Visit: http://diavgeia.gov.gr

Di@vgeia program implements one of the major transparency initiatives of the Greek government. Beginning October 1st, 2010, all government institutions are obliged to upload their decisions on the Internet. Further, the decisions of all public entities can not be implemented if they are not uploaded on the Di@vgeia website. Each uploaded document is digitally singed and assigned a transaction unique number (TUN) automatically by the system.

So far all public legal entities have implemented the Di@vgeia program, including independent and regulatory authorities, the State Legal Council as well as local government. In less than a year 1.409.703 decisions have been published in Di@vgeia by 2.441 institutions. For the first time in Greece the Di@vgeia program introduces the obligation to publish all the decisions of government and administrative entities on the Internet, with special attention to issues of national security and sensitive personal data. It is an innovative program, aiming primarily to ensure the maximum publicity of government policy and administrative actions. The use of the Internet meets the requirement for wide publicity and access to information, progressively contributing to a culture change in the whole Public Administration.

The implementation of the Di@vgeia program contributes substantially to the creation of a more transparent relationship between the citizen and the State. Through this program citizens are able to exercise fully their constitutional rights, such as the right to information and to participation in the Information Society. At the same time, the compulsory uploading of all decisions by legal entities exercising public authority on the Internet leads to the reinforcement of responsibility and accountability. In short, the Di@vgeia program enacts the dissemination and re-use of Public Sector Information (PSI), providing the necessary tools for open and thorough access to it.

The interested parties can search easily and quickly for acts and decisions of the Ministries and other public institutions by using keywords and thematic metadata, with which every act is tagged, thanks to an intuitive search form, available either from the website of each public entity issuing the act or from the central web site of the National Printing Office.

Furthermore, the widest possible publicity is also achieved via the use of popular social media such as twitter and Facebook as additional means to circulate and re-publicize the day to day material that is posted on the official Di@vgeia websites.

The Project Management model is based upon the Task Forces approach, consisting of a network of management teams which have been established in all government Institutions that are required to implement Di@vgeia. This ensures wide participation from all areas of the Greek Public Administration.

The main objective of the Di@vgeia program is to introduce and guarantee the widest possible publicity for all governmental and administrative decisions via the use of information and communication technologies.

More specifically, the Di@vgeia program objectives concern:

• The safeguarding of transparency of the governmental actions
• The observance of legality and good administration
• The reinforcement of citizens constitutional rights, such as the participation in the Information Society
• The enhancement and modernization of existing publication systems of governmental and administrative decisions.
• Di@vgeia made for the first time in Greece freely available all documents published by the National Printing Office
• The availability of all governmental decisions in formats that are easy to access, navigate and comprehend regardless of the level of knowledge of the inner processes of the administration by the average citizen.

The publication of all public documents bearing the signature of a government official is expected to have a silent but profound impact on the way officials handle their executive power. The direct, almost in real time, accountability brought upon the administration by the radical transparency that the Di@vgeia program introduces means that any government official needs to think twice before making a decision. This leaves considerably less room for corruption, and exposes it much more easily when it takes place since any citizen and every interested party enjoy the widest possible access to questionable acts. Such a collective scrutiny can be extremely effective, since it allows citizens directly involved or concerned with an issue to scrutinize it in depth, rather than leaving public scrutiny to the media, whose choice of issues necessarily may be restricted and oriented towards sensational topics.

Visit: http://www.astynomia.gr

The project Police On Line, completed in 2008, provided the fundamental infrastructure for:

• the expansion of the existing nationwide operational network to all Police Stations & Departments (approximately 1.500), and the establishment of integrated voice – data network,
• the supply of central & peripheral systems,
• the development of backbone applications to re-organize business procedures, serving citizen requests.

Police On Line aims to modernize the way the police operational procedures affect the citizen service. The Informatics Division of Hellenic Police Headquarters takes action to evolve, develop and expand its access to cover most operational needs of Police Departments, by providing useful applications to the operational level, reliable operation & network connectivity through direct problem solving.

Benefits & Objectives:

• Unified access to more than 30.000 end users to client-applications by means of direct access to data at regional & national level, increasing efficiency while reducing bureaucracy and lowering operating & postal costs.
• Adopt a joint operational environment and develop a common methodology in Police Action businesses to host all the subsequent informational resources.
• A common application to handle the digitization of internal documents exchanged in the borders of Police Organization.
• Tackle crime through information exchange.
• Support/access to operational applications of the National Schengen Information System (projects N.SIS & N.SIS II), according to the obligations of the Schengen Treaty.
• Expansion of services to the Greek citizens.
• E-mail services and internet connectivity.
• Modernisation of communications through unified voice network – data.
• Provide infrastructure for future functions.

One of current undertakings is the gradual upgrade of network infrastructure of all points-buildings nationwide through migration to MPLS VPN infrastructure network, so as to:

• significantly upgrade the bandwidth of all points of presence of the Police Departments to ensure better scalability and technical compatibility, and therefore meet both the providers evolving technological possibilities and the need for further upgrades in the future.
• adopt a technical solution within the framework and architecture of the SYZEFXIS II project for all public bodies.

All above are within the framework of the Greek Police commitment for «continuity and consistency in modernization».

Visit: http://illegalsigns.gov.gr

The Illegalsigns project aims to address the problem of uncontrolled large number of illegal outdoor advertisements in Greece based on crowdsourcing and digital communication.

All over the country and especially at the centre of Athens and the highways leading to the suburbs there were over 25.000 illegal outdoor advertisements mostly of enormous size on the roofs of the buildings and on the sideways. At night they were lit (illegally) charging the bill to the municipalities and the state and creating even more dangerous situations regarding the public safety.

During the 2004 Olympic Games the project of “clearing” illegal outdoor advertisements managed to remove around 1.500, mainly from the city centre. After the summer of 2004, although in the city centre of Athens there were only legal advertisements, at the outskirts, the numbers increased dramatically.

In January 2010 the Prime Minister took the initiative of creating the crowdsourcing site “www.illegalsigns.gov.gr ’’ (in Greek). The site gives information on outdoor advertising in general as well as on the existing legislation in order to answer to FAQs.  It is a site whose content is based and created by the citizens themselves. The citizens upload a photo and this way they report an outdoor advertisement which they “feel” it is illegal and should be removed. On the other side of the line this report is been checked and becomes “visible” on the map and gets on its way of being removed.

At the site, there is also the possibility of uploading through Smartphones, giving automatically the position of the sign on the map. The direct interaction and participation of citizens brought spectacular results since the big participation showed the authorities the importance of the project to the everyday life of the citizens.

The press covered extensively the project and continues to do so. As a result, more than 1.500 illegal advertising billboards have been removed from the streets of the greater Athens area. The project is ongoing.

Visit: http://labs.opengov.gr

Labs.OpenGov is the first experimental attempt engaging corporate and non-corporate users into generating sophisticated and immediately applicable ideas. It is an open innovations web laboratory that brings together experts from the technological community and institutions that manage information technology projects for the public sector and citizens.

Visit: http://www.gsis.gr

The Open Taxation Data initiative aims to improve the accountability, reduce the bureaucracy and increase the transparency of Greece’s taxation system. As part of the initiative, the General Secretary of Information Systems of Ministry of Finance, has published extensive statistical data from the year 2000 onward.  In addition it has made available on a daily basis each regional tax office’s outstanding and has handled cross-checking cases.  Further planned actions include the quarterly publication of taxpayers in arrears, the monthly publication of regional tax office key performance indicators, and a web service providing the registration details of professionals and companies.  The initiative also had planned the publication of all taxpayer’s income and tax, yet this action was blocked by the country’s Data Protection Authority.