Apps4Warsaw – Opening a City is a Process

Personal Democracy Forum PL CEE 2015 will be all about an open, digital and civic country, by all and for all. While country is an important common ground for many, smaller ecosystems - cities play a vital role. During the second day of the event we will talk about Apps4Warsaw - a project aimed at making the City of Warsaw open, digital and civic.   Apps4Warsaw (in PL: "Dane po warszawsku") is more than a competition for the best city apps built upon City of Warsaw publically available open data. We want to promote open data and engage people in creating civic technology tools for their city. To do so we have worked in a wide partnership of three NGOs, one public university and one corporate business for more than a year now. While you can read more about the project here: http://www.apps4warsaw.org/, come and join us on Friday between 4:30 and 5:20 PM to talk about how we made it work and what did we learn in the process. Our 50 mins session will cover the basic description of the project and the needy-greedy of how we gained data sets from the city and built a proper technical infrastructure for it. The brain behind our open data platform was Jarosław Legierski of Orange Labs, who will act as a special guest at the meeting. The platform which is based on a CKAN instance especially modified for the purpose of the project, is the first open source platform based on real time open data which allows so many data sets of different types to be available at once. You can read more about Jarosław Legierski below. The session will be facilitated by Anna Sienicka, director of TechSoup Europe, an organization who is the project’s leader. Sebastian Grabowski, Director of Research and Development from Orange Labs, will co-host it. Apart from TechSoup Europe and Orange Labs a project is run by The Unit for Social Innovation and Research Shipyard, Digital Center: Project Poland, Warsaw University of Technology under the honorary patronage of Warsaw’s President. The project is co-financed by the National Center for Research and Development within the framework of Social Innovations Program. Dr. Jarosław Legierski received his M.Sc. in electronics and telecommunication and Ph.D. degree in electronics from Technical University of Lodz. Since 1998 he has worked in the telecommunications industry especially between 1999 and 2011 as an Integration Expert in Siemens in B2B telecommunication area. Currently he is an Expert R&D in Research and Development Center at Orange Poland. He is the co-creator of Open Middleware 2.0 Community (www.openmiddleware.pl). His research interest includes: next-generation Service Delivery Platforms, Unified  Communications, Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and Open Data. He is main architect and system integrator of the platform exposed Open Data of City of Warsaw developed in the Apps4Warsaw project.  He authored multiple publications in the area of exposure Open API and Open Data.  The picture used in that post was taken by Jakub Jurkowski (Light at Night) and has all rights reserved.