Marta Kowalski
pubhub.ie — County Kerry

9 September 2026

To whom it may concern,

This letter confirms that Marta Kowalski completed the third cohort of The Academy — Built In Ireland's cooperative-project programme — working on pubhub.ie under my mentorship between 11 August and 5 September 2026.

pubhub.ie is a live Irish pub directory — not a review site, but a structured-data source of record for Irish pubs, with verified opening hours, live music nights, and GAA match screening schedules. The site's value depends entirely on the accuracy and completeness of its data. Marta joined as a directory data researcher for the County Kerry rollout.

What Marta shipped

• Verified opening hours for 72 County Kerry pubs, checked against each venue's own website, Google Maps listing, and — where those conflicted or were absent — confirmed by direct phone contact. The final dataset was delivered in the project's Google Sheets template with source column populated for every entry.
• Live music schedule data for 41 of the 72 pubs — day of week, frequency (weekly / occasional / sessions), and genre where available. Eight pubs were contacted directly to clarify schedules not listed on their websites.
• GAA match screening data for 28 pubs — confirmed which channels they carry, whether they have a second screen, and whether they show both codes.
• A set of 14 "no data available" flags for pubs where the phone number was not answered after three attempts and no web presence existed — documented so that the next pass doesn't waste time re-attempting the same dead ends.
• A short QA document identifying three systematic issues in the data intake template that would have caused import errors, which I fixed before she found them but which she flagged before I did.

Impact

Marta's dataset went directly into pubhub.ie's County Kerry section — 72 pub listing pages, now live and indexed. The Kerry section launched with the highest data completeness of any county on the site at time of publication: 97% of listings have verified hours, 57% have music schedule data, and 39% have GAA screening data. That's a direct result of the rigour she applied.

How she worked

Marta is methodical in a way that is genuinely rare: she finished each batch of 10 pubs before moving to the next, she documented every source, and she raised questions in writing rather than waiting for the weekly call. When she couldn't reach a pub by phone, she noted the time and number of attempts rather than leaving the field blank and hoping I wouldn't notice. This kind of care for data quality is exactly what a directory project needs and exactly what most people don't supply.

My recommendation

I'd hire Marta into any data verification, directory research, or operations role where accuracy over speed is the brief. She is thorough, communicates proactively about blockers, and treats the data she's responsible for as if she'll be judged on every field — because on pubhub.ie, she is. Strongly recommended.