User:Thanough

Welcome to my personal meta.wikipedia page ! A page that I have always avoided to create but now I am glad to be here :-)

In a nuthsell, I enjoy mingling with activities, research projects, you name it, linked with open technologies. I consider this a good entry point for agitating preconceived ideas in organisations, business, schools, friends, family... My full name is Athanasios Priftis, raising -and this is far from being easy - two children (16 and 20 years’ old). I am swinging between Geneva and Lausanne (Switzerland), Thonon (France) and Athens (Greece). And with that you have a clue of the languages that I speak... fluently. People have descibed me as someone contributing to the area : of relationships that one can build – and how to do so – for people who work together on something but not in one place.

I am a researcher at HES - HEGGE and coordinate the research activities of Ynternet.org Research Foundation. During the last ten years, I have coordinated several applied research projects, on decentralized protocols and applications, smart contracts and blockchain implementation for the State of Geneva and other organizations. A list of related articles is to be found here here. I am also a Senior Consultant on learning with collaborative tools and practices for the World Bank and Openwise. I hold a MSc in Information Science, University of Loughborough (UK).

I am, also, an active member (Treasurer) of the Ecopol Cooperative of living together in Grandvaux (close to Lausanne). And then, there would be so many other places to find me: TEDxGeneva, the CHAB local complementary currency, the LAC pour TOUS initiative...

Projects I have really enjoyed working with are Wiki Loves Africa, OLPC in Greek Schools, various special issues of Republic

October 2015 - present

Scientific collaborator and lecturer at HES-SO / HEG-GE (Geneva School of Business Administration). Coordination and delivery of applied research projects on digital competences: a) DIBS (dibs.hesge.ch), Digital Individual Benefit Statement, a research project co-financed by Innosuisse, continued as the e-rentes.ch project in 2025; b) CoWaBoo (cowaboo.net), a protocol for building decentralised and collaborative application prototypes together with our students; c) SCODES (scodes.ch), a collective and decentralised system (proto3.ynternet.org) to manage building rights in collaboration with the Département de l'aménagement, du logement et de l'environnement (DALE) of the State of Geneva. Teaching (Wikinomics, Blockchain) is grounded in group work, prototype creation and participatory research.

June 2014 - present

Executive Director of the Ynternet.org Foundation (www.ynternet.org). Ynternet.org promotes good citizen practices (free licences, online collaborative culture, sharing of knowledge) in the digital age, through several projects at national and international level. Coordinator of the TEDxGeneva project.

September 2013 - June 2018

Researcher for the Independent Reporting Mechanism of the Open Government Partnership (OGP, opengovpartnership.org). Analysis and evaluation of the Greek government's actions within the OGP action plan.

January 2014 - June 2019

Consultant in collaborative learning for the World Bank (Knowledge, Learning and Sustainable Development department, and the Global Water Partnership - GWP). Development of a wiki policy, training of wiki gardeners, and facilitation of the World Bank Wikithon - Knowledge Forum.

December 2013 - June 2014

Invited lecturer at the National Centre for Public Administration and Local Government (Greece), on systems of social and economic governance and on open governance practices.

August 2013 - January 2014

Researcher for the Eurostat project "Automatic online collection of data for ICT related indicators", with GFOSS, which produced a conceptual framework of ICT statistical indicators.

January 2010 - May 2013

Researcher for the European project MIG@NET (mignetproject.eu), on migrant individuals and communities and their participation in the production and transformation of transnational digital networks, as well as the effect of these networks on migrant mobility and integration.

October 2009 - November 2011

Coordinator of the eGovernment team in the Greek Prime Minister's Office (example). Flagship project: transparency in public administration (diavgeia.gov.gr, the Di@vgeia program).

September 2004 - June 2012

Director of the Internet Services Department of PASOK (Socialist Party of Greece), building and leading a team of 13 people of various profiles. In 2008 our team deployed an electronic identification system for the election of the party President, rolled out across 3000 polling stations nationwide.

December 2002 - September 2003

Coordinator of the European Union Member States for the World Summit on the Information Society (United Nations, Geneva), during the Greek Presidency of Europe. Participation in EU and UN meetings, closed-group negotiations and the drafting of policy reports for the EU Commission and the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

May 2001 - November 2002

Adviser to the Minister of Economy and Finance on Information Society matters. Proposal and organisation of projects at national and European level.

Recent work (2024 - 2026)

In 2024, I co-authored:

Equey, C., Hutzli, V., Bayat-Ricard, M., Priftis, A., & Schaffter, S. (2024). Digital social innovation: lessons learned from European pension tracking systems. In Proceedings of ISPIM Osaka 2024: Innovation's role in connecting and empowering society.

Equey, C., Priftis, A., Trabichet, J.-P., & Hutzli, V. (2024). Designing a digital citizen-centered service. Technological Forecasting and Social Change (peer-reviewed).

In 2025, I submitted — and in 2026 it was selected — the project "Enhancing multilingual foundation models through lexicographic grounding: advancing GlossAPI for Apertus Greek language integration" for the Swiss AI Initiative's Call for Small Projects (2026).

In 2026 (already published):

Priftis, A., & Equey, C. (2026). Perspective Chapter: Social Innovation, Ethical Digital Services, and Personal Data in an AI Era: A Case Study from Switzerland. In D. M. Delgado-Prieto & D. L. R. Martinez (Eds.), Industry 4.0 — Transforming the Future Beyond Manufacturing — Volume 2, Human-Centred, Organizational and Societal Transformations (Vol. 2). IntechOpen. https://doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.1013093

Forthcoming:

Priftis, A., Karounos-Zamparloukos, F., Skarvelis, P., Ioannou, M., & Spanou, K. (2026). GlossAPI and Apertus: Building Open Greek Language Infrastructure for Transparent and Reproducible AI.

Selected reviewed publications in English

Equey, C., Hutzli, V., Bayat-Ricard, M., Priftis, A., & Schaffter, S. (2024, December). Digital social innovation: Lessons learned from European pension tracking systems. In Proceedings of ISPIM Osaka 2024: Innovation's role in connecting and empowering society (18 p.). International Society for Professional Innovation Management. ISBN 978-952-65069-7-5

Equey, C., Priftis, A., Trabichet, J.-P., & Hutzli, V. (2024, February). Designing a digital citizen-centered service. Technological Forecasting and Social Change. DOI, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2024.123280

Priftis A. Equey C. and Trabichet J.-P. (2022) Designing a Digital Citizen-Centered Service Through Social Innovation Proceedings of the XXXIII ISPIM Innovation Conference "Innovating in a Digital World", Copenhagen, Denmark on 05 June to 08 June 2022. ISBN: 978-952-335-695-5. LUT Scientific and Expertise Publications.

Priftis A. and Trabichet J.-P. (2021) Open government benchmarking for the state of Geneva, Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, Athens, Greece, 2021-10-06, ISBN 9781450390118.

Priftis A. Afonso L. Bondolfi T. and Trabichet J.-P. (2019) “Building a platform of social entrepreneurship and living together”, Proceedings of the OpenLivingLab Days 2019 Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece, 3-5 September 2019, Pp. 244-253, ISBN:9789082102796

Priftis A., Israel J. and Trabichet J.-P. (2019) “Smart contacts as APIs” Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Social Media Technologies, Communication, and Informatics disponible à https://hesso.tind.io/record/4792?ln=en

Priftis A. and Trabichet J.-P. (2018) “The CoWaBoo Protocol and Applications: Towards the Learnable Social Semantic Web”, International Journal on Advances in Software, ISSN 1942-2628, pp. 6-17 vol.11, no.1&2.

A. Priftis and J-P.Trabichet, “CoWaBoo: a descriptive protocol of learning driven applications,” The Ninth International Conference on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-Line Learning (eLmL 2017), IARIA, March 2017, pp 94-100 ISSN: 2308-4367, ISBN: 978-1-61208-541-8

Full list of reviewied publications here.

Priftis A. Afonso L. Bondolfi T. and Trabichet J.-P. (2018) “Building a platform of social entrepreneurship and living together”, Proceedings of the OpenLivingLab Days 2019 Conference, Thessaloniki, Greece, 3-5 September 2019, Pp. 244-253, ISBN:9789082102796

Priftis A. and Trabichet J.-P. (2018) “The CoWaBoo Protocol and Applications: Towards the Learnable Social Semantic Web”, International Journal on Advances in Software, ISSN 1942-2628, pp. 6-17 vol.11, no.1&2.

Melidis Alexandros, Deligiannis Athanasios, Priftis Athanasios, (2017), Independent Reporting Mechanism Greece: Progress Report 2015–2016 (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/country/comment-report/greece-end-term-report-public-comment-2014-2016)

Priftis, Athanasios; Trabichet, Jean-Philippe; Molas-Castells, Núria (2016) Recasting “wikinomics” in educational environments case studies in the wikinomics project, in Re-Imagining Learning Scenarios, proceedings of the EDEN 2016 Annual Conference Budapest, Hungary 14-17 June 2016

Priftis, Athanasios; Slater, Matthew; Trabichet, Jean-Philippe (2016), The Credit Commons an open protocol of promises in Proceedings of IASC Regional European Conference 2016, Bern, Switzerland, 10-13 May 2016

Priftis, Athanasios, Theo Bondolfi, and Yves Boisselier (2014) “Revisiting the Wikinomics Concept: Towards New Methodological Approaches.” In New Horizons in Web Based Learning, edited by Yiwei Cao, Terje Väljataga, Jeff K.T. Tang, Howard Leung, and Mart Laanpere, 8699:153–61. Springer International Publishing, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13296-9_17.

Priftis Athanasios (2014), Independent Reporting Mechanism Greece: Progress Report 2012–2013 (http://www.opengovpartnership.org/files/greece-ogp-irm-public-comment-engpdf/download)

Priftis T. (2013), “Home”, O-Zone: A Journal of Object-Oriented Studies, Issue 1: Object/Ecology, Spring 2013.

Bouras C., Giannaka E., Karounos Th., Priftis T.,Poulopoulos V., Tsiatsos Th., "A Unified Framework for Political Support eDemocracy Practices", Int. J. Electronic Democracy, Vol. 1, No. 1, 2008,

Oppenheim C. and Priftis T. , “Development of a National Information Policy in Greece”, Information Development, vol. 15, no.1, March 1999, p. 32-43.

Selected presentations in English on Open Government

Athanasios Priftis, (2014) Ever tried to "open a government? TEDxGeneva 2014 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrdu7NMcOOY)

Athanasios Priftis, (2012) Igniting change? An OpenGov Story (http://igniteshow.com/videos/igniting-change-opengov-story)

Athanasios Priftis, (2011) Shaping policy using digital channels: Ensuring effective public consultation (https://www.wiltonpark.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/wp1104-programme.pdf