The collaboration between Novoville and the City of Athens was officially launched on March 27th at Innovathens, The Hub of Innovation & Entrepreneurship. Georgios Kaminis, Mayor of Athens, presented the Novoville app, a solution aimed at strengthening communication between citizens and the municipality, ensuring transparency and motivating civic engagement.
“For the first time, Athens has at its disposal a single and open reference point for city issues. We now have data on the most important problems citizens face in their everyday lives; as well as on the municipal services’ response”, said Mr. Kaminis.
Through the Novoville app, Athens residents and visitors can easily submit requests, report problems they come across in the city, express their opinion on important issues, and get live updates about the progress of their requests on their smartphones. In addition, through the app, city authorities can instantly notify citizens about events, public consultations, emergencies, and much more, while providing useful telephone numbers, points of interest, and a comprehensive FAQ section.
At the same time, the Novoville platform offers municipal services real-time visibility of the city’s pain points, so that they can better plan their work and be held accountable for their performance and response time. Live statistics and automated workflows allow them to make better, data-driven decisions.
The Novoville platform was initially implemented in the City of Athens over a soft launch phase starting on October 3rd, 2018. Within five months of pilot operation, 22,500 requests were resolved, while 8,500 SMS and 2,500 push notifications were sent to citizens, significantly enhancing the quality and frequency of communication between the public and the Municipality. Prior to this, a total of 140 city employees were specially trained to respond to Novoville data.
Fotis Talantzis, CEO and co-founder of Novoville, said: “Our successful collaboration with the City of Athens represents an important milestone for us, especially due to the scale of the challenge. The Novoville platform complements the Municipality’s digital strategy and contributes to better communication with and service to citizens. We are thankful for the trust the local government showed us, and look forward to continuing our excellent cooperation with them”.
Konstantinos Champidis, Chief Digital Officer at the City of Athens, added: “We are very happy about our collaboration with Novoville. It is not just an app you can use to report issues that you encounter in your everyday life. It is much more. It closes the communication cycle between the City and the citizens, and creates a two-way relationship between these two sides.’
The next phase of implementation in the City of Athens will see the rollout of additional online services, such as payments and consultations.