Russians and Americans: differences and similarities.

Both platforms have been launched based on similar purposes. GovLoop.com and GosBook are both the sites, where officials and experts can exchange opinions and share the best practices. All that will let them learn from each other and be more effective in their performance.

GovLoop assists officials who work on similar projects to join their efforts, whereas GosBook initially aimed to exchange information among members of Expert advisory group of Information society development council under the President of Russian Federation. However, today GosBook  not only informs, but also creates intelligent data base with expert recommendations and successful cases; creates databases of experts in the fields, participates actively in expertise of developing projects.

As a result, initial Web-sites start bringing ‘offline profit’. For example, current issues are solved due to GovLoop prompter and more effective. They learn daily about innovations of other similar agencies, get responses for their highly specialized questions and build cooperative and interactive relationships. One of the GovLoop.com groups– Procurement 2.0 (Purchase 2.0; Initiation 2.0) – was so active that they started to organize personal events, launched a new thought provoking  Better Buy Project site, and, interestingly, started to use WIKI and new technologies.

The words of Lincoln Chafee, the Governor of Rhode Island, became a compliment to this new web platform: “Using GovLoop, social network for officials, will help Rhode Island to learn from the experience of others in resolving similar issues and share the best practices of problem solving both intra- and extra- departments”.

Russian GosBook has also succeeded: for example, they initiated a discussion on “Plan of high-priority measures for resolving of transport issues of Moscow city” proposed by Moscow government. All the opinions were filed and the final analysis was sent to Moscow government.

Under realization of “Concept of creating of informational system in public health service for the period until 2020”  GosBook together with ECG and ADMIT (Association of Development of Medical Info Technologies) gathers recommendations for realization of regional programs  of  health service modernization in terms of IT implementation. The best practices of solutions implementation in medical institutions of different regions,which may be useful for representatives of the executive authorities of the Russian Federation are gathered here. Solutions and work in progress are being announced on the pages of “Public healthcare and medical service development”  network.

Thinking forward

Do such projects have future? Creators of GovLoop assert that they do. This platform managed to join more than 38 000 participants all over the world, and has strong chances to expand.  The global purpose of the project is conjoining the Government to improve its performance. GosBook is more moderate in its results, nevertheless, creators of the platform believe that it is necessary to develop this project with the experience of real cases and with tangible usefulness for solving of government management issues.  However, electronic government will become more effective only when officials realize the necessity of such dialogue with the public.

GovLoop and GosBook  are similar in their ideology and practice, but exposure audience of English-speaking project is wider. Thus, solutions concept became international, i.e. it considers positive experience and fails of the experts of many countries.

The question is: Is that enough for our project to have only Russian experience?

 My GovLoop profile

My GosBook profile

So, the key weapon here is my personal web-site that explains my participation  in  elections. I’ve decided to make this site as a independent platform for communication and comments in order not to confuse this political initiative and activitiy with my personal blog  (alenapopova.ru / alenapopova.com that is dedicated to eGov services, women and social entrepreneurship in Russia and other countries) and to discuss in greater details my principal views on participation in elections, presenting Fair Russia party and what measures, project I’m ready to suggest.  The web-site candidate.alenapopova.ru is based on three main principles: Promise - Action – Suggestion. 

My suggestions mainly reflect all experiences and practices that I’d attempted to promote to authorities. So you may find all gov 2.0 services that I support and that are mainly initiated by Novosibirsk citizens. The aim of these actions is to gain popularity after its launch and attract  new consumers to useservices. And finally the key part  is to make them work efficiently not only before but after elections whatever results are.In my opinion, the most interesting projects that are presented on the web-site are “Fair Budget” and “Change your city”.

“Fair Budget” is a special project that was created based on usage of open data of region budget for 2011. All budget items are counted (with percentage from total budget) and published in appropriate form for users. Anyone could use one of 3 bottons: agree with this rate, or decide to add more or less money into it. This is the way we could see how citizens want the budget to be in reality. And also user can leave a comment on any item if he thinks that amount of money spend on this or that item should be either decreased or increased.

Another project that requires attention is “Change your city” that is visualized  on crowdmap platform that allows all citizens to leave their suggestions and “rebuild” Novosibirsk city by moving  or cleaning up buildings, monuments, departments and other objects  within Novosibirsk city.

Another tool that I actively use in my election campaign is social networks. We’ve created Facebook Virtual Headquarter that doesn’t concern party activity but mostly dedicated to my personal contribution to politics  and also to general idea that I could become the first candidate from Runet in the State Duma as I’ve already gained popularity among online users and by now I’m focusing on with working with this audience, trying to receive their feedback, suggestions and opinions.

First and furemost, it is important to see myself  as the first candidate for the State Duma elections that is going to represent the opinions, interests, ideas of Russian web-users. Why am I actually  positioning myself in that way? The answer is concealed in the fact that firstly, while being an active blogger for a couple of years I’ve been learnt how to  build relations via social media marketing and I realize that the certain differences that exist between online audience and offline users.  Second reason for using Internet users as a key audience in my elections campaign is that about a half of population of the region (Novosibirsk) I’m going to present, are online users and what is more interesting this audience usually is apathetic towards politics and elections.That’s why I think it is very important to take this  feature into account and election campaign strategy and consequently motivate online users to raise the voice, express their proactive positions regarding different political/social issues. And I’m sure this communication process will definitely empower voters as a separate unit and give me as a candidate a chance to represent their interests, rights, attitudes in the State Duma.

In order to dwell on efficient work with Russian online users I’ve created a two-way communication within several online channels:

• the official blog/web-site  about insight/plans/suggestions of what changes I could bring while being elected in the State Duma;
• Facebook Page that represents a virtual campaign hearquaters that on the one hand represents my personal insight and strivings and the same time allows different people could gather together and discuss their points of view that further could serve as a foundation for new amendments and etc.
• Working with other Russian social networks;

I’m going to talk about every channel in greater detail in my next post, while here I’d like to underlie that I want to be the one who encourage people to believe that together we could make real changes. But these changes would be possible only provided strongest and serious interaction with each other, open dialogue. That is why I hope that such way of  online communication will lead to success and mutual public good. While I also think that the only thing that I could promise to myself is that I won’t alter my views regarding that all words should be fulfilled and proved by certain deeds and actions.

Let’s do it together! If you’re interested in getting more information about my campaign, please don’t hesitate to contact me or leave your comments!

]]> http://alenapopova.com/egovernment/a-new-aim-means-a-new-challenge-enrolling-for-the-state-duma-elections.html/feed 0 http://alenapopova.com/women/the-results-of-panel-discussion-on-women%e2%80%99s-entrepreneurship-in-novosibirsk.html http://alenapopova.com/women/the-results-of-panel-discussion-on-women%e2%80%99s-entrepreneurship-in-novosibirsk.html#comments Sat, 05 Nov 2011 17:42:29 +0000 A.Popova http://alenapopova.com/?p=1781 Panel discussion on “Perspectives of development of women’s entrepreneurship in Siberia” was held under StartupWomen project on October, 31 in Novosibirsk. Girls and women who run or have intention to start their own business participated in this event. Also along with me, Natalia Odegova, a business woman from Novosibirsk and a founder of “Remote assistants” project; and Alena Kotova, a member of the Board of Deputies of Tatarsk city of Novosibirsk Region and member of the Chamber of Deputies of NR were among the discussion participants.

Our principal thesis was as follows: in terms of women’s unemployment elimination it is more than reasonable to encourage entrepreneurial spirit  and activity of  women themselves. Moreover, if big and mid-size businesses were concentrated in the hands of men after 90-s(judging from logic of historical and economical processes), then small business may become women’s fiefdom.

And Internet  is the fastest way to: first, to learn reply promptly the users’ requests; second, be more flexible and learn from mistakes; and third, learn how not to spend millions and  have an opportunity to create a project with low financial barrier of entry.

‘Round table’ was held in a dialogue format. I spoke on Russian and worldwide practices, analysed women’s entrepreneurship in Siberia. For example, according to data of Grant Thornton company of 2008, the most of female managers in Russia are in Novosibirsk.

During the survey carried out by this company, 65% of respondents stated that three and more women are among the top-management of local companies. 385 women living in the Novosibirsk region have started their own business since 2008. Many of them may be illustrated as successful women, for example, Tatyana Sokolnikova, Chief executive of ‘Argument” company in Tomsk; Elena Polyakova, Director of  Professional development centre, author and coordinator of  regional and corporate educational projects; Anna Vibornih, chief of ‘BIS-Novosibirsk’ company;  or an acquaintance  of mine, active person an successful business lady, Natalia Ibragimova, manager of ‘SibirskayaKopeechka’ chain.

Being in Novosibirsk, we decided that all business ladies should be put in touch with each other, but how we could do that?  The answer is to carry out round tables and regular discussions. What for? We want the issues to be solved and ideas to be scaled. We often find out in our sessions that two different teams in two different cities work on the same idea, moreover, they both have similar problems. So why not to solve this problems conjointly?

Social entrepreneurship became an important topic for our panel discussion. There were many questions in the audience, like what that is and how to do this. We discussed the examples of successful social projects in Russia, such as Urtam.ru, it’s a boarding school for disabled children, where they are nurtured to be Paralympic champions. Another example, ‘Archangelsk professional rehabilitation centre for disabled’.  Also, there is a chain of recreation centres ‘Baby-life’ in Perm.

The audience was concerned by the issue of how to create a web project that could let women earn money being at home with children, and also how to help with employment of those categories of citizens who are unemployed now. Moreover, how to educate them and improve their performance, which could reduce costs of their the client companies.  Natalia Odegova, the founder of ‘Remote assistants’ project, shared her experience and spoke on solutions she offered. Natalia created her project when she was in maternity leave. The results can be already  seen.

Overall, summing up the results of the event carried out, we decided to  put on our web-site www.startupwomen.ru the schedule of meetings, panel discussions and teleconferences that are going to be carried out regularly in Novosibirsk and other cities. Our aim is to help Siberian business women with projects implementation. Among the plans of Startup Women now is designing of e-business educational program for women, they could participate in on attractive terms, and increasing of number of meetings with successful business ladies for experience interchange and issues discussion.

So, now I’m very pleased to announce the launch of our new eGov intiative – Code4Russia  that represents a separate but connected eGov iniative that works under Gov2People project that as far as you might know considers all existed eGov services in Russia and reviews international practices that could be used in Russian virtual reality.

By all means, Code4Russia has little in common with analogous Western projects, firstly due to different objectives that we set up as Russian reality has its own rules and regulations under which project could be conducted.  Code4Russia represents the largest Russian online unique project that includes “Coding for Russia” -  All-Russian contest of developers in eGov context and special project called “Developers expertise.”
So now let’s speak about every project in detail and perspective, what distincive features they have and what further opportunities they provide.

Developers expertise is the first project of that kind in Russia that can be seen as an expert’s crowdsource model that is made to encourage best IT-specialists of e-govermeent project and services to leave comments and feedback. The main difference between developers and consumers of eGov services that IT-experts are more likely to share its constructive professional view on what has been done wrong by government and what can be done to improve this or that feature.

The main problem of today’s projects and eGov services is contained in its unclear presentation and negative perception by the target audience as these projects are not user-friendly at all. Once a new eGov project is launched a certain amount of  negative comments in media and social networks appear with saying that “it has terrible or worst interface I’ve ever seen” that at times seems to be very true. There is no integrated consumers’ feedback system exist at the market. That is why our project aims to improve interface and usability of eGov services, to get constuctive evaluations from IT-experts and their suggestions that would create a platform for effecient e-government marketing development.

So how does this model work? Interfaces of goverment project or mobile apps that are either under development phase or have already entered the market would be placed on Code4russia.ru. These projects would be discussed by a group of experts, the general opinion would be formed and the final assessment of this product would be given. Based on this data the report is developed and further it will be provided with local authorities.

Among main objectives of special project can be identified:

- improvement of interface and usability of eGov services;
- providing feedback and assesment of eGov services;
- establishment of efficient collaboration between eGov services consumers and government itself;
- building media and web loyalty towards eGov services;

We’re keen on getting all developers comments on this or that issue/project and thus to improve the state of eGov in Russia and to encourage a new turn of evolution.  We are ready to discuss all opinions and recommendations that will provide us with the insight  how to attract developers into project’s participation. Surely we expect a variety of opinions, including positive and negative, but we are open to any useful interactions.

The main advantage for authorities is contained in the fact that receiving useful comments, officiers are aware of things they have to improve in their services or e-projects in order to make these web-resources more popular among Russian users .

The contest “Coding for Russia” is conducted among developers of mobile apps and web-sites based on open data. Paticipants create socially important and valuable projects that solve certain problems of a particular regions.  First contests would be organized in Krasnodar and Tatarstan republic.

Key aim of the contest is to first of all attract attention of IT-communities and authorities to public projects and issues that could be transformed into eGov context. And secondly, to show on practice that these available tools for problem solving are more than real and could be used anywhere in Russia!

The essense of the contest is considered in the fact that a region defines a set of social issues that are typical for it and compulsory for finding a right solution, the terms of reference is being then proposed. During the month participants, using open data resources program different range of interfaces (web or mobile apps) to solve emerging issues.  During the whole period participants are strongly connected and interacted with a group of experts that finally makes the final decision and define three contest’s winners. The winner gets not only the money prize with 100 000 rubles ( approximately 3 000 $), but also a guarantee that this project is going to be futher used and supported by local authorities. That is how these projects could become best solutions for building civil society.

So the general idea is to attract and collaborate with best developers of our country in order to create eGov services that will be helpful for citizens of different regions. So now we are anticipating the results and keen on going further and further.

Should you have any ideas or suggestions, please do not hesitate to leave them here.

The Pipeline Fellowship trains women philanthropists to become angel investors through education, mentoring, and practice.  Fellows commit to invest in a woman-led for-profit social venture at the end of the training. This fund aims to diversify the investor pool and connect women social entrepreneurs with investors who get them.

International company Criterion Ventures has lauched its “search community” and women who are interested in investments are welcome to join it, after a while an appropirate project would be matched with women’s preferences and objectives and found out. Besides this service supports not only social entrepreneurship projetcs, but also perspective resources that are going to be successful investement in the future.

Those women who have already invested in such projects are integrated into Association of Women in Alternative Investing, where they share experience with each other. The expert committee consists of the most talented and professional investors with a long-term experience. I think that I that the role of Aileen Lee or  Andrea Zurek is remarkable and significant without any doubt.

What hindres Russian entrepreneurs to become active investors? One of the key reasons for that is a simple absense of knowledge. The widespread question is where am I going to invest my money – to unit fund? to stocks with return on investments? to real estate? Unfortunately by now we don’t have a functional fulfilled infrastructure for women investment education in Russia. Unlike western societies where lots of communities are organized based on these needs and challenges, we can’t do the same in Russia as there is no investment culture and moreover, no one considers women as a substancial group of potential investors.

Traditionally it is well-practiced that men are more responsible and capable to think of where to invest money. However, we’ve decided to go further and within framework of Startup Women project we’re going to develop and promote Women Investment Fund, where women could gain knowledge about ventures investments that would provide them a foundation for future opportunities to become a successful business-angel. Why do we rely on this idea? It’s typical for a woman to listen to her soul, to make choice accoring to her the sixth sense and what’s more that this intuitive decision that we usually make is the most correct and bears its fruits, leads to positive outcome in long-term period.

Russian female audience is also taking over web-spaces and already exceeds male audience. According to the latest marketing research conducted by RUmetrika, a number of female users has doubled for the last two years, while the female audience of glossy-online sites has increased up to 85% for the last year, and up 11% – for the last half-year. Besides it’s also well-researched that female’s online purchasing behavior has its significant differences from male’s intentions as we use Internet in our own way and can afford to make spontaneous purchases or simply perceive online-shopping is a kind of entertainment and the most interesting online-activity.  According to the same research women are keen on buying online books, cosmetics, apparel and kid’s clothes.

A fresh version of StarLook is an updated service of online shopping community that accumulates all latest glamorous fashion trends, brands and responds to emerged women requirements and needs that they might have faced during a usual online-shopping process. As mostly women are interested in online-activities due to the possibilities it offers for communication we offer them to feel free and to be integrated into a variety of activities: starting from searching what other users or experts say about a particular apparel brand or other item to creating the content about this brand, including fashion looks for various occasions (that we call sets, video content and blog posts). Thus, such communication is an efficient tool for fashion and beauty brands to trace what was written, what kind of brand image and associations do consumers have in mind about these brands. It’s the easiest and effective approach for brands to work directly with female consumers and respond to emerging challenges or requests.

Such new approach underlies that we’ve very timely decided to transform and alter the concept and business model of Starlook.ru in order to improve the service and overcome the challenges. If earlier this project was mainly user-oriented and intended to establish a connection between professional models, photographers, stylists and brands as the last thing, a updated service represents profoundly distinctive approach – now Starlook.ru has become a brand-oriented project and that’s why we’re keep on going while other online-imitators are left behind. We can proudly say that we are first on the Russian market in the niche of social shopping, at the same time we could admit that StarLook has similar things with the largest Western shopping communities that are designed by Kaboodle and Polyvore.

Similar to these projects, our users are not only constantly looking for new information about fashion products (women apparel, accessories, jewelry, cosmetics and etc.) but also interacting with brands they’re interested in. And this fact allows us to say that such active and dynamic community can be considered as an effective tool to work and collaborate with, because such users could increase online/offline sales by simply being high-involved into fashion topic or giving recommendations and sharing impressions via word-of-mouth. To increase these consumers’ motivations we’ll launch mobile and social media apps that would enable female users to constantly share their sets, preferences on blogs, Facebook and Twitter.

What is good that beauty and fashion brands could also take an advantage of our updated service: there is no need to create an independent web-resource for the specific audience, to invest money in that, it’s much easier to promote its products on our platform organizing various activities and working with existing audience that “company could feel”. Moreover, when such innovative facilities as a marketplace e-commerce window and an integrated virtual model of dressing room based on augmented reality technology will be launched, female users would be encouraged to purchase more fashion brands online via StarLook.

From my personal experience I could say that while working on this project I’ve also learnt a lot, I realized what is bad and good for a project like that. For example, if you want to make a good project it’s crucial to focus more on user-friendly interface and design development rather than on content and technology fulfillment. Our target audience is primarily attracted by project’s interface as all brands, especially luxury ones want to be clearly seen and identified by its audience as a premium brand. That is why we completely redesigned project’s interface and have no regrets about it as our audience continue to increase.

Starlook.ru has aslo a sufficient number of useful features that were socially demanded. One of them is a creation of a special column “Jewel-box” that was designed in addition to a popular column called “Wardrobe”. Under “Jewel-box” information about all jewelry products is gathered. Thus, we solved one more problem: first of all, create a new market with new brands and secondly, satisfy female users needs who design their sets including jewelries. Another feature that I’m very pleased with and is popular among the community is a Q&A section. Here, members are welcome to discuss their concerns and receive recommendations on a question like: “What kind of haircut is appropriate for the Uni?” or “Would you buy counterfeit products?”

I also consider such sections of Sales and Promo are very essential and necessary for such online shopping project as Starlook.ru that we’ve also launched. It’s again a tool that helps companies to work the specific audience directly that affects its financial performance. Thus, facilitating communications with online consumers, lots international and local brands benefit such collaboration with Starlook.ru

Without any doubt I could say that I’m very proud of Starlook.ru as it represents the most high-performed and successful online shopping project on Russian market that is supported by female audience recognition as since we’ve launched a new version a number of users has risen in three times that is a good sign of Russian online-market potential.

The video “Rodnopolisy” that can be translated as Hometowns  is a great example that appeals to young people and promotes those little cities and towns which people leave for better (or not???) life in Moscow. I liked the idea itself and the way it is done.  Nikita Belikh – one of the most popular Russian eOfficial and governor of Kirovskiy region -  also took part in this video and agreed to give us some comments.

Whose idea was  idea to shoot such a video?

Nikita Belyh: I am really pleased to say that neither me nor any other municipal worker had put forward the idea. It was the absolute initiative of young talented crew  of the regional TV channel. I personally got involved only by the time the process had been already undergone and the final version of the script had been ready.

What do you think of the consequences of this activity? What kind of outcomes are expected?

N.B.: One should be a big optimist to think that one video can change everything in a way that Kirov will become popular and migration patterns will be significantly affected. But this video definitely can be viewed as one more argument for those people who decided to move to the capital or other big “wealthy” city. What we see now is that Web is full of comments like these ones – “Just watched the video from my place in Moscow/New York/London. Missing my hometown so much!” or “That’s it! I’m coming home!” – and it is great!

Why video?

N.B.: Video is the best tool to deliver the vorrect message as well it contains creative ideas nowadays. Anyway we have a plain audio version as well.

How do you think will it make sense to translate the song to other languages, say, English? Are you aware of similar activities outside Russia?

N.B.: Frankly speaking, I haven’t spent much time doing research that is why I personally unaware of similar videos’ existence. Translation? Have no idea. After all the target audience of the video is quite specific, e.g. video is addressed to the people who left their native towns and cities, to the people who know Russian. From the other hand, I can’t see any cons to such a translation.

Are you aware of any negative reaction to the video?

N.B.: There always be some portion of negative reaction to any idea. This case was not an exception. Authors of the video received some negative feedback once they had unveiled their idea in Web. But they did a great job responding to every anonymous message in  Web explaining their position which can be formulated as “stop criticizng everybody just do something”.

Do you think that appearance of the Governor in the video is appropriate?

N.B.: I am not ready to speak for the Governors in general but I can speak for myself. My appearance in the video seems logical to me.  Video creators and me share the common ideas and ideals, I understand the target audience of the video, after all that was the authors who had proposed me a role not vice versa.

Can this video be used to promote inbound tourism to the region?

N.B.: I think the answer is positive. Other towns and cities shall do the same things but anyway Vyatka (Kirov) will always be the first in a row.

]]> http://alenapopova.com/egovernment/super-russian-viral-video-case-initiated-by-regions-governor.html/feed 0 http://alenapopova.com/egovernment/russians-will-be-eligible-to-leave-the-comments-for-state-duma-bills-on-the-website.html http://alenapopova.com/egovernment/russians-will-be-eligible-to-leave-the-comments-for-state-duma-bills-on-the-website.html#comments Mon, 05 Sep 2011 11:10:17 +0000 A.Popova http://alenapopova.com/?p=1667 Such announcement was made by Robert Shlegel’ – Member of Information Policy Chamber – who also proclaimed that a new means of providing the feedback would be firstly, tested on the web-site of the chamber and only after that on the State Duma website. Boris Grizlov, a current speaker of Russian’s State Duma considers that such initiate allows attracting a sufficient number of experts to the discussion process that would positively affect the quality of legislations. “We’re looking for public discussions and polls on federal, regional and local levels”, – the speaker stated.

Lately more and more government organizations and ministries have been established contacts with ordinary people via Web 2.0. Public audience has already criticized “Police” and “Education” bills, although experts admit that authorities hardly took into account people’s opinions and voice.

What’s new and interesting we’ve got in eGov Live? First and furthermost, we’ve made a map, where everyone is welcomed to evaluate the  public services’ level (that differs in colors) in various Russian regions. This option was made to achieve two objectives: firstly, to capture the objective image of public services and secondly, to have an understanding what kind of services are already used by the society, which of them are the socially demanded.

Our second feature is providence of people’s rating system that represents a subjective evaluation of service quality made by each individually. We’ve decided to create a map in two modes to provide us with both data official version and people’s  insight .

We also propose a useful service called  “Officials in social network”, where we’re collecting all social accounts and profiles of officials on Twitter, Facebook and others to facilitate information search of a particular officer in a region or according to its specialization. A wide list of civilian projects that was being collected in framework of Gov2People.ru is also introduced in our new project as well as we include all media stories that have connection to government presence in the Web. Within the framework of the project we’re going to conduct round tables and video conferences that would be open and free for everyone.

The most important project’s objective is to establish stable work and relations with regions and its ministries. We see eGov Live to become an integrated resource that will be the first to let people know about how e-government develops in this or that regions. Thus, the purpose of the project – to produce an efficient two-way communication tool that would be useful for both sides: those who develops eGov and those people who consume these services (the society).

At this stage we very appreciate your comments and feedback. We want to improve the level of eGov development in our country, so we rely on your support and  knowledge. Share your opinion about this project. Thanks!!!