As part of the Edge 50 list, Apolitical is publishing a series of articles exploring a selection of these bold initiatives to learn more about the stories and strategies behind them.

Created by Apolitical in partnership with the Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre for Government Innovation, this list is an invitation to look beyond the usual playbook and ask what becomes possible when governments are willing to think boldly about today's biggest problems.

Apolitical spoke with Fabio Zaffagnini, who founded Volontari SOS, a civic initiative that helps governments coordinate large numbers of volunteers during emergencies.

When flooding hit Romagna in 2023, thousands of people wanted to help, but without coordination, spontaneous volunteers can slow emergency responses down. The solution was to repurpose the Rockin'1000 platform that Zaffagnini originally created to organise large-scale rock concerts. What works for a thousand musicians, it turns out, works just as well for more than 50,000 volunteers.

When the flooding hit Romagna in 2023, what gaps did you see in the usual system for organising volunteers during a disaster?

I started thinking about it as soon as we knew the flood was going to hit my hometown. I was pretty sure that many people would want to help, to go out on the streets and do whatever they could for the community. But I was also aware that without coordination, this spontaneous volunteering could quickly become a problem. People might end up going to places where professional responders were already working, and instead of helping, they could get in the way or occupy space that was needed by emergency teams, putting themselves and others in danger. At the same time, I had the feeling that the local administration wasn't prepared for something on that scale. I saw that they had launched a Google Form online asking for volunteers, and I was convinced that managing large numbers of people that way was unlikely to work.

Can you explain what Rockin'1000 does and how your experience shaped the idea for this system?

My day job involves coordinating very large communities. Through Rockin'1000, we organise large concerts in stadiums where a thousand musicians perform together, and we manage a global community of participants. So while it's a completely different context, I know a lot about organising large groups of people. That's why I contacted the mayor and offered to help design a system that could manage volunteers more effectively.

How did you adapt the principles from Rockin'1000 to disaster response? Did you modify the existing platform, or build something new based on the same idea?

I wrote it from scratch because the Rockin'1000 platform is very large and quite complicated. But I used the same underlying principles. When we organise a concert, we might say we're looking for 300 guitar players or 200 bass players, and musicians sign up until all the places are filled. I applied the same idea to volunteering. Instead of guitar players, we might be looking for 200 volunteers to help clear mud from affected areas, or 10 people to carry materials from one place to another.

The key idea was to move away from actively managing every volunteer. Instead of telling people exactly what to do, we simply publish the tasks: we need 100 people here for half a day doing X, and 200 people somewhere else doing Y. Volunteers choose the task and sign up until all the spots are taken. It becomes a kind of passive management system, which is much easier to scale.

You mentioned that you were able to build the system overnight. Did tools like AI play a role in making that possible?

Yes. I can code myself, and I used AI to support the process and speed up my coding. That's what made it possible to build the system overnight. Before AI, it would have taken a lot longer to develop something like this.

Why did the 'passive management' approach, where volunteers choose tasks themselves rather than being assigned to them, make more sense in a crisis like this?

"In this kind of situation, everyone wants to help. However, trust in institutions can be a big problem."

Some people will follow instructions from the city's official channels. But there is also a group of people who don't really trust institutions. They still want to help, but they feel the institutions are too slow. Very often, when institutions can't manage this spontaneous energy, their response is simply to ask people to stay home and not get involved. That usually happens not because help isn't needed, but because they don't have a system to coordinate all those people.

How did you ensure people knew about the platform and used it? What did you do to spread the word quickly during the crisis?

We involved the institutions so they could explain the process and publish information about how to volunteer through their official channels. But that wasn't enough. So I also got in touch with some local influencers who have nothing to do with institutions. For example, there's a local Instagram creator whose content celebrates regional identity and community pride with a lot of humour. I thought it would be a good idea to involve that channel to promote the system. In that way, we could reach both groups: people who trust institutions and follow official channels, and people who don't really trust institutions but are very connected to community voices.

Mobilising thousands of volunteers in just a few days is a huge task. What turned out to be the hardest part of scaling the system so quickly, especially with only a small team behind it?

On the digital side, we actually didn't face any major difficulties. The main challenges were on the ground, because every city organised things slightly differently. Some cities set up tents where volunteers could check in. Others asked people to go to city hall first. In some places, volunteers were sent directly to the streets where help was needed. Another issue was that volunteers sometimes arrived without knowing exactly where to go, especially after the official start of the shift. So most of the complexity was really in coordinating what happened in the field rather than on the platform itself.

In the early days, we also had a nice yet tricky problem: too many volunteers. When the emergency was all over the news across Italy, people from all over the country came to help. Shifts would fill up in minutes, and sometimes thousands of people were trying to sign up at the same time. After a couple of weeks, as the situation no longer made the news, it became harder to find volunteers. Interest had faded as the situation moved out of the news cycle, and social media clearly has a big impact on motivating people. People still wanted to help, but filling shifts was not as easy as in the first few days.

How did you work with local authorities and other emergency actors while the platform was being used? Were there any challenges around responsibility, trust or roles?

The first thing I did was involve our lawyer to make sure we had the right policy on the website. We made it clear that the platform itself was not responsible if someone was injured. The platform was simply a tool that connected the authorities who made the decisions with the volunteers. We didn't have any role in taking operational decisions. Once authorities started using it and saw how easy it was to manage volunteers, they began asking me to add new features based on their feedback. The relationship with civil protection volunteers was a bit more complicated at the beginning because they saw us almost as competition. But later they realised how useful we could be to them, and collaboration became easier.

What early signs told you that the platform was actually working and helping the response effort?

We kept track of several things, including the number of people registering on the platform, the number of shifts created by local administrations, and how quickly those shifts were filled. We also saw people sharing their experience of using the platform on social media. That kind of feedback was an immediate signal that the system was working and that people were finding it useful. Another factor was the reputation of the company behind Rockin'1000. People already trusted the team that had created the platform, so they were not afraid to register and share their data. That helped a lot in the early days.

What advice would you give local authorities considering putting a system like this in place before the next emergency?

I think the most important thing is to be prepared in advance. Authorities could train a few people inside the administration to understand how the system works, so they can activate it quickly when needed.

"Considering how climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme events, I think having something like this ready could be very useful."

The system could also be used in other situations, not only during disasters. For example, it could help organise volunteers to clean beaches or work on projects to improve parts of a city. It's a way to coordinate community energy whenever people want to contribute.