## 2 Paving the Way for Open Government Reforms in Greece
### Initiatives of the Greek Government within the OGP Context  
Transparency, accountability and citizen engagement are considered as of high priority key issues in the agenda of the Greek government, in the effort to pave the transition from a traditional to a new ICTs-enabled model of public administration. Such a prioritization partially reflects the context, within which these priorities are set, which, during the last few years, is marked by corruption, mistrust, lack of accounting, lack of or low involvement of citizens and stakeholders in the decision-making processes, _etc._[31, 41]. Moreover, there is a need for improving the quality of services delivered to citizens and businesses, taking into consideration the potential offered towards this end by ICTs-enabled communication means. The objective of meeting the demand for high quality public services, combined with the need to enhance e-democracy and e-participation have marked the process of designing and implementing a model for open governance, which is heavily based on the use of ICTs throughout the public administration sector in support of Government to Government (G2G), Government to Business (G2B) and Government to Citizens (G2C) communication. As a country committed to the OGP initiative, Greece has in 2012 developed an Open Governance Action Plan [41], aiming to engage citizens in a dynamic and productive dialogue with governmental institutions. The _most important actions_ are the (Figure 2):* _Transparency Program \"Di@vgeia\"_: the \"Di@vgeia\" initiative represents the flagship of the Greek government efforts in support of transparency [42]. The scope of the initiative is the wide publicity of governmental policy and administrative actions. At the core of the initiative lies the mandatory publishing of all governmental decisions, across all public bodies. Indeed each decision is digitally signed and assigned a unique Internet Uploading Number (IUN), which certifies the upload of the respective document to the Di@vgeia platform. Decisions that are not uploaded to the \"Di@vgeia\" cannot be implemented. The \"Di@vgeia\" platform is heavily based on the potential of ICTs and their applications, representing actually an ICTs-enabled system, integrating innovations in the legal framework and operational processes with technological instruments. Its structure falls within the general strategy of the Greek government for \"open architecture\" and \"open content\". * _Open e-Consultation and Recruitment Platform_ \"_OpenGov_\": it attempts to place technological developments at the service of the political system, in its effort to fulfill critical priorities, such as transparency, deliberation, collaboration, accountability, _etc._, by means of ICTs-enabled applications. The platform supports two specific initiatives, both served _online_, namely: the \"open calls for the recruitment of public administration officials\" initiative, in which job vacancies in the public sector are published online and candidates submit their applications through the platform; and the \"electronic consultation\" initiative, being at the heart of the present paper, through which draft legislation or governmental policies are uploaded in the platform and are subject to e-commenting by citizens/stakeholders or organizations, towards the bettering of respective legislations before they take the way to the Greek Parliament [43]. * \"_GeoData_\"--_Open Spatial Data Platform_: the scope of this data platform is to provide a nodal point for the searching, collection, provision and visualization of open public geospatial \"data [44]. It is considered as a good example of the application of ICTs in public administration, as well as a repository for the storage of open geospatial data at the service of both the citizens and the public/private stakeholders and institutions.