The integration of migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers remains a challenge for both public authorities and local communities at the national, regional, and local levels. For migrants, the lack of information and inability to use technology due to insufficient access skills and proficiency in the language of the host country may lead to limited interaction with the new community and consequently to social exclusion. One of the issues of the hyper-complexity in migrant integration can be related to a problem of communication that not only involves the migrants also the local administrators and service providers. This problem requires systemic solutions rather than simple “ad hoc” solutions. This article describes the case of the easyRights project, an ongoing Horizon 2020 project aimed at improving migrants’ access to public services to ease exercising their rights. It presents the application of a co-design learning framework for the development of hackathons that aim to improve existing services. It also promotes the collaborative design of solutions that use ICTs to overcome the bureaucratic and idiomatic barriers migrants experience in their interactions with formal procedures. The example of the four ecosystems generated in the four pilot cities of the project shows the relevance of interconnecting stakeholders in the co-design of services and the potential of exploiting the multifaceted attributes of ICTs to solve the complexity in the access to such services. The results invite reflection on the necessity of exploring the capability of technology application through user-centric approaches to offer substantial solutions to the imperative—yet intricate—challenge of migrants’ inclusion in society.

More and more, the evaluation of complex projects is being related to the capacity of the project to deal with crucial social, economic, and environmental issues that society is responsible for and with the activation of systemic changes. Within this “mission” perspective, growing attention is given to learning in action. This paper aims at (i) conceptualizing a methodological framework for complex project evaluation within the context of the Triple-Loop Learning mechanism and (ii) showing its application in a European project as well as including the toolbox developed in coherence with the elaborated framework. It does so by looking at the case of an ongoing Horizon 2020 project aiming to develop language-oriented technologies supporting the inclusion of migrants in Europe. In particular, the paper looks at Triple-Loop Learning as pushed by the reflection on three dimensions: the “what”, the “how”, and the “why” of collective actions in complex projects. The consequent learning process is expected to have transformational potentials at the individual, institutional/organizational, and (in the long term) up to the societal scale. By exploring the opportunities offered by the evaluation tools in the easyRights project, the study highlights the potential of nurturing a wider, arguably neglected as yet, learning space for understanding, engaging, and transforming real contexts and thus developing more effective contribution to the needed transition.

This chapter presents the città-IN project, which positions public primary schools as the essential gateway for integration of immigrant families and as the central nodes within their broader rights. Rather than viewing school services as mere administrative tasks, we frame them as interfaces where parents first encounter the digital infrastructures and institutional rules of the welfare system. These interactions are critical, as they often dictate whether a family feels empowered or excluded from their rights. The study focuses on the San Siro neighbourhood in Milan, an area characterised by both rich cultural diversity and significant socio-economic pressure. Here, the città-IN project employs an action-research model, adapting the Mediation Grammar (MG) framework to evaluate five school services. By moving beyond top-down observation, the project combines participatory research with user-centred evaluation to see how language barriers, the quality of information, and the real-world accessibility of rights impact the daily lives of immigrant families. Ultimately, the chapter argues that in contexts marked by school segregation and vulnerability, the school acts as a double-edged sword: it can be a space of profound inclusion or a barrier to it. By applying the Mediation Grammar, we provide both a way to measure these empowerment gaps and a practical strategy for redesigning services to be more equitable. This discussion establishes the groundwork for the empirical findings and community interventions explored in the following chapters.