ESIS Extension / Poland / IS Promotional Activities / Master Report

Poland is an active member of many Information Society initiatives on international, European, national, regional and local level.

Since the publication of the Bangemann report, "Europe and the global information society" (May 1994), a lot of governmental and non-governmental documents and declarations concerning the Polish strategy for building the Information Society have been developed.

Following the First Congress of the Polish ICT in December 1994, the Polish report was compiled and focused on the most important issues of IT development in Poland. The Second Congress, 30 November- 2 December 1998, at the same time as the IST Vienna Conference, revealed that the majority of the postulates in the Polish report are up to date, and many new challenges have arisen. "The Agreement for building the Information Society in Poland" by the Congress participants.

In October 1998 four Polish representatives joined the Information Society Forum (ISF), an advisory body of European Commission. They are representatives of research and business computer and telecommunication organisations.

In June 1999, during the conference – "Cities in Internet", Tarnów – The Polish Information Society Forum, SPIN, was established. This is a joint initiative of local and regional governmental associations, "Cities in Internet Association", "Information Society Journalists Club".

Numerous conferences and exhibitions, both international and nationwide, and dedicated to computer science, telecommunications, and the promotion of information society among citizens, are organised annually in Poland. The most important are "Computer-EXPO", "COMNET", and "POLMAN" exhibitions with the "Infosystem" conference, "Komtel-Euroinfo-Internet".

On 8-11 November 1997, a pilot, experimental installation of the national ATM 34 Mb/s network was presented at the POLMAN’97 exhibition in Poznan. In October 1998 Poznan Supercomputing and Networking Centre became an associated member of TERENA (Tans-European Research and Education Networking Association). In addition, Poland is a member of the Central and Eastern Europe Networking Association.

In March 1999 Pol-34 network connected to the high-speed research network TEN-155. These advances were monitored and referred to during the following POLMAN conferences and exhibitions.

The expansion of web services in Poland is significant. The most popular to date are basic services such as e-mail and WWW pages – which are mainly targeted at institutional promotion. More advanced services such as electronic commerce are at the experimental stage. The longest established are electronic book stores. Electronic banking will begin in the near future, and the PKO SA Group is beginning to provide electronic services. However, there are still psychological and technical obstacles to effectively establishing new electronic services for everyday use by citizens in Poland.

The solution to this important problem is computer and Internet education. It must be stressed, however, that there are some very successful initiatives such as "Internet for Schools" and awareness actions concerning Y2K in Poland.

Please note that this report has been prepared under the sole responsibility of the ESIS II contractors.
It does not necessarily reflect the views of the Commision, nor does the Commission accept responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of information contained herein.
The ESIS Team of contractors welcomes any additional information or corrections.