The problem.
On October 30, 2015, a fire at the Colectiv nightclub in Bucharest killed 64 people. The venue had been operating without permits the entire city knew about; the bribes that papered over those missing permits were a feature of Romanian public life, not a bug. One of those 64 people was a close friend.
The Romanian anti-corruption ecosystem at that point had two modes — investigative journalism, which read very well in English, and street protest, which broke up after a week. There was no civic platform connecting tragedy → evidence → mobilization → policy reversal on a clock the government could feel.
What I did.
Founded Corupția Ucide — “Corruption Kills” — three days after the fire. Treated it from day one as software: a community, a content pipeline, and a database of public-record receipts, run together. By 2017 the Facebook page had passed 100,000 followers; it is now 156,000+. Between 2015 and the OUG 13 cycle in February 2017, the team and I shipped:
- A FOIA pipeline — the methodology that became ACTFOIA: 15,000+ requests to 5,000+ public bodies, ~80% of the submission-to-retrieval work automated.
- An evidence library used in investigative work — deep, multi-year collaboration with RISE Project (including The Journalist House), plus data-cleaning collaboration with Paul Radu at OCCRP.
- A 100,000-lei CNA fine won against România TV for misinformation broadcasts.
- A distributed protest-coordination playbook on Slack and Monday.com, which on the night of February 1, 2017 ran 650 volunteers across 11 time zones.
In 2017 I founded the physical complement — Activist House, a civic hub in Bucharest open to organizers, journalists, and citizens. 5,000+ visitors in its first year. The point was always the same: this isn't a personality, it's infrastructure. Anything we built had to outlast the cycle.
February 2017.
Ordinance 13 was issued at midnight on January 31, decriminalizing abuses of office below a 200,000-lei threshold. By 03:00 the post draft was up. By 06:00 we had a march time. By the fifth night, Piața Victoriei held the largest single gathering in Romania since 1989, and fifty cities held parallel rallies. I took unpaid leave from my Cluj job and slept on a couch in Bucharest for three weeks.
The ordinance was withdrawn on February 5. The protests continued, in waves, into 2019. The judicial reforms that would have followed Ordinance 13 were defeated in stages.
“At just 30 years' old, Florin Badita has founded a movement that has single-handedly exposed endemic corruption in Romanian political life.” Euronews · European Personality of the Year · 2018
What I learned. What I’d do differently.
The first thing the press never gets right: a 600,000-person protest is not a marketing achievement, it is a logistics one. The lesson from February 2017 wasn't “social media works” — it was that a small ops team with a shared inbox, a clear escalation tree, and a written decision protocol can outrun a government's news cycle. Everything I have built since — ACTFOIA, ServerClaw's ADR practice, the WeMeshUp coordination doc — comes out of that week.
What I’d do differently: invest earlier in the local-chapter handoff. The Bucharest fifty-cities pattern worked because we got lucky with motivated city leads; we didn't have a playbook to give them, and the cities without one burned out three months in. A future civic platform should ship the city playbook on day one, not day ninety.
Links & further reading.
- The New York Times — Protests Rock Romania After Government Weakens Corruption Law · Feb 2017
- Reuters — ‘We see you’ — Romanian activists become potent political force · 2017
- Euronews — European Personality of the Year · 2018
- Friedrich Naumann Foundation — Think Freedom: The Firestone · 2025 documentary
- Wikipedia — 2017–2019 Romanian protests
- All press & academic citations