Archive for Май, 2011
NationBuilder.com is a SaaS platform for non-profits and political campaigns with a fundraising capabilities and a lot of other features.
At my last trip to USA, I’ve been meeting with Adriel Hampton — the author of the nationbuilder project.
Watch the Adriel’s interview below:
At the beginning of the year our team has launched an online incubator for e-government startups in Russia – Gov2Project.ru. As always there were a lot of opinions that such initiatives are hopeless in Russia, etc. Everyone tells me that gov2project is too naïve to be on the market and particularly on Russian market. I would agree with their opinions and arguments only after they could suggest something that works. We need to apply a lot of effort and hard work to start things up. But that niche is quite logical for the market especially in terms of regional development.
Why do we need startups in the e-government sector?
First of all, there is no perfect eGov model anywhere in the world.
Civil projects solves 2 problems: involving people into development and qualitative evaluation of public services and reducing costs. And we should realize that citizen’s projects are something that could be in demand by society but is not their priority. That is not public service development, but might be a “crowd” monitoring of these services.
So we decided to find all projects that could become commercially successful and are socially important and place them on one platform. Russia has great possibilities – a large number of developers that could work on different gov 2.0 projects. Our IT could greatly improve situation in the eGov sector.
So is there a light in the end of the tunnel?
Of course there is a light at the end, if we will be able to build the model properly. There are great technological projects and then investor buys the technology not the content component. Russian strength is the best developers in the world. It is assumed that amount of functional projects will be much bigger than media-PR projects. continue reading
The trend of public online panel discussions is continuing its development. The relevant President’s decree has been released in February. Now media reports that on 1st of June the discussion system of legislative initiatives is going to be launched on the government.ru website – the program name is “Open Government”. Every citizen can be involved in legislative system via electronic voting.
The first bill under discussion will be “The bill on the basics of healthcare of Russian citizens”. The discussions are going to be coordinated by the Public Opinion Foundation. The biggest problem with national discussions is when they are not moderated the main thread will be buried under unnecessary noise.
All of the bills that could have social response are going to be submitted on online discussion.
Earlier, the Presidental Police Act was discussed at the similar special platform.
The “Open government program” could be useful in the elections season, so the opposition could not use unpopular initiatives for counter-agitation.
Our Gov2Project team presents you the digest on latest news in Government2.0 (Citizen 2.0) area. The digest’s mission is to inform the society on how civil projects develops in Russia and inform you on the situation of Russian Government2.0 development.
So, what’s happening now in Russia on Gov2.0 projects?
IST-Budget projects leaders (government public and private tenders’ aggregator) told us that they started an expert network of public procurements trainings. The mission of it lies in the fact that from now on any procurements expert can conduct training webinars on IST-Budget platform.
There are more than 6000000 documents now available on Pravo.ru platform. We can now say that it’s full-fledged tool for lawyers and an excellent companion for regular citizen. Besides that Pravo.ru is an online-service with optimized versions for iPhone and iPad – users now always have all the Russian legislative data at hand.
The Surdoserver.ru project enlisted the support of Bortnik’s Fund. The Fund managers expect that the computer sign language interpreter program is going to be developed in three years.
The Rusturn team expands their project functionality and features and introduces them to the Roman consulate. The system now checks if the visitor was recorded before. This small and simple thing is quite important – the “just in case” records could easily score a schedule without giving an appointment possibility for other citizens. continue reading