Romania.org - About us

Dear Users, dear Visitors, dear Friends,

thank you for visiting our site - one of the most comprehensive web spots, focusing on Romania. This site is intended to be a portal to the World Wide Web's Romanian content. We're committed to providing interesting information, along with a series of useful services.

Romania.org was founded by a group of people, spread all over the world. Some of them are Romanians, living either in Romania, or abroad. Others are foreigners married to Romanians, or foreign investors, or just "Romano-philes". We all love Romania, its people, landscapes and culture, and take pride in our affiliation to Romania.

Ten years have ensued, since we initiated our Internet activities to the benefit of Romania. This was a time of hard work, struggle, joy and pleasure. During this time, we've received countless emails, showing a lot of appreciation. Numerous visitors expressed their opinions in our guestbook. We've ranked #1 in the Romanian Top100 Websites for many, many months in-a-row. We were the first who by-passed the 1.000, 2.000 and 3.000 monthly vote level back in the late 90's, still gaining today our visitors' gratitude.

Since a couple of years Romania.org can be found with the top position on the 1st page when querying Google - the world's leading Internet Search Engine - for "Romania" - give it a try:

Our current PageRank^® on Google is 7.

Since our start in 1996 we delivered billions of pages and currently serve billions of requests to a good one million of unique visitors per month. Having in mind these results, we're tempted to believe that our new site will receive even more appreciation from you - our visitors.

We are often asked: "Why are you putting so much in this Website? Romania needs much more than 'virtual-kind' of help."

Our answer is very simple: This is what we can do to help the country and are very grateful to our sponsor. Many of us surf the Internet only for fun, others take it as a very serious business. It all depends on which category one is part of. However, the key is: WE DO WHAT WE CAN TO HELP THE COUNTRY. None of us is a e.g. a medical doctor. Doctors can run free healthcare services in Romania, or build hospitals, we can't. None of us is a construction engineer. Construction engineers could build schools, streets, better houses, for those in need; we can't. None of us is an agricultural engineer. Agricultural engineers can help by growing food for the poor; we can't. Only very few people do volunteer for their communities. We all do volunteer and are proud to help and promote Romania in the way we can: on the global Internet.

And, most important of all, we hate answers like: "Thank you very much, we can do it all by ourselves!" - an answer we've received from a Romanian Official, after we've offered our help.

When starting activities in Romania everybody (no matter if stranger or native-Romanian) has to take several things into consideration, which are not quite "normal" and must not be faced in the rest of the world, at least not the parts we know. You will get in touch with and you will have to deal with people, who have been part of old communist structures and who are not willing to learn to accept changes, to develop the country, to bring the country forward. They show contra-productive behaviour that could even be considered anti-romanian! Several things happened to people more or less deeply involved into Romania.org and - hard to imagine, but true - even our pro-romanian Internet activities became subject to discussions. Investors where blackmailed and threatened from officiers of Romanian governmental institutions! Paid property was almost simply taken like in Ceausescu's time! Hackers attacked us by secret order of an official. Hard to imagine, but true. Though this did not happen officially, it is still bad enough, that it did happen... Send us eMail if you want to learn about the details, that we do not publish here for various reasons. The story is simply to disappointing to be told. We want positive things on Romania.org and intriguing is inappropriate for a site like ours.

But we go on. Even after ten years, we are still positive, that in the (near?!) future things will turn to the better and - maybe a little bit with our help - this kind of people will share the same fate as the dinosaurs...

Maybe one day also Romania will have an "official Homepage" worth to carry this title. NO NO, we are currently not the official Homepage of Romania, though we wouldn't have any problems being it (Please also see the last sentences of our Disclaimer). Actually Romania does not have a central official website as most countries in the world do, even today. Many official institutions have, ministries etc. But there is no central site to be the "CORE" of the many totally un-coordinated official efforts. As a result, we want to try to represent Romania on the Internet, as good as we can and that's why many people, looking for an "official" site arrive at Romania.org.

In 1997 we made an approach to the Romanian Government and presented a file of ~ 20 pages, covering an in-depth elaborated proposal to host a website for them, for Romania, for the country, covering every single Ministry, Agency, Institution, Judet, state owned company for privatisation, interest of the nation. The site would not have only been informative, answering virtually any question concerning Romania, it would also have helped Romania with the integration into the western world. Though we received very positive comments, our proposal was never turned into practice. In the year 2000 several attempts have been made by the government to generate an official site and many of the ideas we submitted have been copied. But until today, only efforts are visible - no centralizsed and coordinated results...

And, of course, originating form a .org non-profit group, we didn't ask any money from the government for the realization of our proposal...

For http://embassy.romania.org a site which also originated from the fact that we are often contacted by people expecting us to be something official, due to the lack of something turely official, we received a lot of appreciation from official Romanian representative offices worldwide and also from the Romanian Government, esp. the Ministry of Foreign Affairs long before they launched their own web-spot (update: in 2001 the MAE regsitered mae.ro and now HAS a decent website! Congrats! update#2: embassy.romania.org has been discontinued in 2012, as we didn't want neither to keep track of the permanently changing data of the Missions we had to update nor to provide outdated information about them to our visitors).

We want to thank to all who wrote us for the correspondence we received from you.

It is our intent that this passage of our "About"-Page will educate the uninformed and spur the uninvolved without alienating any group. It will take the combined skill of the entire Romanian Internet community to craft solutions that lead us to the best path to the future:

Desteapta-te, Române!

With consideration,
Romania.org Webmaster
in the year 2006