Our project partner Digital Cities of Central Greece SA – CITIESNET constitutes the first Digital Community in Greece and participates in many European programmes. CITIESNET has its roots in 2008, when the simultaneous need arose in 10 Municipalities of Central Greece to serve current and future needs of their local communities, based on new technologies.
In 2009 this public limited company was created, with members of these Municipalities and a vision “Always ensure the direct and efficient telecommunications interconnection between citizens, visitors and companies to improve the quality of life and develop our place by providing the required content from sources such as state, society, culture, environment and citizens”. You can read about the objectives of CITIESNET, in our previous blog talking about the organisation and its involvement in the project.
As a partner in Smart-DevOps project, CITIESNET has already participated mainly in the following activities:
- implementation of job role description. In order to complete this task, CITIESNET helped to specify the job role description framework that was needed, and to map the professional needs, along with the other involved partners
- identification and management of all the relevant stakeholders in Greece that will benefit from this particular project, by building a large network of them
- in planning and delivering the training methodology and contents, through proposing the validation and standardization procedures that needed to be followed
- in implementation of MOOC and specialization course, by disseminating these activities to relevant stakeholders in Greece, like municipalities, chambers etc. and selecting the best candidates for these training courses.
Along with these, the involvement of CITIESNET during projects life-cycle was very crucial, especially in activities like:
- participation in management procedure of the project, during project meetings and in project co-ordination initiatives, and in quality planning and management
- planning and implementing dissemination and exploitation procedures and activities
- participating in communication, dissemination and exploitation activities, and producing the necessary information material
The next step in CITIESNET role in the project is the selection of the trainees that will participate in the Work Based Learning, that is scheduled to start in a few months and securing the conditions of a successful implementation by matching each participant to the best possible job role in the municipalities that will participate or in enterprises from the private sector. The outcomes of this co-operation between the future Smart City Experts and both the public and private sector will benefit both and help in evolving the cities to smart ones, by hiring or co-operating with highly skilled professionals.
Upon completion of the whole training process and validating the expected outcomes, a curriculum for a Smart City Professional will be formed, and specifically for the Smart City Planner, for the Smart City IT Officer and for the Smart City IT Manager. The final step is to exploit all the findings to the municipalities and individuals that work or want to work in a city’s administration and help them update their skills or know what should be the skills and competences, these job roles should have.
Since CITIESNET is a consortium of 10 municipalities in central Greece, the need for such staff is established. The publicity of this project made the participants of the training courses already know that they will be the core of the future high-ranking officials in many cities.
A new era of smart cities in Greece is emerging, and the DevOps competences for Smart Cities project is the reason.
By CITIESNET