“Making a better world instead of another banking app”: harnessing AI for good in Poland

By Alicja Ptak

Tech to the Rescue, a foundation from Poland that connects nonprofit organisations with tech companies, wants to shift the conversation around artificial intelligence by harnessing its power to fight for a better future.

In an event organised by them last week, Hack to the Rescue, which they claim was the world’s largest generative AI hackathon for good, over 450 programmers organised into 76 teams set out to tackle the most pressing challenges faced by nonprofits worldwide, using the most talked about technology of recent months.

At the hackathon, whose partners included Amazon Web Services, Lenovo and Zendesk, the programmers faced 12 challenges prepared by NGOs, which included creating tools that would help nonprofits enhance the help they offer in relation to mental health, human rights, climate change and education.

Helping those who help

Izabela Babis, a project manager with nearly ten years of experience, compares the physical exertion that the teams undergo during hackathons – events at which programmers engage in rapid, intense engineering over a period of one or two days – to endurance sports.

She describes a ravenous hunger and profound fatigue. “I know what I’m talking about. I ran a half marathon a few days later,” she says excitedly.

Her team, from Polish software company Deviniti, are regulars at such events. Last week’s Hack to the Rescue, however, was for them the first such event focused on helping those who help – nonprofit organisations.

From the 12 challenges, Babis’ team chose to hack for a Polish pro-democracy NGO, Demokracja Przyszłości, which needed a tool to translate legislation into more user-friendly language, making it easier to understand for a non-expert citizen. Deviniti already had experience in legal tech, and they found the challenge exciting.

Not only did they offer the foundation the possibility of generating summaries of laws in the form of questions and answers, but they also added a chatbot ready to answer any additional questions the user might have. And they won their challenge.

Fear of AI

Besides regularly participating in hackathons, the Deviniti team runs its own foundation focused on promoting AI. According to Babis, events such as Hack to the Rescue are an opportunity to demystify generative AI, which has been at the centre of public debate in recent months with the emergence of OpenAI’s powerful multimodal language model Chat GPT.

In addition to the fascination with the possibilities offered by the technology, there have also been concerns about, for example, job losses and misinformation. The man widely considered the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his role at Google to speak more freely about the dangers of the technology he helped create, including its potential uses in warfare.

Babis underlines, however, that generative AI can be used for good, just like every other tool. “You can see the fear of AI,” she says. “And [Hack to the Rescue] shows in a cool way how this technology can be implemented to do good in real life. It shows that there’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Non-billable hours

The roots of Tech to the Rescue go back to the early days of the pandemic, when an idea was conceived to unite tech companies in sharing resources to support nonprofits and NGOs in navigating the challenges brought on by COVID-19.

Since then, the foundation has linked more than 1,200 IT companies with over 840 foundations (full disclosure: one of them is Notes from Poland) from 75 countries. They estimate that the projects they enabled have impacted the lives of four million people.

While “we are busy with our business models, busy making money…there is a special group of people that is very good at reducing suffering and helping people, and these are nonprofit organisations,” said Jacek Siadkowski, Tech to the Rescue’s CEO, during the hackathon.

“But they have a small problem: they are great at helping communities but lack the resources to invest in technology. Hence, instead of helping the whole of society, they are focused on helping small communities,” he added.

He called on tech firms to use “non-billable hours” – time when, for example, their employees are “sitting on the bench” waiting for a new project – to help nonprofits.

Boosting morale

Maciej Stasiełuk, chief technology officer of Polish software development company Vazco, agrees. His firm has been involved in Tech to the Rescue projects from the very beginning.

He points to the opportunity for developers to have a go at new technologies and the satisfaction these projects bring to their employees.

“Our people just love it,” he tells Notes from Poland. “It’s just rewarding to work on projects like these because it’s often something unique, something to show off, to say that you’ve made the world a better place, rather than creating another banking app.”

As the company has a lot of experience in the education technology sector, during the hackathon they decided to take on a project that would use AI for creative learning.

They helped create an AI-powered mentor chat tool for a Polish NGO, Zwolnieni z Teorii, which helps young activists prepare grassroots projects to benefit local communities and teach them business and project management skills.

Scaling-up help

Marcin Bruszewski, Zwolnieni z Teorii’s co-founder and vice president, says his rapidly growing foundation was bound to implement AI “sooner or later”.

“It is simply unavoidable,” he says, noting that in the past ten years the number of students his foundation was helping to create projects rose from several dozen to tens of thousands.

“This jump…was already painful for us because it entailed a less personal approach,” says Bruszewski, noting that, in the beginning, his team was able to meet with each student in person, something that has been increasingly difficult with the rise in the number of participants.

“I feel that finally, thanks to AI, we will be able to fully return to the quality of service that we were able to deliver to those few dozen,” he explains.

Helping NGOs improve scalability this way is one of Tech to the Rescue’s main aims.

The costs

The cost of such solutions, especially those using cutting-edge technology, is also often beyond the reach of nonprofit organisations, which rely on voluntary contributions from donors, grants or awards, and where every penny is spent with as much care as possible to maximise the benefit.

Eco-focused foundation Uwaga, Śmieciarka Jedzie, which helps people with unwanted items find someone to take them instead of having to throw them out, sought to create an app independently.

It was supposed to help users publish posts about the items they wish to donate, their weight (and thus the savings for municipalities on waste disposal costs) and their carbon footprint calculated in CO2 equivalent.

However, the cost of such a solution, even without AI, ranged from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of zloty, while the foundation, officially registered just six months ago, has only a little over 20,000 zloty (€4,510) at its disposal.

“We hardly have a budget at all,” says Szaciłło, adding that the money they have come from an award she won personally a couple of years ago. “We have no income. Nothing.”

As of January, 800,000 users across 270 local groups participate in sharing items instead of throwing them away. In 2021 this community managed to save an estimated 35,000 tonnes of trash from ending up in a landfill. But despite that, the movement is primarily grassroots, carried out on the backs of volunteers rather than on outside financing.

In the end, the AI-powered app that the foundation had dreamed of was developed by another Polish digital acceleration company participating in the hackathon, Netguru.

Patryk Szczygło, a developer with eight years of experience who was part of the winning team, said he had chosen the project because he himself uses the foundation’s Facebook groups. While he is excited about developing an app he would use personally, he also sees it as a synergistic opportunity for his company.

“In technology companies, there is a lot of downtime, so some resources are always there,” Szczygło said. “NGOs have a digital gap between what they want to achieve and how because they focus on people, ideas. It’s a great opportunity for IT companies because we can test new technology and do something impactful and fun.”

Energised

But the hackathon is boosting more than just the morale of developers. Foundations, too, report that the event has filled them with positive energy and motivated them to work even harder.

“This was very motivating, thought-provoking,” says Marzena Szkolak from the Nowy Ład group, which helps a Polish foundation focused on youth mental health, Unaweza.

“What every foundation probably faces, including Unaweza, is a daily battle, criticism, lack of funds, and ongoing problems that need to be solved,” says Szkolak, adding that among daily struggles “it is easy to become complacent with a smaller solution”.

“A hackathon like this shows that more can be done,” she adds.

Main image credit: Digital Heart and Blueriders team

Alicja Ptak

Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.