Our Mission
Our purpose is to support the development of information technology, digital literacy and cybersecurity, and to make modern technology genuinely accessible to the public, not only to those who can already afford it and navigate it.
Digital services in the Czech Republic are now the default for banking, healthcare appointments, schooling and dealings with the state. The assumption behind that shift is that everyone can follow. Many people cannot, and not because they are unwilling. Nobody ever taught them, or the device they would need to learn on is out of reach.
At the same time, online fraud has become more convincing. Phishing messages imitating banks and delivery companies, fake e-shops and pressure phone calls take money from people who had no realistic way to spot them. The cost lands hardest on those who could least afford it.
These are not separate problems. Access, skills and safety reinforce one another. A person with a device but no guidance is exposed, and a person with knowledge but no device cannot practise. We work across all three.
We support the development of information technology and innovative approaches in the digital world. In practice this means backing useful, non-commercial technical work: open-source and community tools, technical education projects, and small initiatives that would not survive on a commercial footing but produce something of public value.
We support raising digital skills and understanding of technology across generations. That covers children and students learning to use technology critically rather than merely fluently, adults retraining, and older people meeting the internet late, a group routinely overlooked because it is assumed to be beyond help. It is not.
We support education and prevention in safe online behaviour and personal data protection. The aim is not to make people afraid of the internet but to give them a few reliable habits: how to check whether a message is genuine, why a password manager beats memory, what two-factor authentication actually does, and what to do in the first hour after something goes wrong.
We work to make modern technology accessible to the general public without distinction. Skills training is of little use to someone with nothing to practise on, so making usable hardware and connectivity available where they are missing is part of the same task, not a separate charitable gesture.
Our purpose is not limited to a single group, and we intend to keep it that way. In the first phase our attention is on the people for whom the gap is widest: seniors, families for whom equipment is a real financial obstacle, and schools and libraries that already have public trust but lack material for teaching digital safety.
We are based in Prague and expect to begin in Prague and Central Bohemia, simply because we can be present there. The registered purpose is not geographically limited.
What we are doing right now
The fund is new, so this list is short. We would rather it be short and true than long and padded. It will grow, and each addition will be documented here.
ZŠ Montessori Kladno is the Montessori branch of ZŠ a MŠ Kladno, Norská 2633, a state primary school run by the city of Kladno.
We support the school's digital operations end to end, at no cost to the school. Three strands run in parallel:
We are responsible for the school's networking infrastructure: designing it, putting it in place and keeping it running, so that classrooms have connectivity teachers can rely on rather than work around.
We administer the school's Google Workspace environment: accounts for staff and pupils, groups, shared drives, access permissions, and the security settings that protect children's data.
Infrastructure that someone else must maintain forever is not a gift. We train the school's teachers in the tools they use daily and in the digital-safety basics they pass on to pupils, so the school's own capability outlasts our involvement.
The project sits across three of our four registered areas at once: IT development, digital literacy and access to technology. That is why we took it on first.
Visit ZŠ Montessori KladnoBeyond the project above, these are the priorities we are working towards. They are intentions, not activities already completed. We will document results on this website as they happen.
Adopt and publish written rules for how support is requested, assessed and awarded, so that decisions are consistent and can be reviewed.
Establish working contacts with schools, municipal libraries and community organisations in Prague and Central Bohemia that already reach the people we want to support.
Produce a first set of plain-language Czech materials on recognising fraud, securing accounts and protecting personal data, free to use and reuse.
Deliver a small number of in-person sessions with partner organisations, and use what we learn there to correct the materials before doing more.
Close the first accounting period, file the annual report in the public Collection of Deeds, and publish what was spent and what came of it.
We are open to cooperation with schools, libraries, community organisations and technical volunteers. If your work falls within our four areas, we would like to hear from you.
[email protected]