I have just posted about Open Government Data Camp in London, so I though I would balance it back a little bit by mentioning an event organised in the region too – actually on the very same day. I have talked to Anna Kuliberda, one of the organisers of Transparency Camp Polska today. She has kindly responded to my simple question – “how did it go?”:

It was brilliant! We had very positive feedback from all sides involved in the event. Not only the idea and the content, but also the very fact that someone spoke at our event was later mentioned during other really important meetings and conferences. We are extremely happy about it, as we hoped for wider understanding of the issue of reuse and transparency.

I am really happy to hear that.  If you check the list of speakers, you will see that it contains plenty of names from the region with a nice international input too. I managed to talk to key transparency voices of Polish community like Piotr VaGla Waglowski (established lawyer, Internet Personality of the Year 2001, funder of Internet Society Poland) or Alek Tarkowski (voice of Creative Commons Polska) for example. I learned about interesting transparency projects from the region from Hungary (Júlia Keserű from K-Monitor.hu) and Slovakia (Matej Kurjan from Transparency International Slovakia talking about Public Procurement Visualization and Open Municipality). I listened to the presentation about MamPrawoWiedzieć.pl, project documented to Technology for Transparency.

Sejmometr.pl was there too presented by Jakub Górnicki. I am terribly sorry, I only have the recording in Polish, but if you check it’s ending you will find questions asked and addressed in English.

If you go to the event page dedicated to the video recordings, you will find that the first seven sessions are in English, but I will post here another one, the opening talk with John Wonderlich and Daniele Silva:

Once again, please send us your feedback if you have attended this event!

Well, Sejmometr.pl is something I did not have to be introduced to simply because I had the privilege to talk to the team this summer during my Technology for Transparency research (entire case study available in English here). It’s an on-line platform providing Polish citizens with insights into the work of their government in a very simple, easily digestible way as opposed to the traditional sources of information. Sejmometr.pl in its original form was running for about two years before it received our support to re-launch in its new, more developed form. Today the major functions allow the users to browse through parliament’s work based on the political party involved or the status of various acts. The next steps will contain adding profiles of MP’s and building Facebook-line functions into the system, but I am sure we will hear about those soon in more details from Daniel Macyszyn, the developper of the project.

Sejmometr.pl has employed another local Technology for Transparency researcher, Jakub Górnicki, to drive promotion and marketing activities. As part of the job, Jakub presented the current vision of Sejmometr.pl at TransparencyCamp in Warsaw quite recently. It’s a great pity that the recording is available only in Polish, but if you trust my translation I can share with you few insights resulting from questions Jakub has received. It has been suggested that the website could also act as a place for political discussions, however Jakub pointed out that this would defeat the main, rather educational goal of the platform and would become difficult to mange (could be a separate project though). One suggestion worth incorporating on the current website is the option of subscribing to Sejmometr.pl content based on the interests of users, who usually remain ignorant of overal legislative work, but who would be interested in acts and laws related to their work or passions.

It is also worth mentioning that while Jakub was promoting their ideas in Warsaw, Daniel presented Sejmometr.pl to attendees of Open Goverment Data Camp in London (you will find a lot of interesting content from that event here) collecting valuable feedback. He  is currently working on their new blog in English, but in the meantime you can find their updates on the Polish blog and Facebook fan page.