SynAthina

SynAthina is the common space which brings together, supports and facilitates citizens’ groups engaged in improving the quality of life in the city. By coordinating the invaluable resource of citizens’ groups, the City of Athens actively listens to the needs of its people and is thus revitalized.

By supporting the activities of the citizens the City creates a new perception about the relationship between civic society and local governance and cultivates their dynamic, bidirectional bond.

• Collecting: collect the activities of citizens and through them we learn what their priorities are for the city.
• Connecting: enable the groups and the citizens to actualize their activities and encourage them to cooperate with other groups, sponsors, and institutions.
• Sieving: pick out those activities which have a greater impact on the city and explore their potential for use in local governance.
• Incorporating: activate the City’s reflexes so that its services can be improved in relation to the current needs of its citizens. The citizens’ activities can lead to changes in the City’s political priorities, to an upgrading of the regulations and to a simplification of procedures.

The initiative represents crowdsourcing in public policy, which indirectly relates to ENTICING crowdsourcing, as it used for knowledge discovery and civic engagement. The platform can act as a technological enabler that can increase speed and ease of participation and ideally as a policy tool or a means of co-production. This approach, also called ‘citizen sourcing’, is often used to accomplish large-scale tasks, find solutions for problems, or to gather information. Its potential as a problem-solving mechanism stems from the fact that both the original creator of the process of solving the problem and the participants in the process (citizens), have mutual and common benefits.

https://www.synathina.gr/el/