#kaminis

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Novoville: Smart App for problems solution in the city of Athens

Athenians will be able to send to municipality authorities requests and complains or point out to a specific problems with an application introduced by Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis on Wednesday. The application Novoville for mobile phones and tablets.

Via Novoville, municipal authorities also inform residents and visitors about various events and activities, including extraordinary actions or important announcements.

Novoville, as the application is called, in pilot testing since October 2018, has so far received some 22,500 requests and returned 8,500 SMS messages and 2,500 push notifications to Athens residents.

At least 135 specially trained municipal personnel are on standby to handle anything citizens might report, i.e. problematic road lights, constructional defects on roads or pavements, abandoned cars, or more urgent incidents that require the immediate response of municipal authorities.

The app tracks the reported location and when a report has been processed or a problem has been resolved successfully, the person receives an update on his/her mobile phone or tablet.

Via Novoville, municipal authorities can also inform residents and visitors about various events and activities, including extraordinary actions or important announcements, as well as receive people’s thoughts on many issues and subjects by conducting opinion polls.

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Greeks in the Crisis: 'We Need To Explain Ourselves'

What hopes and fears has the new government in Greece awakened, and how bad are relations with Germany? Four weeks after the election, SPIEGEL sat down to discuss the situation with six Greek people from different walks of life.

With tensions between Greece and Berlin having been significant in recent weeks, SPIEGEL decided to invite six prominent Greeks to a roundtable discussion at Katzourbos tavern in Athens' Pankrati neighborhood.

The state minister is the first to arrive, 10 minutes early. Alekos Flambouraris, 72, wears a black suit, no tie and the kind of open-collared shirt made fashionable by the governing Syriza party in recent weeks. Flambouraris is a close confidant of Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras. "We need to keep up our contacts with the Germans. We want to explain ourselves," he says.

Athens' politically independent mayor, Georgios Kaminis, 60, arrives shortly thereafter on foot -- an inconspicuous man wearing a corduroy suitcoat. The others are: Natassa Bofiliou, 31, a famous Greek pop star who has been threatened by supporters of Golden Dawn because of her vocal opposition to the party; Christos Ikonomou, 44, whose book "Just Wait, Something's Happening," is a compilation of short stories about everyday life in Greece during the crisis; entrepreneur Aggeliki Papageorgiou, 50, the owner of a small ice cream spoon factory that is on the verge of shutting down; and journalist Xenia Kounalaki, 44, who writes for the center-right newspaper Kathimerini and has been disappointed thus far by Syriza's behavior in Europe.

The guests conduct their discussion in Greek and the event is moderated by SPIEGEL editors Manfred Ertel and Katrin Kuntz as well as co-moderator Angelos Kovaios, a journalist with the weekly newspaper To Vima. They spent three hours discussing developments in the country over Greek wine and Cretan cuisine.

[thekrambrulee]

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The City of Athens, in collaboration with four Greek NGOs, will launch a campaign in order to help the homeless of Athens and enable their social integration.

The initiative, described by Athens’ mayor Giorgos Kaminis as “a social experiment,” is being funded with 918,000 euros in European Union structural funding. The City of Athens will collaborate with Klimaka, Doctors of the World, Praksis and Equal Society. These organizations have experience dealing with the homeless,whose number is increasing  due to the current crisis in Greece.

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"Samaras’ coalition, that includes the invisible PASOK Anti-Socialists who didn’t even register in one poll at the three percent level needed to enter Parliament, has only a three-vote majority, and that would evaporate if he tried to reprimand or oust a growing number of miscreants and late-to-the-party rebels.

Chief among them is Nikitas Kaklamanis, 67, who was a one-man train wreck as Mayor of Athens from 2007-10, a tenure marked by his flitting around to the theater while the city disintegrated around him, which would have made him perfect for  A Night at the Opera but not as a manager of the nation’s capital.

Since politicians in Greece never die nor fade away, after he was beaten by New York-born George Kaminis – who was backed by a coalition of leftist parties including PASOK but quickly wised up and became an Independent – Kaklamanis found a home in the Parliament where he was content for a few years taking orders from Samaras on how to vote."

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The City of Athens and the European Commission representative office in Greece held an open panel discussion at Technopolis today where Mayor Georgios Kaminis and Commissioner of Regional Policy, Mr Johannes Hahn announced far reaching initiatives in support of startup entrepreneurship, the boosting of the existing business environment in Athens, urban regeneration projects and support measures for those afflicted by the ongoing crisis.

The 10-year project, called “Ergo Athina” is funded by the European Commission totaling 120m Euro and consists of 72 individual projects ranging from the establishment of business incubators, a business support center, mentoring and training of new entrepreneurs, upgrading of facilities, projects geared towards urban regeneration and more. The event, titled “European Urban Development in Practice, the example of Athens”, was attended by over 300 participants and included brief remarks from 3 invited panelists from business, education and the social entrepreneurship sectors.

Link to Athens Development here: http://www.developathens.gr/en/

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If you live in Athens, news of Golden Dawn’s heinous alleged lawbreaking will come as no surprise. In the local elections of November 2010, the party received more than 5 per cent of the vote in the city of Athens. In 2012, it also won representation in parliament after gaining almost 7 per cent of the national vote. As it rose to power, both leaders and members grew insolent, raising uproar with words and deeds of unparalleled vulgarity – and they are now accused of openly and provocatively ignoring the law.

The municipality of Athens was the first to witness and record these actions and vociferously to denounce them. Twice in the past eight months, in an attempt to defend the city against racism and intolerance, the municipal authority has prevented the party from distributing food handouts to “Greeks only” in the capital’s central squares. Comment by Athens Mayor Giorgos Kaminis.

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Golden Dawn is a product of Greece's crisis

Golden Dawn made headlines yet again on July 24, when it organised another food handout outside their Athens headquarters "for Greeks only". However, this was no ordinary event; the date marks the anniversary of the restoration of democracy, back in 1974, after seven years of authoritarian rule under amilitary junta.

During those troubled years, thousands of democrats were jailed, and the country suffered from the regime's incompetence to deal with the national tragedy of the Turkish army's invasion in northern Cyprus. The message of the neo-Nazis was as simple as it was outrageous and insolent: Democracy failed; back to dictatorship.

Choosing July 24 to convey their racist message was yet another step in a consistent campaign to establish their presence in Greek society. While giving away bags filled with potatoes, the Nazi anthem "Horst Wessel", translated in Greek, was playing on loudspeakers, revealing Golden Dawn's true Nazi affiliation, which it has denied so many times in public.