How can we provide the people arriving in our city with all relevant information in their language as quickly as possible? Without permanent internet access and without confusing paper chaos? We also asked ourselves these questions in 2015. The result is Integreat, an effective and low-threshold solution. A digital platform that provides all relevant information in several languages at the municipal level to newly arrived migrants and refugees. We started with the idea under the project name Refguide+. In the meantime, Integreat is more than just an idea and a theoretical concept. It is a digital integration platform for cities, districts and federal states that want to break down language barriers and create information transparency. The focus is on all people with a migration background – regardless of whether they have been forced to come to a new country and a new culture by fleeing or have come voluntarily (keyword: labour migration/ skilled workers). Our digital solution is intended to support the integration process and also serve as a basis for further activities and measures in this environment.
Our vision is to promote communication and understanding between cultures with the help of digital solutions. These aim to facilitate and support integration on the ground. We primarily pursue impact-oriented rather than economic interests. Currently, we are focusing on identifying the needs of the target group as best as possible, developing solutions and implementing them. The focus is currently on multilingualism and offline availability and on skilled workers and EU migrants, after the influx of refugees has decreased in recent months. The target group-oriented presentation of information and the implementation of needs-oriented functions is a major concern for us.
Transparency is our top priority in the project. The complete programme and source code of the Integreat app is freely available and provided under an open source licence (MIT). We explicitly support the campaign Public Money, Public Code, which advocates that software developed with public money for public administrations is published under a free software and open source licence.
Furthermore, all content of the various cities and municipalities is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY 4.0). This means that new and existing counties and cities can benefit from each other in terms of content and translations, and workload in creation and maintenance is minimised. The project is financed from revenues through cooperation agreements that can be voluntarily concluded by the municipalities if required.
In our impact reports, we also show you the resources and activities we use to create long-term change and what we use our funds for year after year. We also refer to the transparency guidelines that we have voluntarily and benevolently implemented in our legal form and project.
