Modern Poland Foundation

In the times of digital media, freedom of speech and freedom of communication need special support and protection. We believe that only free culture is worth our effort. Users’ rights are the foundation of democracy and the public domain should be a rule to which information monopolies are an exception.

Freedom of communication is only possible when citizens use free tools to control the flow of information, have media and information competences and have access to free knowledge. Therefore we build open educational resources, develop free digitalization technologies and effectively influence public policies in the field of exclusive rights.

Creating innovative technologies

We built the most popular Polish free online library Wolne Lektury which has already gained the audience of 5,7 million users. Since its launch we have published over 4400 literary texts. We constantly develop tools for digitalizing and releasing books in various formats: XML, HTML, PDF, MOBI,EPUB, FB2 and via mobile applications, OPDS catalog, OAI-PMH protocol and open API. We developed web software for publishing fully semantic educational materials and an editing platform to prepare them for release. All of the software is freely available under the GNU AGPL licence.

Educating conscious media users

We prepared a catalogue of media and information literacy competences approved by the Polish National Commission for UNESCO as a significant input into the Information For All international program. On its basis we continue working on a complete set of educational materials for students of all ages. Our goal is to popularize the media and information education among students and teachers by organizing a national knowledge contest.

We help citizens understand copyright and free licences application by developing an information website, publishing guidelines and providing legal helpdesk. We organize copyright trainings attended by representatives of non-governmental organizations, public institutions, businesses as well as artists and students. We conduct social campaigns aiming at making citizens aware of their rights as active culture users.

We publish texts (including translations) that are crucial to the debate on the shape and changes of the copyright law as well as on methods of finansing culture (i.e. Philippe Aigrain, Eben Moglen).

Fighting for the rights of culture users

The Modern Poland Foundation was one of the leading organizations that publicly supported users’ rights during the Polish protests against ACTA in 2012. In the last years we took part in a few dozen social consultations and governmental workshop meetings. As a result, we affected the final shape of the reuse of public sector information act in Poland, we influenced the creation and development of the governmental free e-textbooks program entitled Digital School (available under the free licence CC-BY) and we co-created the Culture Pact signed by Prime Minister Donald Tusk.

By organizing the CopyCamp conference we highlight the need of discussion on copyright and related subjects and we enable presentation of various points of view on the matter. We conduct a crowd-founded international Future of Copyright contest for the best literary pieces on the future of the copyright law.

Within the frames of the Coalition for Open Education we promote the Polish Open Educational Resources. We systematically work on maintaining the solid public domain in Poland by promoting the Public Domain Fund and co-organizing the annual Public Domain Day.

Our projects are sponsored by: Mozilla Foundation, Google, Tides Foundation, Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe, National Audiovisual Institute in Poland, Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Poland, Open Society Institute, Senate of the Republic of Poland, Polish Film Institute, Citizens’ Initiatives Fund, Polish History Museum.