VeloLove is an association founded in Rome to asset the bicycle as an ideal means of transport for the future, including in this category pedestrians, commuters and users of public transportation.

Thanks to the commitment and skills of volunteers, VeloLove promotes the change in the capital through proposals, ideas, projects and a carousel of events organized to promote love for green means of transport.

Among the initiatives put in place by VeloLove, in collaboration with GRAB + and Lagambiente, there is SOdA – Roman Joint Stock Company.
SOdA was conceived as a free and collaborative map of initiatives, arriving from citizens, that take care of the well-being of the city and people.

It is an Atlas of the people, updated directly by the protagonists that insert spontaneous experiences to contrast the processes of marginalization, inequalities and cultural impoverishment. This is an innovative way to experience unprecedented forms of integration and sociality, which regenerate marginal or degraded urban spaces, and enhance common goods.

The goal is to raise awareness of the added value of the actions that the Roman society actively undertake with generosity and selflessness. The participatory process foster the people’s involvement in creating new mobility opportunities, tourism, cultivation and food consumption, reuse of spaces and objects, solidarity and hospitality, cultural production, sport.

A crowdsourcing application has been designed to populate the collaborative map that illustrates the location of all the Associations in Rome and the initiatives that take care of the well-being of the city by acting on different sectors.

The application was created using the ESRI template that allows to guide the user in filling in a predefined descriptive form with the info of the Association, with the possibility to upload images and videos. A second application has been configured to control, verify and in case moderate the content uploaded through the crowdsourcing application.

The final map is public, available through a short StoryMap which describes the project and shows all the associations that have been registered.

 Each association has a card containing the uploaded material: description, website, social network, video. This way the map is constantly updated with new registrations.

The crowdsourcing application is configured in a simple way thanks to the ESRI template that allows to choose which fields make public and which mandatory. The final map is constantly updated without the intervention of expert mappers. Thanks to the customization of the StoryMap, also the cards of the various associations, composed on the basis of the information loaded into the crowdsourcing application, are automatically added in an interactive slideshow.

The project was created from the need to have a space opened to everyone’s contribution, available and editable by all the citizens. The shared development this virtual ‘square’ is a place where you can easily find the contacts and essential information (addresses, links to websites and social profiles …) on groups of citizens who act in the urban space and who transform the city by dealing with problems of the territory and community.