Trainer Bios

Inga Kasak is the Managing Director of the Black Swan Fund, an initiative that responds to the needs of women seeking capital for the development of their startups and for the needs of investors interested in angel investments in business ventures.  The Black Swan Fund is based on the concept of “women support women”, that is both business leaders and investors are women.  The Black Swan Fund was initiated by the Women’s Entrepreneurship Foundation.  Previously, Inga was a Hybrid IT Marketing Manager for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and a project manager for Fundacja Liderek Biznesu & Ernst and Young.

Mirella Panek-Owsiańska is co-founder of the Cosmos for Girls foundation, which prepared one of the most successful crowdfunding campaigns in 2017.  Former President of the Responsible Business Forum (FOB), a leading Polish corporate social responsibility (CSR) think-and-do-tank, where she was responsible for external relations with key stakeholders in Poland and abroad (e.g. CSR Europe, World Business for Sustainable Development, Global Compact, etc.).  Mirella is a public speaker, media commentator, academic lecturer, jury member of many contests devoted to communication and CSR, and a member of the Board of Directors of CSR Europe.  A graduate of the School for Leaders and Stanford University courses, she has extensive experience working at the meeting point of the government, non-government, and private sectors.  Mirella provided training for more than 500 women activists from Poland, Belarus, Cuba, Serbia and Kyrgyzstan and worked in two political cabinets of Justice Ministers.  She is a PR specialist and spent four years working as a spokesperson of the Polish section of Amnesty International.  Mirella has gained her knowledge in the fields of political and social marketing in the UK and the United States as a scholarship recipient from Lech Wałęsa, Council of Europe, the U.S. State Department and the Governor of the State of Illinois.

Stanisław Skarżyński is a sociologist with a degree from the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the University of Warsaw.  Stanisław specializes in political philosophy and history of ideas, and works as a journalist.  Formerly at TVN and Radio ZET, he is currently at OKO.press, where he is responsible for website and multimedia development projects.  He is also a contributing editor at “Res Publica Nowa” and columnist at “Gazeta Wyborcza” daily.  Stanisław was awarded with Konrad Radecki-Mikulicz, a Grand Press 2016 prize in the news category, for articles exposing and covering Bartlomiej Misiewicz’s scandalous nominations in the Ministry of Defense.

Aleksandra Goldys is a sociologist, researcher and an activist experienced in providing expertise and in leading large-scale evaluation programs for state and non-profit organizations.  She works at the University of Warsaw in the Social Challenges Unit and in the Office for Innovation in Academic Space.  Her key interests are social change in health promotion, public policy in sport, and innovations in higher education.  Aleksandra uses her scientific background in building wide partnerships for creating better programs and policies.  Working in Eastern Europe taught her how to act smart, seek synergies, and never to give up.  She cooperates with many Polish foundations that deal with important social challenges (e.g. Polish Children and Youth Foundation, Information Society Development Foundation, Unit for Social Innovation and Research “Shipyard”, The Polish-American Freedom Foundation) and also with international organizations such as Stanford University, Brown University, ISCA, and UEFA.  She is most proud of being part of community-based projects like planning strategies for two Polish regions.  She believes that researchers share responsibility for translating research results into real actions and real change. 

Katarzyna (Kasia) Dorsey is passionate about building global start-ups believing that technology is changing the world for the better.  With years of extensive experience in marketing in The Coca-Cola Company on international markets, where she was responsible for strategy, brand positioning, communication, and defining and delivering on KPIs, she is currently focusing on building a global company Yosh.AI with the use of Artificial Intelligence for the apparel retail business.  She is supported by Google Campus, global accelerator program Blackbox.vc from Silicon Valley powered by Google for Entrepreneurs, and a Leadership Academy associated with Harvard University.  At Google Launchpad program, she is mentoring other global startups.  Her dream is to change how apparel retail is operating globally and transform it into conversational commerce with personalization to better serve users needs.

Eric Barrett is a data journalist working in the South Caucasus.  He uses open-source technologies to improve the security of communications among staff, enable audiences’ access to blocked content, investigate stories using data, design data visualizations for stories, improve methods of content creation and distribution, and train journalists in aspects of data journalism and security.  He also collaborates with other organizations when communicating data is of prime importance, including creating data visualizations and leading trainings.  Eric was the director of JumpStart Georgia, an organization that advocated for open data and the improved communication of data, from 2012 to 2016.  Eric moved to Tbilisi, Georgia in 2005 and now resides there with his wife and two children.

Maciej Słomczyński is a news editor, producer, Mobile Journalism enthusiast and propagator. He is currently the head of Special Projects Unit at TVN24 – 24/7 polish News. Starting out in 2004, Maciej was the producer and editor of the first Polish live program using Skype interviews with viewers (2007), the first live report using mobile phone (2008), and producer and editor of election nights, presidential debates etc. Editor of evening broadcast Fakty at TVN, watched by 3.5 million people daily. Since 2016 Maciej is the head of Social Video platform TOTERAZ – with more than 0.5 billion video views since the start at Facebook fan page. TOTERAZ is the first in Europe and one of the first in the World platforms using Vertical Video only.

You can trust him, he’s an archeologist with diploma.

Beata Biel has been working in the media industry throughout her whole professional life. She began her career as a journalist at TVN, Poland’s leading commercial TV channel, in 2001. She stayed there for 10 years, also as an editor. Later she worked as a freelancer, mainly directing crime documentary series and working on investigative and social stories. Since September 2017 she’s back at TVN, coordinating the development and leading the editorial team of Konkret24, a crowd-sourced solution for fake news at TVN, supported by Google’s DNI Innovation Fund.  For the last four years, she has also been working as a media training expert, mainly with the Google News Lab (2015-2017), representing the team in Central & Eastern Europe and working with newsrooms and journalists in CEE to enhance digital knowledge and drive innovation in the media.  She also teaches at the SWPS University in Warsaw.  Beata is a member of Fundacja Reporterów, a non-profit investigative journalism initiative in Poland, and responsible for its educational activities. She is the winner of several journalism awards and was a 2011 Transatlantic Media Fellow at CSIS in Washington, D.C. Selected one of the 50 most influential women in Poland in 2016 (by Wysokie Obcasy/Gazeta Wyborcza).

Maarten Schenk is the creator of the Trendolizer engine, a tool to detect trending content on the internet.  Among other things, it is used to find topics to write about on the website of the company he co-founded, http://leadstories.com.  During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election campaign, he discovered that Trendolizer also works quite well to monitor fake news websites and, as a result, he shifted the focus of Lead Stories almost exclusively to debunking emerging fake news stories just as they are going viral.

Douglas Arellanes is a technologist, broadcaster and software developer focusing on innovative technology solutions for journalism. A co-founder of the Czech nonprofit institute Sourcefabric, Arellanes has won several awards for his technology solutions with news organizations in developing countries, and has led several significant journalism innovation projects. He is a longtime moderator on Radio 1 in Prague, and has translated several books from Czech to English, including “Economics of Good and Evil,” by Tomáš Sedláček (Oxford Press, 2011).  Arellanes holds a bachelor’s degree in Book Arts from the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Andriy Gazin is a data journalist, who uses programming, data analysis and data visualization for finding and telling stories. He is an open data activist and a big fan of R programming language, self-tracking, lifelogging, comic books, and graphic novels.  Andriy currently runs a blog about data analysis and visualization – Textura.in.ua.  He provides training sessions on data analysis and visualization for journalists and NGOs.  Previously, Andriy worked as a head of the infographics departments at weekly magazines Korrespondent and Novoe Vremya, and as a data journalist at online-media Texty.