Dan Lungu
Coordonator „Ciugud Smart Village”
Ciugud, a village in Alba county, has become a national model for local development. While a few years ago the local budget was only enough to pay the salaries of a few employees, in recent years the village has flourished. It has a smart school with all the facilities, smart street lighting and digitization of the relationship between citizens and the town hall. Learn how a municipality in Romania is being transformed from Dan Lungu in the Smart City of the People panel.
Dan Lungu has almost 20 years of experience in media, marketing, advertising and public administration, with studies in journalism, communication, management and public administration. He has worked for media institutions such as Mediafax, Ziarul Financiar, BBC, News.ro, Libertatea and Transilvania Business.
He has also worked in the central administration, where he headed the Communication, Promotion and Organisation Directorate of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for about a year, which was directly responsible for the technical preparation of meetings and public communication during Romania’s six-month rotating presidency of the EU Council. Among other things, he knows what European policies “eat” because he studied in Brussels, where he was awarded a scholarship by the European Commission through its Representation in Romania.
In 2019, Dan Lungu chose to join the team of Ciugud Municipality, where he now coordinates projects in the field of public communication, but also educational projects (“Ciugud Smart School – the first smart school in rural Romania”) or in the field of digitization (“Ciugud Smart Village” – the first integrated smart village project in the country, which is also a case study for the Romanian Government).
Presentation: Ciugud Smart Village – how do we help Romanian villages move from the paper file to digital public services?
Romania’s public administration is in need of a profound reform that will allow it to de-bureaucratise and move towards digitisation of public services. However, it is a long way from the rail file to digital services, hampered by legislative problems, resistance of the system to change and lack of professional training of employees in institutions to use new technologies.
In Ciugud, a community of about 3,500 people, the local government is stubbornly pushing ahead with innovation and breaking new ground in digitising local government. This is how Ciugud Smart Village was born, which from 2020 is the project used by the Romanian Government as a case study for extending this concept to the whole rural area of the country. The project integrates all the essential areas of a community, from education, public services to environmental protection and energy reduction. A smart village is one that manages to use modern technological solutions to develop and reduce its administrative costs, while preserving and conserving the community’s rural identity.
Discussion Panel: “Tech in Community Development”
Moderator: Andrei Dumbrava
Participants: Laura Popeea, Dan Lungu, Radu Lepădatu,
A special track in PeakIT where we present daring, innovative initiatives, centered on technology, to increase community resilience, enabling their further development even in crisis time.
Join us to find how communities collaborates and develop key strategic projects, improving education, well being and supporting development of new skills and competencies, facing Industry 4.0 transition.