority office. It is far more difficult to explain why the Italian healthcare system operates according to logics that a person arriving from another context may never have encountered before. “When a migrant accesses the service, they were looking for, that is often one of their first encounters with Italian society. For this reason,” he concludes, “accessible information and accessible services are not necessarily the same thing.”
The example Coresi offers is extreme, but not marginal: Nigerian women who have survived trafficking cannot be reached effectively without taking into account the belief system with which they arrived – rituals, constraints, and invisible dimensions that do not exist within the categories of the average operator. No database can manage that dimension. Only a cultural mediator with adequate training can do so.
In Italy, however, this professional figure still does not have a nationally defined profile. Registers vary from region to region, and sometimes from municipality to municipality. An attempt at interinstitutional standardization stalled in 2013. No chatbot can replace this role.
If technology were ever to become a meaningful part of this process, it is unlikely to happen because of public investment in tools designed to facilitate integration. At present, innovation funding is moving in a clear and opposite direction. “Technology enters immigration-related legislation essentially as a tool for control,” Coresi notes. Fingerprint-based presence detection in prefectural centers, flow monitoring systems, identification procedures. There is no equivalent investment in tools designed to orient people towards services.
Interoperability between internal systems – which would make it possible to distribute people rationally between overcrowded and underused centers – is declared in ministerial performance reports but does not function in practice. Moreover, its effectiveness is not evaluated based on outcomes. Assessment stops at the quality of the process. According to Coresi, the Ministry records that prefectures have been trained, systems implemented, and technical objectives achieved. It does not measure what has changed for the person trying to renew a residence permit.
That part of the chain remains invisible in official reports. And what is not measured is difficult to improve.
Open Questions Ahead
The current landscape of technological innovation in migration is the context into which the new European Pact on Migration and Asylum will be introduced. For Italy, this means faster procedures, compressed timelines, and stricter standards in decisions relating to reception and protection. In this context, some questions become more urgent, not less.
Who ensures that procedural acceleration does not further reduce people’s ability to understand what is happening and how to respond? Seventy-five thousand questions handled by an association of twelve volunteers such as Buonsenso amount to a detailed map of the system’s breaking points. Who owns that map? Who can use it to change something? And when a voluntary tool steadily absorbs an institutional function, does political pressure to reform that function increase, or does it weaken?
There is nothing wrong with the existence of tools such as Sportellino, JumaMap, and SOS Permesso. What is deeply problematic is that they need to exist in order to compensate for a function that should belong to the State.
The distinction between these two levels – a useful tool today, a structural problem tomorrow – is precisely what risks being lost every time a technological solution is presented as the answer to an institutional failure.
Technology can be an excellent prosthesis. It is a poor excuse.
