Its name is Covid19Italia.help and it is a non-profit project born in Italy that attempts to offer solutions to the Coronavirus emergency.
It was started by a group of 20 volunteers and civic hackers composed of developers, editors and communication workers. The purpose of the portal is to share useful and verified information about Coronavirus in Italy.
Besides useful information, the website also provides requests for help with offers of goods and services. On Covid19Italia.help visitors can also find solidarity initiatives such as home delivery, fundraising and psychological support.
On the homepage, in addition to the function that combines requests and offers of help, there are the following services:
- Recommend home delivery;
- Recommend initiatives and services (work/business support, cultural, recreational and solidarity initiatives);
- Recommend fundraising;
- Recommend useful contact;
- Report scams;
- Submit documentation/data;
- Report news.
This is how the initiative is explained on the Facebook page:
“This is a non-profit project, fully organized by volunteers. It was created to share useful and verified information about the CoronaVirus outbreak in Italy in 2020.
The project aims to aggregate and avoid dispersion of useful content from various sources (official and unofficial) in order to create value in a time of crisis for the country”.
The project, as explained in the press release, does not want to replace institutional sources of information. However, the website is well organized and helps to manage the research of the most interesting news and the most useful services in this period of emergency.
Very interesting is the section dedicated to fake news that sheds light on several aspects, such as false emails of tax refunds, fake self-declarations for travel circulating on the network, and even the fake quick tests to verify whether one is affected by Coronavirus.
In short, a valuable initiative that in a few days (it is active since March) has already collected 1420 reports, of which 1218 have been verified, concerning home deliveries, remote education, fake news, fundraising, public and private solidarity initiatives, psychological support, institutional sources, women and fake news.
The reports can be made on the website but also on the official channels of the platform that include all the media, from Facebook to Telegram. Visitors will not get lost in the meanders of the Coronavirus.
