What problem are you solving?:

Czech NGOs have been repeatedly blamed by the Czech state and also by the public for not being accountable and transparent. Yet, it is the Czech Ministry of Interior which has been blocking – for years – creation of a public registry of NGOs. Therefore it is not even clear who can legally act on behalf of 60000 Czech civic association. This situation is no longer sustainable yet the Czech government still does not take the steps needed to change the status quo.

That is why we believe there is a space for creating a web portal that enables for so called self-reported transparency as practiced in the UK and US (through Guidestar, Network for Good, Just Giving etc.)

Those Czech NGOs that are accountable will gain access to a credible web-based space through which to demonstrate their transparency.

To accomplish this, we have designed a portal which allows for self-reported transparency of Czech NGOs and which connects donors with charitable projects of accountable NGOs.

Describe your idea:

The portal will operate as an online marketplace that enables the public to double-check financial & other aspects of NGO transparency & connects donors with charity projects.
The portal promotes accountable behavior – only NGOs that disclose financial information and report back & update info about their activities will be present at the portal.

Benefits for the public/donors: Portal will 1) enable donors to research & donate on-line to accountable charities, 2) maintain a list of transparent NGOs with news stories, charitable projects in need of support & with information that makes it easy to see how NGO operate – annual reports, financial info.

Benefits for NGOs: Portal will provide space for making accountable and transparent behavior visible. It ensures processing donations for charity with modern on-line payments methods.

Platform used for the portal is an open-source solution Magento which is distributed under the open source OSL 3.0 license.

What country will this operate in?: Czech Republic

Who are you?:

The Via Foundation is one of the largest and most active independent foundations in the Czech Republic. In addition to having provided close to € 9 million in grants to more than 2,000 charitable projects in the Czech Republic over its 12-year history, Via has a great deal of experience managing national corporate philanthropy programs with companies such as T-Mobile, Ceska sporitelna/Erste Bank, Phillip Morris, Citibank..

What problem are you solving?:

Most people, when we say about law, see a government, court of justice, politicians, strange procedures and treat it as a topic that do not concern them. They do not feel they can do anything with it, that they have real impact on how the law can be changed. Moreover, people usually do not see that the choices they are making during the election have something common with the law. The true is that all the people are those who have right to decide, because the law is not something above us but something among us. The politicians should respect our needs when creating law proposals, because we have chosen them on our representation in the government. This is the foundation of democracy. To encourage people in active participation in law preparing, we want to show people that law is common and concern everybody. Moreover people may influence on it and we should talk about it so the politicians could change it according to our needs.

Describe your idea:

The idea of project is to prepare an interactive, transparent tool – world wide web, based on open source solutions, where all the parties, politicians, NGO’s and groups of citizens can put and present an act proposal before it becomes obligatory. Thanks to it, proposals will be publicly available – everybody can read it, rate it, put a comment. To present this tool to a wider public we would like to arrange some meetings and prepare trainings on how to use it, combined with the discussion on social engagement in law preparing. Campaigns in press, radio and television will be organized to spread the information about this social web. The portal will show quantity and quality of draft laws and allow any citizen to comment on proposed laws and contribute to its improvement and development. Such a possibility is the foundation of democracy. At the same time the political parties receive a very effective tool which enables them presentation of their contribution on the law creation.

What country will this operate in?: Poland

Who are you?:

I represent the “Fundacja Rozwoju Edukacji i Kultury (FREiK) ‘MIERZESZYN’” (”Education and Culture Development Foundation ‘MIERZESZYN’”), which has a legal status of a public benefit organization. We support initiatives that encourage the strengthening of social ties and local solidarity by involving local residents. One of our statutory aim is to strengthen social capital through the development of social economy: activation and mobilization of local partners, regional and national support for civil society institutions, building partnerships between the public and private social support citizenship, the construction of decentralized networks of social interaction. Until the present day the Foundation has successfully run several projects. The latest one is “Active, competent, progressive – job activation of youth and ICT learning for children from municipality of Trąbki Wielkie” supported from European Social Fund within the Human Capital Program.

What problem are you solving?:

Poland has been living in a democracy for 20 years. Still, we have a feeling that democracy is more about procedures and images, not a real experience. Research and everyday practice show that Poles do not trust one another, are often unable to cooperate, and do not appreciate success. In many Polish regions and in Warsaw – which has become a melting pot – social capital is weak.
However, we do not take this as a “must be”. We strongly believe that we can change our country to make it a more attractive place to live and give our democracy a true meaning. Most of us come from minority groups, such as the LGBTQ community, but we want to bring about social change not only for the most discriminated, but for everyone. So often were we working on improving democracy as a mechanism, now we want to strengthen its virtues: cooperation, acceptance, trust.

Describe your idea:

We envisaged a multi-task, interactive, technically advanced website which would offer:
1. An online “living library”: a place where people can meet and learn each from another. This tool can raise awareness of diversity – a key point for improvement of social capital. We want to propose one our own “living book” every month, but we encourage every readerto become a “book”: present his/her story by video and audio podcasts, texts and chats.
2. An e-learning tool for a general public, as well as for leaders of social change. It will offer regular courses (with group video chat learning sessions, etc) to improve the skills and abilities which we think are key to social change and social capital improvement.
We want to develop as well our existing e-magazine homiki.pl to make it more interactive and develop further e-publications on social change and social capital improvement.

What country will this operate in?: Poland

Who are you?:

Our group met in 2004 when we started our online magazine homiki.pl. Then, we focused on LBGTQ issues wanting to promote community identity and culture. With time, we started to focus on the factors making society and democracy in Poland imperfect. We asked: What are the factors that drive intolerance directed at the LGBT people and others?, What weakens the quality of links in the society? This led us to the idea of openness and social capital. In 2008, we set up an NGO dealing with publications and trainings. A group of app. 20 people from 20 to 55 y.o. from the whole Poland, we represent different backgrounds. We work in 2 teams, one dedicated to publications, the other one to trainings. Our trainers, with their large experience confirmed by diplomas, will manage the e-learning component, the “publishers” group will assure the living library to be a crowded place!

What problem are you solving?:

Hate speech is defined as using language to insult, libel, or stir up hatred against a person, a group of people or any other entity designated by the speaker. Polish law does not allow for prosecution of manifestations of hate speech and the subsequent hate crimes, especially in relation to people who are not included in the premise list in the articles of the Criminal Code.

Existing monitoring activities undertaken by various organizations include only the monitoring of court cases directly relying on articles 119, 256 and 257 of the Criminal Code, paying no attention to the fact that the lack of the term “psychosexual orientation” is the main factor for hate speech and hateful actions against LGBT people going to the courts on the basis of other articles.

Describe your idea:

Designing a website with an up-to-date report of cases where hate speech is the main or one of the main issuess. This report will consist of six steps:

Step 1 – A description of the case – what has exactly happened (including the query in the courts for cases in which there were hate speech and/or hate acts).

Step 2 – Description of the reaction – newspaper articles, both parties reports

Step 3 – Information about filing a lawsuit

Step 4 – the prosecution monitoring – dependent on the consent of the plaintiff and the availability of evidence (pleadings, articles in the media)

Step 5 – The Verdict – at this point we would like to publish the operative part of the Ruling and statements made by experts and stakeholders on it

Step 6 – The follow-up – further events related to the case. In the event of an appeal of the parties, a further monitoring, in the case of a final court decision and the presentation of settlement of the press and others on the sentence.

What country will this operate in?: Poland

Who are you?:

Our mission is to build a positive image of LGBTQ people by creating a climate of social acceptance.
Our Association was established in 1997. We are a national organization by law, but most of our activities are based locally around the Warsaw area. Our members are mostly volunteers and professionals who spend their time working on our projects.

Our statutory aims are:

building a positive identity among LGBTQ people.
promoting social tolerance for LGBTQ people.
combating HIV/AIDS and other Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
fighting discrimination, especially with regards to sexual orientation.

Professionalism is a very important issue for us. We have already implemented the Volunteer’s Ethical Code and became members of the Polish Help-lines Association (PTPT), Federation of Social Service Organizations Mazowia and International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA-Europe). We are also associated with the National Federation of Non-governmental Originations.

What problem are you solving?:

Currently, Poland is the largest EU member state in which same sex
relationships have no effective legal safeguards, as well as one of
the few European countries where the discussion on this issue has not
been sufficiently taken on by the authorities. The aim of this
campaign is to monitor the debate which is beginning right now.
Creation of a website that will monitor the discussion on civil unions
and enquiring as many political leaders about this matter as possible,
will allow to gather previously scattered data and enable the analysis
of discourse – both quantitative and qualitative.

We plan to:
1. monitor what political leaders and other opinion leaders are saying
about the issue of civil unions in the media, and put it up on the
website,
2. survey the candidates in upcoming elections:
1) presidential elections 2010,
2) local elections (mayors) 2010,
3) general elections 2011.

Describe your idea:

We plan to create a website consisting of the following elements:
1. Information about the statements of opinion leaders and press
reports regarding civil unions – updated in news form.
2. Information on the activities of NGOs, political parties, the
Government and other centres of opinion regarding civil unions.
3. A section, where one will be able to see what and when did an MP,
or government official, say about civil unions.
4. A section showing the frequency in which the subject is brought up
in media appearances, with data arranged according to party
affiliation, as well as attitude towards civil unions.
5. A survey, conducted prior to each election (until the end of 2011),
regarding civil unions, targeted at election candidates. Answers will
undergo a quantitative and qualitative analysis and will be presented on a section within the website in form of diagrams and descriptions.
6. Experts’ views, opinions and analysis resulting from the data
collected.

What country will this operate in?: Poland

Who are you?:

Beginnings of SPR date back to January 2006, when a branch of Campaign
Against Homophobia (CAH), a Warsaw-based LGBTQ association, was
established in Toruń. In December
2008 CAH Toruń was transformed into an independent and fully-fledged
association called Diversity Workspace (SPR).
After four years of activity SPR’s accomplishments include: annual QueerFest
festivals in Toruń,
outdoor actions, e.g. Anti-Homophobic Clinics in Toruń, in Grudziądz and Włocławek and
Day Of Silence demos, a poster campaign
(”You are not alone” December 2007), public debates with
scientists, politicians, journalists and others opinion leaders, and Living
Library events.
Since its establishing as an independent LGBTQ association SPR is
active not only locally, but also nationally.

In addition, thanks to the twin-city link
between Toruń and Leiden (Netherlands), SPR has close ties with its
Dutch counterpart – COC Leiden.

What problem are you solving?:

Number of freedom of information requests in Kosovo is quite low, and even lower is the level of requests being answered. Emulating whatdotheyknow.org, our website will enable an easy way to request official information with the aim of increasing the number of such requests. Our second aim is to highlight those institutions that are failing to respond to such requests.

Describe your idea:

InformataZyrtare.org will guide interested citizens to the right official and help her write a successful information request in the two official languages of Kosovo, Albanian and Serbian. The website will be highly autonomous and will be complemented by a simple forum to be staffed by volunteers in order to answer any questions not already addressed. All requests will also have commenting open to the general public. The partners will tweak the website/content in response to comments being made after the website is launched. We will also pay attention to search engine optimization and promotion to the general public.

What country will this operate in?: Kosovo

Who are you?:

The project will be realized by two organizations: FLOSS Kosova, which will handle the technical work and GAP Institute, which will build the content and promote the website.

FLOSS Kosova is a young non-governmental non-profit organization established to promote free and open source software, knowledge, culture and technical standards. It’s main activity is an annual international Software Freedom Conference.

The Institute for Advanced Studies GAP is a Kosovo Think Tank. A priority of the Institute is to mobilize professionals to address the country’s pressing economic, political and social challenges. GAP’s main objectives are to bridge the gap between government and people, and to bridge the gap between problems and solutions.

What problem are you solving?:

Transparency, easy of access to public information, structured ways of
presenting information and publishing, intruding open standards and
free software to present government and public data and information.
Basically the standard Application Interface part of TheyWorkForYou to
various important governmental institutions, ministries and agencies,
that have online presence and offer some kind of electronic way of
publishing information on their web sites, web services and structured
data.

Describe your idea:

Make a central API that will be similar to the API of the
TheyWokrForYou project, we will need to parse and scrape the
government website, the assembly website ( the project for Podobro
sobranie will provide the content), ministries and governmental
agencies, courts and public institutions.

We will design, develop and host the interface, that will expose
standard function calls that will have implementations in Python,
Ruby, Java that will allow third party web services, web sites and
applications to use this data.

Primarily the focus will be to proved the information on our site, and
the API so they will be used by news agencies, journalists and
citizens to query and gather the data in JSON, HTML, REST, TXT etc.

What country will this operate in?: Macedonia

Who are you?:

Free Software Macedonia is a non-profit organization that works with Free Software as in freedom in the Republic of Macedonia. FSM is dedicated to promotion of Free Software, creating awareness of both the economic and socio-ethical context of Free software especially for a developing country such as Macedonia.

FSM was established in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia in 2002. It is the only NGO in the country that deals with the issues of Free Software. Also, Free Software Macedonia works on issues related to Open Standards and Free Culture.

We are running the KIKA hacklab in Skopje, we are looking for interesting public projects that we can deliver to the citizens and that will help us to pay the rent for our hacklab.

We would like to use our technical skills and expertise to help free the information and data to be accessible to the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia.

http://slobodensoftver.org.mk/about_free_software_macedonia

http://slobodensoftver.org.mk/chlenovi

What problem are you solving?:

All of the laws, declarations, laws all of the transcripts, everything the Macedonian assembly and its committees have ever done is published as a word document.

We are solving the problem of transparency and freedom of information as well as vendor locking using a proprietary format to store publicly accessible information.

Describe your idea:

We are going to scrape the documents from the sobranie.mk website, we are going to use openoffice server side to convert the documents into Open Document text and we are going to save it as txt and html so it can be published at sobr.anie.mk. This will provide the citizens with the ability ti search these materials online and they will be indexed and cached by Google, yahoo and Bing.

As long as we have these materials it will also be a challenge and an adventure to see how much work they do, how much documents they publish and it will provide a certain metrics to be publicly available about the Macedonian assembly.

What country will this operate in?: Macedonia

Who are you?:

Free Software Macedonia is a non-profit organization that works with Free Software as in freedom in the Republic of Macedonia. FSM is dedicated to promotion of Free Software, creating awareness of both the economic and socio-ethical context of Free software especially for a developing country such as Macedonia.

FSM was established in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia in 2002. It is the only NGO in the country that deals with the issues of Free Software. Also, Free Software Macedonia works on issues related to Open Standards and Free Culture.

We are running the KIKA hacklab in Skopje, we are looking for interesting public projects that we can deliver to the citizens and that will help us to pay the rent for our hacklab.

We would like to use our technical skills and expertise to help free the information and data to be accessible to the citizens of the Republic of Macedonia.

http://slobodensoftver.org.mk/about_free_software_macedonia

http://slobodensoftver.org.mk/chlenovi

What problem are you solving?:

Collaboration of three sectors – power, business and public is necessary for harmonious development of democratic society. Each of them executes the functions which are indisputably directed on solving of certain society problems. However accumulated efforts can result in more effective dealing with urgent issues through forming of problem and joint search of ways of its decision by all possible methods and ways, but within framework of basic functions of each sectors.
As representatives of all sectors of society repeatedly marked during the discussion of the harmonious development issue, absence of experience and skills of co-operation of authority and business with the third sector constitutes a certain problem in harmonious development. One of the reasons is a limited access of active representatives of society to traditional MASS-MEDIA that requires search of alternative sources of informing.

Describe your idea:

Establishment of non-politically committed informational resource which from one side will provide community with complex of social professionally worked out information (interview, reporting, analytical video- and audio-materials, articles etc.), and from the other side it will provide development of civic journalism, primarily on the bases of Web 2.0 technologies.
That center will provide NGOs with free of charge informational services.
The project is expected to fill in the informational space with socially significant information – video-clips, interviews and analytical materials on public activists, NGOs, initiative groups’ activities.
For increase of reach and its engagement into the process of social partnership establishment a project developers foresee the holding of complex on-line events.
This information will assist in establishment of partnership between NGOs themselves, NGOs and Business, NGOs and Authority.

What country will this operate in?: Ukraine

Who are you?:

Members of the NGO «UkrProstir» have over ten years of successful experience in the field of media development and implementation of PR-campaigns in social and commercial areas and of work in publishing sector.
The main purpose of the organization are:
– to improve the effectiveness of non-governmental organizations and to promote active cooperation in the third sector, NGO interaction with the authorities and the media
– to develop information programs with NGOs to strengthen civil society
– to attract the community to discuss important social issues.
– organization and holding of press-conferences, briefings, presentations, roundtables;
– preparation and placement of press releases, press announces, special materials for Mass Media;
– design and production of audio-video clips of social advertising;
– websites development – design, programming, imposition, administration;
– development and implementation of social, advertising and PR campaigns.

What problem are you solving?:

Our organization is student organization and the main idea is to make exchange between student of different counties. With this we are making positive impact of the society because with this exchange process the student are bringing new ideas and new experience in their countries. Also we are having projects in which are given chance to students to be a leader and to lead a team.With this project we are making positive impact of the society, because with this projects we are solving some problems of the society.

Describe your idea:

Our idea is to design web page for our Local Committee Prilep of AIESEC, because we need to promote our work and opportunities that we offer. Also this page will be used for recruiting new members and also for communication and collaboration with others local Committees from other countries. This page is very important for our organization because now Internet is most used place for communication and marketing.

What country will this operate in?: Macedonia

Who are you?:

This is one international organization for young people to explore and develop their leadership potential. It exist in 108 countries, and it have around 50 000 members. Our local Committee is in Macedonia in city Prilep. The idea of this organization is to create new leaders and change agents that in the future can make some positive changes in the world.