“Thessaloniki is starting to play a very special, very important role in the area of technology and IT”, said the Minister of Digital Governance, Dimitris Papastergiou, in the context of the 3rd Conference on Innovation and New Technologies of Local Government, which takes place at the conference center “I. Vellidis” in Thessaloniki.
The conference is organized by the Region of Central Macedonia. Mr. Papastergiou specifically referred to the Local Government, saying that “the next few months are very critical because the projects of the Recovery Fund are running and we must be careful how we will turn this money into effective and useful projects for the municipalities.
What Papastergiou from Thessaloniki said
We also have the NSRF projects, 320 proposals with a budget of 230 million euros. Towards the end of May I think we will have the first 70-80 ok and by the end of the summer all the rest”.
Papastergiou from Patras: We are at the most interesting point of the country’s digital transition
Papastergiou: Greece has scientists, infrastructure and political will to produce artificial intelligence
The minister added that “the climate crisis clearly has priority.” There is no point in discussing anything else if we do not make sure that we, our families, the citizens of our cities are safe. The second is infrastructure and to be honest, Greece still needs a lot of work. In mobile phones we are relatively good, in fixed phones we still have a lot of work to do.”
He stood on an “important, a new aspect that is also developing in our country and has to do with space technologies. A new perspective is coming, all these opportunities given by near space, by satellites in Greek orbit, to provide solutions. In the summer, the government changed its policy due to the fires and floods in Thessaly. We have created a new microsatellite program, these competitions have already “run”.
Mr. Papastergiou underlined that “there are always excuses for not doing something. The point is to find solutions, within the difficulties that exist. For the bureaucracy part, we are moving into a next era, where we do not simply digitize, but abolish services. We will have a traffic of data and not a traffic of documents.”
RES-EMP
