Jan Gondol

Directory of Technology
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia

Jan was born in Czechoslovakia, educated in Slovakia and now lives in the European Union (EU). All this without moving, which is seen by those outside of the EU as quite a feat. He fell in love with technology in the late 1980s when he wrote his first computer games on ancient 8-bit machines that were connected to a black-and-white TV and used a tape recorder for storage.

In 2014-2015 Jan worked at the Ministry of Interior. He was Slovakia’s Open Government Partnership (OGP) point of contact and was responsible for coordinating the country’s open data agenda. In his pioneering work, he also introduced the theme of open education in the OGP National Action Plan and drove the initiative to build the foundations for Open Educational Resources (OER) policy and open access policy in Slovakia. He has cooperated with SPARC, Creative Commons and other organizations to advocate for open education, open data, open access and open source software globally. Jan is currently also a member of Slovakia’s Committee for UNESCO.

While wearing his activism and technological hats, Jan co-founded SPy (Slovak Python civic association) which organizes local meetups as well as PyCon Slovakia conferences and also helps hundreds of teachers across the country teach technology in an engaging way (yes, our videos, resources for teachers and software are all open!).

Contact: jan@oeglobal.org
Website: https://jangondol.com
Twitter: @jangondol