TEDxKraków blog

Agnieszka Stach holds a rather radical belief: that the law is ours and should be understandable by everyone. While this might be obvious to you and me, Agnieszka is a law student hoping to one day earn her living as a lawyer. In other words, her financial interests and future professional standing lie in us understanding as little of the law as possible. Does that mean she wants to do herself and her peers out of a job?

Not at all. In fact, Agnieszka is a strong advocate for the “prophylactic” use of lawyers. She argues that these days, ordinary people go to lawyers the way they went to dentists 30 years ago: only when they are in so much pain that they can no longer ignore it. Unfortunately, this approach leads to far too many teeth being pulled that could have been saved had their owners sought treatment earlier. Agnieszka argues that it’s pretty a similar situation for legal advice.

It all started when Agnieszka tried out writing down the law she was studying at the Jagiellonian University as algorithms. It just seemed like a natural way of understanding what was going on and many of her classmates agreed – she got so many requests to share them that she decided to publish them on her blog. She wants to make it possible for anyone to understand the laws of the land, and not just highly paid lawyers. The blog took off almost immediately! Her original goal was to make legal information accessible, but she soon found that she was getting constant requests for legal opinions on specific situations.

At TEDxKraków, Agnieszka will argue that setting this information free is not ruining the market as some of her peers (and professors) have suggested but is ultimately beneficial for both parties. She says that a more informed public means more informed clients that call on lawyers more often, in a preventative way.

When you think of a slow, analogue and decidedly not tech-savvy organisation, probably the first one that comes to your mind is our fair government. It’s not just Poland, though, as around the world governments have been slow to enter the 21st century. One maker working to change this is our next speaker, Catherine Bracy, who earned her stripes revolutionising one of the least tech-savvy processes: the U.S. presidential campaign.

Catherine launched and helped run the San Francisco-based Tech Field Office for the 2012 Obama presidential campaign, utilising the grassroots nature of the Internet to spread grassroots support for her candidate, and working with numerous engineers to develop technologies that would enable this.

After helping Obama win the White House (again), Catherine set her sights on bringing technology to governments not just in the U.S. She joined Code for America, a non-profit organisation whose aims including helping local governments use technology to connect with its constituents and vice versa. She is a firm believer in making a true government of and by the people, and wants to discourage the common hacker mentality of us (hackers) versus them (the government) and instead focus on how all of us can improve the role of local governments.

CfA itself is near and dear to our hearts, as it inspired us to organise last year’s Hackathon that led to the Otwarta Małopolska project. As its International Program Manager, Catherine will be instrumental in making our very own Code for Poland project come to life. But before that, she will speak at TEDxKraków 2013 and share her knowledge on making governments work for the people.