City of Ljubljana and the Ljubljana Fire Brigade participate in the ATHENA research project whose purpose is to explore the impact and use of social networks, both for communication between residents and emergency services before and after a natural or any other disaster, as well as to obtain and share key information at the time of the accident.

The project is funded by the EU, Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007 – 2013, grant agreement nº SEC-2012-313220. Besides the Department for Protection, Rescue and Civil Defence and the Ljubljana Fire Brigade project involves the West Yorkshire police (UK) which is the leading partner of the project, the International Organization for Migration (Belgium), Sheffield Hallam University (UK), Fraunhofer Geselschaft zur Förderung der Angewandten Forschung (Germany), SAS Software Limited (UK), Thales (Netherlands), University of Virginia (USA), Swedish National Defence College (Sweden), City of Izmir (Turkey), Epam System (Sweden), Research in Motion Limited (Canada) and Epidemico (Ireland).
This is a project in which they are looking for ways to use social media to gather information on the state (in terms of the context, problem, location and time) of the accident or any other incident, the relationship of people to this event and adopted measures on the one hand and on the other to provide information and recommendations or instructions to participants.
One of the products of the project, which will end on 30 November 2016 will also be drafting of an IT tool for the acquisition and sharing of information via social networks.