Lack of transparency, accountability and responsiveness of public authorities results in distrust, weak position of citizens and predominance of private interest over common good.
ePaństwo Foundation – established in 2010 in Poland – is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization supporting democracy development through promoting government transparency, accountability and citizen engagement. We work with ordinary people, activists, NGOs and public authorities by providing them with practical tools and exploring transparency issues meaningful to their work.
The outcome to achieve is: competent citizens engaging in the country’s administration management, leading to better and fairer decision-making processes. We want to inspire people with the idea of their responsibility for the country and give them the knowledge as well as modern digital tools needed to improve it.
The main projects that ePaństwo has started and will be developing in the future include:
TransparenCEE – The network built in cooperation with TechSoup Europe, K-Monitor, OPORA and ACTION SEE stands for an effort to build a strong civic tech community across CEE countries. We’ve already reached to over 70 civic tech organizations working on over 80 products (inc. creating and scaling tools red-flagging irregularities in public procurement) and we keep expanding this group.
Code for All – It is an international network of civic tech organizations that drive change through digital technology, citizen participation, collaborative decision-making and good governance to deliver solutions for social challenges while improving the relationship between governments and citizens.
Personal Democracy Forum CEE – PDF CEE is their annual event during which people representing diverse environment have a unique chance to discuss current problems, present tools and share thoughts on the future of democracy. We are working on a longer list of local PDFs in CEE (three already had place in Ukraine).
Civic Tech – Over the past years, they have created such tech tools as: rejestro.io – the most well-known open data platform in the CEE region with 600K unique users monthly, the national repository of public data in Poland (cooperation with the Polish government), many visualization apps explaining the government transparency and the rule of law.
Policy works – In the past we managed to involve in many litigations that brought issues of openness and transparency into the public eye as well as collaborated with Polish cities implementing Open Data policies. We also focus on sharing our knowledge and competencies with other CEE and EU organizations. We work on policy papers and conduct research on topic on the intersection between democracy and technology.