Thirty years.
One idea.
Never abandoned.

We registered the domain informacja.com in New York on June 13, 1997. Three months before Larry Page and Sergey Brin registered google.com. I mention that a little out of pride and a little for context, because the rest of the picture matters. Modems hissed. Search engines fumbled. Most Polish families in Brooklyn and Queens were still buying their first home computer.

The idea was simple and just slightly audacious. Build a place where the Polish community in America could find itself. Businesses, agencies, clubs, newspapers, organizations, people. The Polonia in New York lived very physically back then: in Greenpoint, on Manhattan Avenue, in Brooklyn. In apartments, shops, churches, in notices pinned up by the entrance on a Sunday morning. Information traveled mouth to mouth, between Nowy Dziennik and the bulletin board at the parish. The plan was to move all of that online. The first homepage carried a title that didn't try to be clever: POLISH HOME PAGE in NEW YORK.

At the center of that history stood Sławomir Stec. Sławek designed and built the first version of the site. His name sits under every page the Internet Archive preserved. At the footer of the original homepage, in the era's plain typography, one line still reads: Strone zaprojektowal i wykonal Slawomir Stec, meaning "Site designed and built by Slawomir Stec." Sławek saw it before most people saw it happening. He believed, back in 1997, when that kind of belief wasn't standard, that the internet would matter far more than the evening news suggested. That it would change how the Polish community abroad would communicate, do business, organize its daily life. Many of the things that sound obvious today were already obvious to him then. That's rare. And that's why his name belongs on the first page of this story.

Life moved in its own directions, the way life does. Sławek went his way. I stayed in technology. For twenty-something years I built a career around IT infrastructure: networks, systems, servers, datacenters. It was work I loved, and work I needed to do. But the domain informacja.com stayed in my care. I never sold it. I never let it expire. Every year I renewed the registration, first with Network Solutions, then through whatever new system came after. Each renewal was a small act of faith that the story wasn't over yet. That the idea conceived in New York in 1997 would, one day, come back to someone.

Through all those years, I kept coming back to informacja in conversations with Tom Kruk. Tom is the kind of person whose conversations carry weight. Ideas. Energy. A different perspective you can't see for yourself. Suggestions that maybe it's time. Questions that don't have comfortable answers. Sometimes just a plain when are you finally going to do this? Tom doesn't write code. But he is one of those people without whom this project wouldn't have come back. The decision to try again ripened in those conversations. First over coffee, then over plans, then over specifics. The page you are reading now has his fingerprint on it.

Two things changed the game. The first: the internet finally grew up to what Sławek saw in 1997. The phone in your pocket has more capability today than an entire newsroom had then. People are always online, speak Polish and English in the same day, hold accounts in five places at once. The Polonia for whom the first version of informacja.com was built is more dispersed today (Chicago, London, Berlin, Toronto, Sydney) and at the same time more connected than anyone would have expected a quarter century ago.

The second: artificial intelligence. AI lets a small, well-organized team do work that used to require a newsroom of twenty. Translation. Moderation. Aggregation from hundreds of Polish and diaspora sources. On-the-fly help for someone looking for a specific listing, a specific business, a specific event nearby. All of it is finally reachable for a project that began in 1997. For a project that never had, and will never have, a big-company budget. This is the moment the original vision becomes possible, not just hopeful.

Informacja.com is being built as a long-term platform for the Polish diaspora. In the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia. Anywhere Polish families and their kids live abroad. And for those who stayed in Poland but want to stay in touch with the people, businesses, and places that are part of their story. Concretely: daily news from Polish and diaspora sources. Cultural events, concerts, masses, gatherings, fairs. Free classifieds. A directory of Polish businesses, organizations, parishes, clubs, and shops. Practical guides for people just beginning their life abroad. From documents to taxes, from healthcare to schools for the kids. Everything in Polish, and when it matters, in English. It is not meant to be a content colossus. It is meant to be a place you come back to because it works, it's current, and it treats the reader as an adult.

We won't build this alone. We are looking for journalists, photographers, developers, marketers, business owners, community leaders, event organizers, translators, volunteers. Anyone with something to say to the community informacja.com serves. We are not looking for résumés. Passion and willingness to help count for more here than experience. If you feel you have something to add, from a single notice about a local event to regular writing, get in touch through the contact page.

Thirty years in. We're just getting started.

What Sławek started in New York in 1997, what Tom refused to let me forget, what the internet and AI are finally catching up to. All of it is open today to anyone who wants to be a part of it. Welcome.

Chris Wianecki
Founder, keeper of the domain since 1997