Alek Tarkowski
Alek Tarkowski is the Director of Strategy at Open Future. He has over 15 years of experience with public interest advocacy, movement building and research into the intersection of society, culture and digital technologies. He is a sociologist by training and holds a PhD in sociology from the Polish Academy of Science. In 2010 he established Centrum Cyfrowe, one of the leading Polish organizations promoting openness and internet users’ rights. He led Centrum Cyfrowe for ten years as the Director and President of the Board. Before founding Centrum Cyfrowe, he was a strategic advisor to the Prime Minister of Poland.
In 2005, he co-founded Creative Commons Poland and had since then been an active member of the Creative Commons network. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons, member of the Executive Committee of the Global Network Council and representative of CC Poland to the network.
He is also one of the co-founders of COMMUNIA, the European Association for the Public Domain. Together with other COMMUNIA members, he’s been involved since 2015 in European copyright reform advocacy, related to the European Copyright Directive legislative process. One of his focus areas is Copyright and Education.
Alek has been involved in a range of initiatives aimed at charting new directions and strategies for a range of organizations and the open movement itself. He led (with Nicole Allen), the 10th Anniversary review of the Cape Town Open Education Declaration. He co-chaired (with Ryan Merkeley) CC’s network strategic review process, which led to creating the new CC network model in 2017. He is one of the authors of the Open Policy Index, an effort to map open policies worldwide. In Poland, he has been involved in developing epodreczniki.pl, the open public textbooks initiative. Finally, he co-authored A Vision for Shared Digital Europe, an alternative digital policy vision for Europe.
He currently sits on the Steering Committee of Internet Governance Forum Poland and the Program Committee for IGF2021. As a member of the Board of Strategic Advisors to the Prime Minister of Poland (2008-2011), he co-authored the strategic report “Poland 2030” (2009) and the Polish official long-term strategy for growth. He was also Junior Fellow at McLuhan Program on Culture and Technology, University of Toronto.
He published, with Mirek Filiciak, a collection of essays titled Two zero. Alphabet of the new culture and other essays. Since 2006 he has been blogging for Polityka, a Polish weekly.
Alek lives and works in Warsaw. (2022)
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