In some countries in Europe and the United States, automated access to all public administration data becomes standard (e.g. www.data.gov, www.data.gov.uk and others). In Poland it sometimes takes months before such data are made available, and the applicant may need to pay for their processing. Transparency of lawmaking is one of the most important aspects of a democratic state's functioning. Hence the idea of the “Who's in charge - data journalism" project.
The project's objective was to make it possible to follow and review the actions of Polish Parliament members, and to enhance informed participation in elections by providing information about out-of-parliament activity of MPs. Two services visualising connections between the world of politics and business were created and journalistic materials based on public data were prepared. In total, during the year, the services were visited by the users 540 thousand times. At the moment, the portal is screening 22 thousand entities (people and organisations), together with their connections. 30 journalists from all over Poland (from the largest editorial offices, as well as form small, local ones) were trained in data journalism and public data processing. The first data journalism conference in Poland - Data 3.0 was organised. Together with Google, the mamprawowiedzieć.pl (I have the right to know) service and the ePaństwo Foundation, foundation organised a pre-election hackathon, visualising data connected with the election. In addition, 25 civil servants from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs were trained in public data visualisation.
The Spanish partner Civio Foundation provided part of the programming code for the ktorządzi.pl service, and supported the foundation's editors with their expertise. The Transparent Data company provided their databases form the prześwietl.pl service free of charge. An informal partner of the project was the ePaństwo foundation, who provided API for the data on well-known MPs. At the beginning of 2016 the Civio Foundation and Media 3.0 established a strategic partnership, which ensured that both the Polish ktorzadzi.pl and the Spanish quienmanda.es would be developed by joint efforts of both organisations.