I build public infrastructure — and I document every decision so somebody else can fork it.
I was born in Arad in 1988, which means I learned what corruption was before I learned what software was. Both lessons stuck. I’ve spent the last ten years building the same kind of thing on three different substrates — civic, technical, social — and trying to be honest about the receipts.
On the civic side, that’s Corupția Ucide. I started it in 2015 after Colectiv burned. By 2017 we were the largest demonstrations Romania had seen since 1989. I coordinated 650 volunteers across eleven time zones using Slack and Monday.com and a lot of black coffee. We forced the withdrawal of Ordinance 13. I am extremely proud of that work, and I’m also clear-eyed that the system we pushed against has since rebuilt much of its position. The work is not done; the methodology is durable.
On the technical side, that’s DomainScope, ServerClaw, and Scrape The World. The throughline is data discipline. Every domain in the index is pinned to evidence sentences; every infrastructure change passes through an Architecture Decision Record; every commit lands on a repo a stranger could read three years from now and understand why, not just what.
On the social side, that’s WeMeshUp: eighty curated humans, mostly drawn from the Forbes 30 / TEDx / Global Shapers / Davos overlap, who meet in castles and coliving houses around the events the rest of the world recognizes them for. The product is the room. The room is the work.
The throughline is not branding.
Friends ask me how the activism and the data work and the gatherings are connected. They’re not, in the usual sense. They’re three substrates for the same practice: name the decisions, log the evidence, design for participation, ship in public. Activism without receipts is a press release. Software without decision context is a future maintenance debt. A community without curation is a Whatsapp group.
I do all three because doing just one feels dishonest. The civic work needs the data work to be evidence-based; the data work needs the civic work to stay grounded; the community work is where I learn what the next ten years should look like before anyone has written the words for it.
Outside the work.
I’m a Burning Man participant nine years running and a fire performer with about forty performances under my belt. I’m a trained Forum Theatre facilitator (the Augusto Boal lineage) and I studied Labyrinth Theatre directly with the format’s inventor, Iwan Brioc. None of this is on the consulting page. It’s here because I cannot pretend it’s irrelevant to how I build — participatory practice is the same discipline whether the room is a protest, an open-source repo, or a candle-lit dinner.
I read more than I write. I write more than I post. I post very little.
The dates that matter.
Where I live.
Arad, Romania, by default. Most months also somewhere else — Davos, Lisbon, Lower Silesia, wherever the next house is being run. I speak Romanian, English, Spanish, and Italian. The English on this site is the one I write in; the Romanian is the one I argue in.
How to talk to me.
If you’ve got commercial work: /hire. If you’re press or a conference organizer: /press. If you just want to say hello: florin@badita.org. I respond, but slowly, and in the order that respects the work in front of me — not the inbox.