– Raising public awareness about the benefits of using and developing Open Technologies.
– Providing reliable and timely information regarding Open Technologies, both in Greece and internationally.
– Fostering cooperation and equal participation for all stakeholders that are directly or indirectly involved in the promotion and development of Open Technologies in Greece, such as the community of developers and the entrepreneurs interested in Open Technologies.
– Establishing a number of Open Technologies promotion centers in Greece. (Their tasks includes organizing training seminars, cataloging Open Technology needs in various business sectors, and indexing all Greek institutions and organizations with an active interest in Open Technologies)
– Coordinating the efforts of groups of volunteers, enabling them to form the backbone of Greek FOSS development and implementation.
– Supporting the development and promotion of Open Technologies-based business initiatives, and providing SME’s with information on the adoption of Open Technologies.
– Offering technical support for Open Technologies applications. In particular, establishing a help-desk for Open Technologies users and groups, supporting localization efforts, developing a glossary, and contributing to the development of applications for which there is demand in Greece.
– Participation in national and ineternational R&D projects in cooperation with our members.
To achieve our goals we cooperate with:
– the Greek Open Technologies communities of users and developers,
– laboratories using and developing Open Technology in Greek Universities and Research Centers,
– interested parties/potential users(public administration, local and regional governments, educational institutions, businesses) and
– ICT companies, that provide Open Technologies support and development services in Greece.
A short description of most recent and ongoing projects and initiatives:
- The collaborative wikification of public services – https://diadikasies.gr We are collaborating with our member the Institute of Communications and Computer Systems (ICCS) and the Region of West Macedonia and we have deployed a wiki for documenting and maintaining government processes. The core idea behind this project is that with the use of open, standardized and widely available tools like MediaWiki openness is actively adopted. The ultimate goal is to pursue open government reforms with a tangible impact that will progressively enable changes in the day to day operation of government thus transforming government at the department level into a more transparent and effective organization. This project will be presented at OGP Summit in Paris this December.
- ‘Open Wifi for Refugees’ – Project for providing open wifi connection to refugee camps in Greece. The project is implemented under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Education with the cooperation.
- Open Courses in Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, OER and 3D Printing – In collaboration with the Municipality of Athens, we have organised a series of courses for 3D Printing, Open Educational Resources, Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap in several schools. The participation to the courses was free and all the educational material is provided for re-use as OER. We are planning to continue this initiative over the summer and throughout the next school year.
- Open Technologies Hackerspaces in Schools – In 2016 we set up and donated an open technologies lab in a secondary school, which entails 12 workstations (RaspberryPI) with an Ubuntu 14.04 LTSP server and a 3D Printer. At the moment we have announced an open call for participation for supplying 5 schools with 5 3D printers to use during the next school year.
- Donation of Laptops – We have an open call in cooperation with the Municipality of Athens and our members to collect old pc’s (desktops, laptops etc), which we will ‘upgrade’ to linux and then distribute to schools and students.
- MOU’s with Public Administration and other Organizations – Over the last two years we have developed collaboration with several Ministries and local and regional governments and have signed Memorandums of Understanding for the promotion of Openness. Among the public bodies we have formed this kind of collaboration is the Ministry of Economy, Development and Tourism, the Ministry of Education and Research, the Region of Attica, several Municipalities, etc.
- YourDataStories – www.yourdatastories.eu – Your Data Stories, is an EU funded innovation project that deals with finding, analysing and visualising open governmental data. Our role in the project is to ensure that all legal and privacy issues concerning OGD will be taken into account, evaluate the results of the pilots that will be run during the project and engage the community of developers and users from civil society groups.
- SlideWiki – https://slidewiki.eu/ – The project is using the open source SlideWiki platform (available at SlideWiki.org) for large-scale pilots for collaborative OpenCourseWare authoring, multiplatform delivery and Learning Analytics. Our role in the project is to set up, execute and evaluate part of the professional and vocational trials.
- OpenBudgetSurveyTracker – https://obs.ellak.gr – We have a collaboration with the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (http://www.cbpp.org/) and its think tank International Budget Partnership (http://internationalbudget.org/), for the project Open Budget Survey (OBS) Tracker, which is an online database, that provides access to updated information on the compliance of participating states with certain prerequisites to publication relating to the public information budget.
- Open Government in Local Governments – https://eu-smartcities.eu/commitment/7948 – We have a collaboration with the municipalities of Athens, Thessaloniki and Heraklion and have submitted a commitment regarding the opening of their data as part of European Smart Cities Initiative commitment
- ODI Athens Node – http://athens.theodi.org/, – We are the Greek community node of Open Data Institute and we convene local individuals and organisations interested in open innovation by delivering local events and workshops. We raise awareness of data’s economic, social and environmental benefits and encourage local collaboration of all interested parties.
- European Enterprise Network – http://www.enterprise-hellas.gr – We cooperate with the Enterprise Europe Network – Hellas in the ICT sector, with the aim to assist companies that provide Open Technology services or companies that want to obtain information about the use of Open Technologies.
- Code + Create – The scope of the project is to teach youth digital skills with the use of open technologies. We have set up open labs (we use open hardware and open software) and we have also created open educational material (available in elearn.ellak.gr) and provide free courses to mixed classes of refugees and Greek youth. More information is available here.