The Blog
HellenicOCRteamCall for Papers for the inaugural issue of the Austral Journal of Parliamentary Studies (REPA)
On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of the Hellenic OCR Team and the School of Politics, Government and International Relations of the Faculty of Law at Universidad Austral, we invite the national and international academic community to submit papers for publication in the inaugural issue of the new Austral Journal of Parliamentary Studies (REPA). The issue, titled “A decade of excellence in parliamentary studies”, marks a decade of innovation, collaboration, and research in the field of parliamentary studies.
The Hellenic OCR Team supported the publication of the Guidelines for AI in Parliaments in Greek
We are proud to have supported the translation, design and print publication of the Guidelines for AI in Parliaments in Greek!
Press release on the partnership between Universidad Austral and the Hellenic OCR Team
Universidad Austral and Hellenic OCR Team formalize strategic partnership for strengthening global cooperation in governance and parliamentarism.
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Main page
This is the central page of the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies that took place on Friday, 13 June 2025, in Athens.
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Press release – Conference conclusion
Press release on the completion on the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies (English/ελληνικά).
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Conference photos
Official photos of the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies (constantly updated). Credits: #HellenicOCRTeam
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Program (delivered presentations)
The organizing committee of the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies has announced the program for the event, which will take place in Athens, Greece, on Friday, 13 June 2025.
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Sponsoring and supporting scheme
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – PRESS RELEASE
An official announcement from the Organizing Committee of the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies – Call for Papers
CALL FOR PAPERS – UPDATE
4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies
The organizing committee of the 4th Global Conference on Parliamentary Studies invites submissions of papers for a unique event to be held in Athens, Greece, on Friday, 13 June 2025.
ARPC workshop
A workshop on “Advanced analysis and recognition of parliamentary corpora” (ARPC) will be organized at the International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition conference (ICDAR 2024), which will take place is Athens, Greece. The ARPC workshop will be held on Saturday, 31 August 2024.
Call for Papers: ARPC workshop at the ICDAR 2024
CALL FOR PAPERS (UPDATED)
Workshop on
Advanced analysis and recognition of parliamentary corpora (ARPC)
The ARPC organizing committee invites papers for the workshop to be held in physical format during the ICDAR 2024 conference in Athens, Greece. The ARPC workshop will be held on Saturday, 31 August 2024.
TOGI partners with the Hellenic OCR Team
The Hellenic OCR Team and The Open Government Institute at Zeppelin University announce their partnership.
Celebrating 60 members
In December 2022, five years after its establishment, the Hellenic OCR Team achieved another significant milestone by reaching 60 members.
To BHMA presents feature story on Smart Parliaments
Greece’s major newspaper TO ΒΗΜΑ TΗΣ ΚΥΡΙΑΚΗΣ included on 27 November 2022 an impressive story on the occasion of the publication of the edited volume titled Smart Parliaments: Data-Driven Parliament (Brussels: European Liberal Forum) by the Hellenic OCR Team.
Edited Volume on Smart Parliaments
The Hellenic OCR Team is incredibly proud to announce the publication of its first collective authoring effort titled Smart Parliament: Data-driven Democracy. The book is jointly edited by the Team’s co-founders, Fotis Fitsilis and George Mikros. The book is published by the European Liberal Forum as part of its Techno-Politics Series.
Supporting the LegisTech Forum 2022
The Hellenic OCR Team supported the organization and implementation of the 2022 LegisTech Forum, which took place on 12-16 September 2022. The Forum was put together by our long-time partner Bússola Tech.
AI Workshop in Argentina
On 31 August 2022 the Hellenic OCR Team organized jointly with The Open Government Institute of Zeppelin Universität, a special workshop for the Honorable Chamber of Deputies of Argentina to collect empirical evidence for the future institutional use of Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Our Team at Wroxton
The Hellenic OCR Team was represented by four of its members at the prestigious Wroxton Workshop of Parliamentary Scholars and Parliamentarians (15th edition, 30-31 July 2022, Wroxton, UK).
Hellenic OCR Team award
A great moment at the International Workshop of Scholars and Parliamentarians that took place in Villa La Angostura, Argentina, on 7-8 September 2022. The Hellenic OCR Team award for “Excellence in Parliamentary Studies” has been awarded for the first time!
BISON in the room
We have a BISON in our team! The Hellenic OCR Team partners with the Business Intelligence and Social Innovation (BISON) research group of the University of the Peloponnese, Greece, to further extend its global expert and institutions network.
A dedicated volume on the Hellenic OCR Team
After years in planning, the Hellenic OCR Team came to an agreement with the European Liberal Forum to publish an edited volume exclusively dedicated to the study of parliaments.
New benchmarks reached
In late 2021, the Hellenic OCR Team made two new benchmarks! In November, it celebrated its fourth anniversary and, shortly after, it reached 50 active members.
Diversifying LEOS
Hellenic OCR Team continues its tireless efforts on the transformation of parliamentary control. Sotiris Leventis, Vasileios Anastasiou and Fotis Fitsilis have used a modified Legislation Editing Open Software (LEOS) entity as the primary system, which was linked through software agents to an independent data source.
Flagship article out at last!
Hellenic OCR Team co-founders Fotis Fitsilis and George Mikros have published their latest open access article in the Journal of Open Humanities Data! This is the flagship publication on the science and methods behind the Team’s unique composition and approach.
New partnership with BitNomos
BitNomos, a Bologna-based company aiming at digitalizing deliberate societies, and the Hellenic OCR Team, a scientific crowdsourcing initiative and an expert network for the processing and analysis of governance and parliamentary data, are announcing their cooperation.
Emerging technologies
The Hellenic OCR Team continues its aggressive research strategy within the greater ParlTech domain by initializing three proofs-of-concept on emerging technologies: recommender systems, artificial intelligence and blockchain.
New partnership
May 2021 newsletter #10
The Hellenic OCR Team’s May 2021 newsletter is out – our 10th! It includes rich but concise information about the Team’s activities during the past quarter.
Ground-breaking paper from the Team
Hellenic OCR Team members Fotis Fitsilis and Apostolos Dalas joined forces with Dimitris Koryzis and Dimitris Spiliotopoulos to come up with a state-of-the-art contribution on Parliamentary Technology, or ParlTech, just published on Big Data and Cognitive Computing, an MDPI journal.
Rule as Code
In February 2021, SmartLegal and the Hellenic OCR Team joined forces to use the Rule-as-Code approach on Greek legislation! Using SmartLegal’s platform, an existing law will be transformed into machine-consumable language (code). This proof-of-concept, applied on a Greek law for the first time, has the potential to deliver better, digital ready regulations that can be tested before actual implementation.
January 2021 newsletter
Becoming an expert network
In the advent of 2021, the Hellenic OCR Team is initiating its transition from a crowdsourcing initiative towards a structured expert network for the processing and analysis of government and parliamentary data.
36 months of operation
October 2020 newsletter
The Hellenic OCR Team October 2020 newsletter (#8) is out! This time on the menu: a new milestone, a huge boost in transparency, networking and significant contributions to scientific literature.
Partnership with LUDCI.eu
Newly Launched Diplomacy and Communications Institute, LUDCI.eu, and the Hellenic Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Team announce partnership.
A new milestone!
The Hellenic OCR Team reaches a new milestone! Today, we proudly celebrate our expansion to 40 members. As of now, our Team has 36 individual and four institutional members that closely cooperate to achieve a set of greater goals, such as data openness, systemic interoperability and digital transformation of parliamentary institutions. read more…
A Joinup solution
The Hellenic OCR Team, an innovative crowdsourcing platform for the processing and analysis of parliamentary data and more…, now appears as a solution at Joinup, EU’s collaborative platform for Interoperability solutions for public administrations, businesses and citizens under the ISA2 Programme.
Digital Humanities 2020 poster
At this year’s Digital Humanities 2020 (virtual) conference, between 20 and 24 of July, the Hellenic OCR Team presented a poster on Xtralingua, our latest digital tool for extracting quantitative text profiles.
Hellenic OCR Team – Hypernetica joint announcement
The Hellenic OCR Team, the world’s first crowdsourcing initiative for the processing and analysis of parliamentary data, and Hypernetica, an emerging provider of business process automation and interoperability software solutions, join forces to commonly tackle legal informatics challenges in the parliamentary environment and in public governance at large.
Hellenic OCR Team members produce top-notch research on SDGs
The article titled “How parliaments monitor sustainable development goals – a ground for application of post legislative scrutiny” that appeared on June 4, 2020 in The Journal of Legislative Studies includes top-notch research by members of the Hellenic OCR Team.
Hellenic OCR Team enters EU’s Transparency Register
The Hellenic OCR Team hereby announces that it entered the EU’s Transparency Register, a system of transparency that is operated jointly by the European Parliament and the European Commission.
May 2020 newsletter
Our May 2020 newsletter (#7) is finally there and includes major steps of our aggressive evolutionary process, such as ramping up software development, concluding parliamentary control sampling, initiation of cooperation with European Commission instances and partnerships with Hypernetica and Hansard at Huddersfield.
Working on LEOS
On 29 April 2020, our development team, i.e. Sotiris Leventis, Konstantinos Tsiaras, Panagiotis Papantonakis and Dr. Fotios Fitsilis, had the opportunity to participate to an online workshop for LEOS – Legislation Editing Open Software organized by DG DIGIT at the European Commission.
Stay home: video message
This is a social message by the Hellenic OCR Team. In view of the novel coronavirus pandemic, please STAY HOME. STAY SAFE. Watch the video below.
Summer of Code 2020
Here we go again! Following successful project implementation during GSOC 2019, the Hellenic OCR Team and its partners have proposed two new exciting software development projects to org admin GFOSS! Interested students are kindly requested to express their interest at any time.
Our presence in the press: TA NEA Weekend
An interesting reportage by Marnie Papamattheou on the Hellenic OCR Team and our innovative crowd sourcing approach to parliamentary data appeared today February 1st, 2020, at the weekend edition of the newspaper “TA NEA”.
Second anniversary meeting – the real thing!
It has been a fruitful anniversary team meeting on Wednesday 22 January 2020 at the Found.ation! After two years in operation, the Hellenic OCR Team now counts 31 members in seven countries, 11 team meetings, six newsletters, and -most importantly- approx. 40K of processed parliamentary control documents.
Second anniversary meeting – announcement
Our second anniversary meeting is ante portas! Enter the Found.ation on the 22th of January and learn about the team, our achievements and goals. The agenda shall include a short presentation by the initiative’s main stakeholders, lightning talks by our members and a developer’s forum to plan for the next steps.
It’s our second anniversary!
Something big happened back in November 2017; our scientific crowdsourcing initiative, the Hellenic OCR Team, came to life! This November, members and supporters celebrate our second anniversary. Look out for a special monthly meetup and get introduced into the state-of-the-art processing and analysis of parliamentary data.