Marko Rakar (1972) is Chief executive manager of the consulting company MRAK services ltd. Marko has a lifelong experience in working/writing for media as well as dealing with the media. He combines his media knowledge with new technologies and was one of the earliest internet adopters in Croatia. He is a recognized lecturer and consultant the subjects of organisation, internet, new media as well as politics. He ran a number of successful campaigns and races for organisations, parties and independent candidates on presidential, parliament and muncipal elections in Europe, Asia and US.
Projects:
Here are few projects I was either involved with or accussed of:
- In 2009. with a group of people I have published a Croatian voter registry files. In Croatia we have about 900.000 more voters then eligible citizens to vote and while this is a well known fact nobody really knew how is this used to influence election results. We have created simple search engine which showed number of registered voters on particular adress so anyone was able to check for his household or his neighbours how many registered voters are there. The voter registry issue is now resolved and it is just a question of political will to fix it. I have received World eDemocracy forum award in French parliament in autumn of 2009.
- In April of 2010. registry of Croatian war veteran was published and I was arrested and questioned for 10 days regarding my involvement in this site. Investigation about the leak is in the meantime canceled and I was never charged. The issue here is the fact that after the war in Croatia we had about 350.000 war veterans while today we have about 550.000 of them. Croatian war veterans receive about 1 billion EUR per year in benefits (about 5-6% of Croatian state budget) and most of the people are concerned because many of these "false" war veterans receive benefits which they have never earned.
- In late november of 2011. NGO called "Windmill" which I founded released about 58.000 public procurement documents with approximate value od 80 billion kuna or about 10-11 billion EUR. While all of this data is already avaliable through government sources; our approach is unique becase database is fully searchable, indexed and it comes with basic financial information about suppliers of the government and now for the very first time you can easily see who received which jobs from the government, how much money they received as well as many other details about the transactions. We have also started creative contest for best and most creative visualisation, analysis or investigation of this data set.
I was also involved with other smaller projects like visualisation of Croatian state budget or creating Croatian state budget calculator (the later one allows you to create your own proposal of Croatian state budget and also calculate your own contribution to it and major items in it). Basic purpose of all the actions I was involved with is either fight against corruption and for a better and fair government, or I create tools which are designed to educate people that public money is their money and that they should hold politicians accountable on how their money is spent. Some more info about me you can find in this TechPresident article, or this latest BoingBoing post.
