synAthina is an online-offline public platform where the City of Athens supports citizens in developing and implementing projects that improve the quality of life in the city. While an activist working outside of the city’s government initiated the project in 2013, the city’s government has owned the project since 2014. synAthina has achieved widespread participation. A network of nearly 450 social impact groups have shared almost 4,000 activities on the online platform. According to the synAthina manager for the City, the project’s greatest contribution has been fostering a creative and collaborative ecosystem that engages both civil society and Athens's municipal government to face the city’s challenges in innovative ways. synAthina has survived a recent transition of mayoral administrations and is still going strong, demonstrating that, even within a bureaucratic and cash-strapped city government, innovative public servants can channel the collective intelligence of citizens to develop and implement solutions that improve the quality of urban life.
Background
How It All Started
Greece was hit hard by the global financial recession of 2007 – 2008. Several years of austerity measures left the nation’s capital pockmarked with dilapidated buildings and vacant lots, and left its citizens’ trust in government shaken. Yet at the same time, citizens’ initiatives sprung up around the city to address issues such as homelessness, poverty, and vandalism.1
In 2013, former documentary filmmaker Amalia Zepou approached the city’s mayor, George Kaminis, with an idea: create a central hub within the city’s government that would connect citizens’ projects in various neighborhoods to share resources and learn from one another. Seeing the project as an opportunity to bridge the gap between civil society and the government, Mayor Kaminis invited Zepou to assume an advisory role in the mayor’s office to develop the project.2
The first version of synAthina was a physical map of grassroots communities in the city, which grew into a digital map hosted on a simple website. In 2014, the project received a major boost when it won €1 million from the Bloomberg Mayors Challenge to develop a fully-fledged online platform. In the same year, Amalia Zepou was elected as a city council member and assumed the role of Vice Mayor of Civil Society and Innovation, officially bringing synAthina into the city’s government.
The Collective Intelligence Process
How does it work?
The synAthina.gr platform functions as a central portal for civic participation in Athens.
The “Activities” section acts as an events board where users can post their actions that aim to build community and improve quality of life in the city, from community cooking events to free medical care and counseling for substance abuse. Residents can search for these events by district, topics, and date, or by scrolling through the interactive web map on the site’s homepage.
The “Groups” portion is the network-building section of synAthina. Here, any non-profit, business, or unincorporated group of people can create a team profile to showcase their community-oriented work. This includes a written description, a list of actions and events the group has been involved in, as well as an optional photo gallery.
The “Open Calls” page helps citizens to address a broad network of community groups with calls-to-action for collaborative initiatives or the municipality programs to engage with numerous local stakeholders when implementing projects for the city. For instance, the Open Schools initiative –a city program for students and their parents to participate in after hours cultural activities at schools—regularly solicits ideas for activities (and people to organize them) -- through Open Calls.
Figure 1: The synAthina homepage, centered around an interactive web map that captures citizens’ initiatives (Source: https://www.synathina.gr/en/)
While the synAthina.gr platform has been the main entrepot for active citizens and city officials, much of the collective action takes place offline. A prime example is Curing the Limbo, a pilot program for the City of Athens to model innovative strategies for the integration of migrants and refugees using €5 million in funding from the European Union’s “Urban Innovative Actions” initiative. Curing the Limbo engages around 300 refugees and migrants who have been granted asylum and live in Athens in collaborative actions and community-building activities supporting local collectives and citizens that work equally to benefit Athenian neighborhoods and improve the quality of life of its communities.
Such actions and collectives include accessibility of public space initiatives, projects around the promotion of Athens as a multicultural/alternative tourist destination, neighborhood cultural communities (theater groups, sound collectives, arts and crafts projects etc), local sports and well-being groups, and environmental initiatives. In one case, participants worked on a photography project that captured life in the city as seen through the eyes of a new citizen. Two days of photography tours and workshops produced a public exhibition entitled “Athens, My New Neighborhood” which travelled around the city’s public spaces. “The project experiments around the hypothesis that citizens can have an institutional and systemic contribution to the way such groups are included in our societies,” Haris Biskos, current Project Manager for synAthina said in a recent conversation.3 synAthina, along with several local and international partners, are running the initiative from 2018 to 2021.
Figure 2: The mobile installation “Athens my New Neighborhood” was one of the tools used by Curing the Limbo program and synAthina to help refugees assimilate to life in Athens (Credit: synAthina).
Who Participates?
synAthina is open to anyone who wishes to partake, so long as their projects have social impact rather than profit as their primary motive. Participants need only register with a name and email to be able to sign up and organize or join an event. Any group can also register, regardless whether it is a nonprofit, social impact business, or an unincorporated group of people.
Participation started out strong and has seen steady growth. In 2013 (synAthina’s inaugural year), 42 groups shared 208 activities on the City’s digital map. As of 2020, a total of 443 groups have posted 4,050 activities on synAthina in cooperation with 148 sponsors. In an interview, Haris Biskos remarked that the younger generation is the group most engaged on the platform.
While synAthina allocates funding to certain projects, such as activities for the Curing the Limbo initiative, access to the larger network of innovative groups and projects is the main incentive for participation.
Figure 3: The growth of synAthina activities over time (Source: https://www.synathina.gr/en/synathina/statistics.html)
Outcomes and Impacts
As the synAthina team does not manage or track the outputs of all the groups with a presence on the platform, it is difficult to quantify the number of projects that have had positive outcomes. The collaboration described above –the network of nearly 450 innovative groups working to improve the quality of life in Athens-- is synAthina’s primary impact.
In a larger sense, synAthina has also contributed to the rebuilding of trust between citizens and the city’s government. The initiative’s mediating role in the redevelopment of the Kypseli Market is a demonstrative example. Prior to the city’s decision to refurbish the market in 2012, the historic municipal building had lain vacant for a decade, and the city even considered demolishing it.
In 2015, synAthina launched a public consultation to engage the community in co-designing this new market space. The platform collected 470 ideas for the future use of the building from 200 participants. synAthina then held an open call for community groups, nonprofit organizations, and charitable organizations to determine the market’s operator, eventually settling on the social innovation group Impact Hub Athens. Finally, synAthina held a six-week program in the market to organize community events and workshops.4
Today, the Impact Hub describes Kypseli as a “market for social entrepreneurship” whose tenants include social organizations that provide educational and social services alongside the traditional second-hand stores and fruit vendors.5
Figure 4: synAthina has been hosting numerous collaborative workshops with citizens about pressing challenges of Athens (Credit: synAthina)
For synAthina, the most important outcome of the Kypseli Market consultation was not to generate new ideas, but to let the market community know that the city was listening. “Public consultations can be extremely boring and quite hypocritical things, because they are usually question sessions where only elected representatives would come,” Vice-Mayor Zepou told CityLab. “We could have almost predicted the ideas that came in...what was more significant was that synAthina broke the ice, and the tension among community groups in that area, helping them to collaborate.”6
Key Innovation
While the synAthina website attracts a great deal of international attention, opportunities to participate in-person have been key to the initiative’s success. “What synAthina is doing, most importantly as a process, is to engage with communities and help empower citizens initiatives,” Haris Biskos said.
The synAthina kiosk is one example. Located in Varvakeios Market in the city’s center, the kiosk is an indoor and outdoor public space that any registered user can reserve for a group meeting or to host an activity. While a simple idea, the kiosk provides a place to meet and face-to-face events, accessible even to informal groups who lack an office space.7
Figure 5: A group meeting at the outdoor kiosk space https://www.synathina.gr/el/%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AD%CE%B3%CE%B7.html
synAthina is managed by a team of five people working full time, and one person working part-time, within the Vice Mayor’s Office for Civil Society and Innovation. This includes two team members who are designated Public Engagement Officers. The mandate of these team members is to form and maintain relationships with community groups, mainly by attending events and meetings within the community. Meeting with groups face-to-face helps the synAthina team to better understand the challenges each part of the community faces, while also showing isolated groups, such as refugees, that the city government can be a trusted partner.
Katerina Gkoutziouli, a former synAthina Public Engagement Officer, described the outreach challenges for a project involving transforming a building into a community center for refugees: “At first, I did not reveal my identity, because I know that some groups are skeptical of what the government does,” Gkoutziouli wrote. After slowly gaining the group’s trust, Gkoutziouli offered to put them in touch with educators or architects who could support their project.8
The Open Mondays program is another way synAthina connects with the community. During this weekly meeting held at synAthina’s offices, anyone is welcome to gather around a communal table and discuss ideas they would like to see implemented, or simply connect with like-minded people in the community or municipal government. These meetings often center around a specific theme. For instance, when Athens’s’ population of refugees began to grow, synAthina invited relevant community groups and city departments to share ideas about how the city could better support refugees.
Current Status
Notably, synAthina does not take funding from the city’s government. The initiative primarily receives funding from European Commission’s Urban Innovative Actions program. The team allocates approximately two-thirds of its funding towards personnel. The remaining budget goes to operational costs, such as organizing events and workshops and calls-to-action supporting and nurturing community-led initiatives. These days, as the team does not make major changes to the online platform, the website requires minimal funding.
While this external funding may seem to insulate synAthina from changes in administration, Mr. Biskos emphasizes that political support is important to the initiative’s survival. “Political support is the most important parameter in sustaining synAthina,” he said in a recent conversation. As synAthina is not backed by any legislation, the political support of the mayor’s office is what gives the initiative its staying power.
This reliance on political support throws a veil of uncertainty over synAthina’s future, as the initiative’s two key champions recently exited Athens’s government. Founder Amalia Zepou left her role as Vice Mayor to pursue a fellowship abroad, while George Kaminis resigned shortly before the end of his term as mayor in 2019. As the new administration has been in place for only a few months, and the current funding from the European Commission will last only through the next year, Biskos admits that it is difficult to say whether synAthina will continue in its current form, and if so, for how long. “This is a crucial time as the government approach is changing with the new administration on board” Biskos said. “If we lose the political support, there might be no synAthina in its current form.”
Lessons Learned
- Harnessing Passions: A key ingredient in the longevity of the project is that the website serves as a one-stop locus for setting up and finding civic engagement projects of all kinds. Rather than limiting projects to those created by the City, synAthina helps civic groups source participation. It also channels European funding and provides support and coordination for these volunteer efforts. At the same time, there is a dedicated City staff of five who run the network.
- Hybrid Online/Offline Collective Intelligence: Another reason for the project’s success is its use of an online platform to coordinate real world activities, taking advantage of key spaces in the City of Athens to invigorate civic life. The successful blending of online action with offline mobilization has been a reason for success.
- Key Personalities: Another reason for synAthina’s longevity may be the key role of the Vice- Mayor. Like Audrey Tang in Taiwan, who went from civil society into government, Amalia Zepou, too, started as a civic leader and then assumed a leadership role in the administration. Her renown, however, in the civic community helped to instill trust and interest in synAthina.
- Institutionalization has Trade-Offs: While achieving institutionalization in the city’s government is an admirable goal for many collective intelligence projects, synAthina demonstrates that involving the bureaucracy can also lead to unexpected obstacles. For instance, the team would like to further experiment with the online platform but as the website sits on the city’s servers, it can be difficult and time-consuming to make changes within the rules of the city’s bureaucracy.
- Success Is Fragile: Though many media outlets in Greece and abroad frame synAthina as a major success, Haris Biskos emphasized that the initiative has faced major challenges, even in its most celebrated projects. The Kypseli Market has delivered numerous benefits to the community. But the process of developing the market put considerable pressure on the synAthina’s relationship with both the operator and the City Hall. This underscores the importance of seeing the larger aim --building of collective intelligence within the city’s government-- rather than becoming discouraged by the difficulties faced by one particular project.
- Aim for Cultural Change: synAthina began with the ambitious goal of building trust between Athens’s government and its people. As Mr. Biskos told us, one aspect of this approach was “Reaching out to unknown spaces in the city… exploring and bringing forward voices that are not heard inside the city hall or in the municipality offices.” By demonstrating the successes of this outreach strategy, and its positive effects on Athens’s quality of life, synAthina has been able to drive change in the mentality of the city’s government that has carried over into the new administration. “This mentality of co-creation is a mentality that is now embroidered into the administration of Athens,” Biskos said. “Now it’s part of how the administration runs the city.”
Listen to the podcast episode with city planner Haris Biskos here
- “SynAthina: A Social Innovation Platform,” Urban Sustainability Exchange (website), Metropolis, accessed February 17, 2020, https://use.metropolis.org/case-studies/synathina-turning-grassroots-activities-into-tools.
- “Sharing Cities: Activating the Urban Commons,” Shareable (website), accessed February 17, 2020, https://www.shareable.net/sharing-cities/.
- Haris Biskos, interview, 30 January 2020.
- “SynAthina Lessons Learned,” SynAthina, Issuu, video, June 27, 2018, https://issuu.com/synathina/docs/synathina_lessons_learned_2_spreads.
- “Welcome to Kypseli’s Municipal Market: the 1st Social Agora,” Impact Hub Athens (website), accessed February 17, 2020, https://agorakypselis.gr/?lang=en.
- Feargus O’Sullivan, “The Big Lesson Bloomberg Mayor’s Challenge Winners Can Teach Other Cities,” City Lab, October 11, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2016/10/the-big-lesson-bloomberg-mayors-challenge-winners-can-teach-other-cities/503603/.
- “SynAthina’s Roof [in Greek],” SynAthina (website), accessed February 17, 2020, https://www.synathina.gr/el/%CF%83%CF%84%CE%AD%CE%B3%CE%B7.html.
- “SynAthina Lessons Learned,” SynAthina, Issuu, video, June 27, 2018, https://issuu.com/synathina/docs/synathina_lessons_learned_2_spreads.
