Digital Beach Summit

By project CIVITEC

Published on 05 June 2025

Greece

Ipeiros

About this good practice

The 1 st Digital Beach Summit was organized at 2-4/09/2021&the 2nd at 1-2/09/2022 at the sandy beach Monolithi (25km long), which ranks first on the list of the "Safest Beaches in Europe for a Summer Holiday in 2020" according to European Best Destinations.
The idea for the application of this GP was the need of the Municipality to establish a mechanism that will ensure citizens' involvement and active participation into the decision procedures of the Municipality facilitating participatory democracy and transparency.
Digital Beach Summit performs a GP as there participate pioneers in the field of ICT who present digital solutions which transform the cities into smart cities, improves citizen’s daily life, facilitating access to a wide range of administrative procedures for citizens, business and public services online.
Indeed, apart from the experts in the ICT sector, with great experience in digital government with emphasis on the strengthening of human resources skills and social integration, the support of entrepreneurship & business innovation and the local and regional development using innovative methodologies, during the event, there is an open discussion in real time with the citizens, community teams, NGOs creating a dynamic dialogue and exchange of ideas, expression of needs and challenges and potential solutions in existing problems. Main stakeholders & supporters are all the neighbour municipalities, the Region of Epirus, Chambers of Commerce, NGOs

Resources needed

Own resources of the Municipality along with sponsors from public and private entities. For the preparation & execution of the event, is was required a full time job of about 15 people . The support from volunteers was also of significant importance,

Evidence of success

Citizen’s active participation is enhanced and promoted through this event.
After the first event, the participation (physical and online) was increased significantly paving the way for the organization of bigger events, combing also additional thematic.
The organization of such a great event provides visibility and increase of visitors in the Municipality of Preveza. All the big events, conferences, concert etc are usually organised in the capital (Athens) or other big Greek cities.

Potential for learning or transfer

The event is organised in hybrid structure. Therefore, someone can attend it in physical presence or digitally, through the online tools previously mentioned, having also the opportunity to actively participate during the sessions, not just “watching”. The organisers aim to create an app for mobile services exclusively addressed to this event including innovating ict tools for the active participation of the public, using also AI and mixed reality so as to be attractive, approach and engage the participation of more people not only in national but also in international level (with parallel translations).
This attempt ischallenging as there is luck of resources but seeking for supporters and donators is another challenging issue that the Municipality has to deal with. A good idea is to find donators from the ICT sector who would like to launch IT solutions either through the app or present them during the event.