Project Profile

Y-ourcity, conceived by a group of young Sicilians, is a platform aimed at the promotion and evaluation of the territory, its material and immaterial cultural goods, productive activities tied to the local industry and the branch of tourism in the area of the provinces of Ragusa and Syracuse.

Y-ourcity is at the same time a portal of tourist-cultural promotions, an e-commerce platform, and an Information Technology training and education tool. The portal will give users the ability to upload videos and text which recount the territory's history through the direct narration of the protagonists or those who remember it. This material will be geo-localised and tagged in such a way as to provide more opportunity for traveller choice and useful information on local products available for sale.

The project also outlines some training activities in primary, middle, and senior schools, with the objective of alphabetising the students using the platform and open-source software. Once trained, the young people in the territory will have tools and topics to involve the whole population. Through this methodology at least 50% of resident citizens should be alphabetised by the end of the project, multiplying the use of the platform and therefore the quantity of information offered to tourists, an always "new" and updated product.

Y-ourcity wants to be at the same time:

1. a tourist-cultural promotion portal;
2. a platform for promotion of local products
3. an information tool on cultural traditions.

Indeed taking as a model the example of memoro.org, the portal will give the opportunity to add videos and texts which show the territory through the narration of protagonists or those who still have memories of it. In this way one can directly access the extraordinary oral heritage which otherwise risks disappearing, made up of stories, techniques, tales, anecdotes, recipes, customs, etc.

This material, collected by the same young residents of the territory involved, will be geolocalised and appropriately "tagged" in order to provide more opportunities to choose paths to take or useful information on local products to buy. 

Through Y-ourcity we will be able to think about a real and genuine Si(ci)lycon Valley: a territory which thanks to new technologies will know how to promote the extraordinary heritage of history, culture and tradition that belongs to it.

The platform will be created using open source technology and software.

The project will be realised initially in the two Sicilian provinces but is applicable throughout the entire region and country.

RESULTS

In the course of creating Y-ourcity, various startups have in fact begun and various projects have launched with similar aims. The project not only wants to promote the territories of Siracusa and Ragusa but, at the same time, will give the possibility to all startups or associations committed to the promotion of their own territory to use plug 'n' play "tools" to create their own site or portal based on the topics they want to promote or the territories they want to support.

In conclusion Y-ourcity is:

1. a portal for promotion of the territories of Siracusa and Ragusa, containing information on cultural assets, enogastronomic products, local traditions;
2. An easily used tool to implement the contents through texts, photos, videos, etc. (to ensure that citizens and tourists continue to enrich the archive of the territory with new information, traditions not directly censused, places not yet discovered, etc.)
3. A package of tools to replicate the model in other territories or with other aims.