ePanstwo Foundation, Koduj dla Polski

Code for Poland is an interdisciplinary community seeking technological solutions to civic challenges.

Program Description

Our vision is Poland as a country with efficient public institutions being citizen-centric, companies focused on social issues operating on public data, progressive NGOs knowing how to advocate with data, with citizens involving themselves more in public matters and finally with dialogue that builds trust among all of these actors.

We believe that wise use of technology can help to achieve such state in Poland. We have divided our actions in three areas of action:

  • Advocate - create dialogue with public institutions and NGOs, recommend them progressive open solutions like open data platforms and publishing procurement info, stimulate integration with various partners.
  • Create - build innovative social prototypes, applications and services. Repeat successes with deployment in other cities/areas.
  • Discuss - participate in discussions on our forum, on conferences. Propose new ideas, debate ones published by others.

We act in mentioned areas through the network of formally confirmed partners - mostly local NGOs and hackerspaces, but also companies and city offices.

Founding Story

Since 2010 ePaństwo Foundation has been a leader in creating technological tools to support democracy and access to public information in Poland. We believe that new technologies should serve not only business but also empowerment of citizens. We believe that using tech skills for social benefit is a modern way of patriotism and should be promoted as such. We build a great product - it started as a parliamentary monitoring website and grew into the biggest repository of public data in Poland with various apps build on the data. At that point we felt ready to build a community of like-minded people to spread the idea of Coding for Poland. Than we discovered that there is Code for America and thanks to contact with CfA we gained a lot of inspiration on how to organise our community work.

People

Krzysztof Madejski

Krzysztof Madejski is fulfilling his activist passions working at Foundation ePaństwo and being a board member of Stowarzyszenie Miasto Moje A W Nim. After graduating from Warsaw University of Technology’s “Elka” Faculty he worked as a developer on a number of topics including medical data visualizations, GIS systems, SOA integration and web-based startups. He has co-built logistics platform standing behind the scenes of the Nowe Horyzonty Edukacji Filmowej film education project reaching school pupils in sixty polish cities. At ePaństwo Krzysztof is responsible for developers gathered in Koduj Dla Polski community (Code For Poland).

Jakub Górnicki

Jakub builds communities. He formerly did it for British and German startups. Then he started to create community around Sourcefabric, an open source software producer for professional media. Jakub is also a journalist. As a media consultant, in the past three years he's helped various media outlets in Georgia (tspress.ge, liberali.ge, netgazeti.ge, and seven others), Turkey (taraf.com.tr) and West Africa (wacsi.org). He teaches new media and blogging, and was named one of the most influential bloggers in Poland in 2012. As Operations Director at ePF, he combines those skills to make ePF and its services trustworthy, transparent and community driven.