Two weeks ago, the Municipality of Thessaloniki launched its e-Government web portal; an effort based on open and free source software. On June 29, I will present our experience in Athens, on the occasion of the Going Local Greece event of the European Commission.

This portal is meant to be the host platform for every new e-Service or future ICT project of the Municipality, and our mid-term goal is its transformation to Thessaloniki’s Smart City platform. For the time being, it aggregates all existing e-Services and ICT-related projects of the Municipality, while it presents our perception about Thessaloniki being Smart. Several of these projects  have received wide acceptance from citizens and key stakeholders of the city. One of them our Open Budget web service, presents real time data from the Municipality’s budget, also in graphs (pies) that can be downloaded for further re-use.

Moreover, we have launched a mobile-friendly e-service allowing citizens to notify us of issues they have come across (a water pipe leakage, illegally parked cars, garbage to be collected etc.) by posting them on an interactive city web map. The service provides personalized information and feedback about the progress of each issue, while it serves as a monitoring instrument for effective internal decision making.

We are also proud of our Open Data platform (CKAN), also part of our e-Government portal; to further build on this, we have successfully completed the first Apps4Thessaloniki competition and the first Hackathon for Thessaloniki. Thanks to these crowd-sourcing initiatives, we've received over 200 ideas on how to improve the quality of life in the city, more than 3.000 votes were submitted about these ideas and  about 30 web and mobile applications were developed from motivated citizens, developers and various groups of the city, who were actively involved in resolving issues in the city.

Our initiatives are constantly rated by citizens. Users of our services can vote and rate the quality of our services. We have also carried out a survey about the level of user satisfaction and its results assisted us on the design of our new e-services. We value citizens' feedback to help us improve the quality of our services and give us an overview of users' needs.

Challenges

It's not always been easy. We have to break existing silos inside and outside our organization, to ensure collaboration and synergy take place. We are thus planning a city-wide communication campaign, to raise awareness of citizens and stakeholders in Thessaloniki. But, I believe that our main challenge is to re-gain the trust of the public to local government and re-build an effective relationship between the two sides, through efficient and productive communication channels.

Next steps

So far the feedback we receive is very positive and supportive. This gives us inspiration and courage to move forward. So, we are already planning new services and, in about a week from now, we will launch the “Advocate for citizens and enterprises” e-service. This service will allow every citizen and business in the city to post online (to the advocate) a complaint about maladministration of the municipality services or its legal entities and it will provide a proper mediation service to resolve issues within thirty (30) days. Moreover, we plan a survey on the quality of our services in about six months from now and we are already preparing the next crowd-sourcing project (Apps4Thessaloniki-2015). In this year's competition, the prizes will include micro-financing, coaching, mentoring and business orientation for the winners and participation in the 2016 Business Lounge event, which will be held by the Apps4Europe network.