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
I would like to tell you more about my project StartupAfisha and initiative that we’ve started and it seems to be really effective – the most complete and open events calendar for entrepreneurs. From now on any entrepreneur is able to check any events in his business area he needs, he could find an event where he could present his startup, find partners or gather a team he is in need until of, or find a VC’s to get investments in startup. The geography of events is quite big starting from Russian events (not only Moscow and St. Petersburg bet also all regions of the country), Ukraine, Belorussia, USA and Europe.
The biggest problem for Russian startup-community is lack of single platform for all of the events in regions. And market had a big demand for such platform. We are using the mixed model on our Startup Afisha: there is an open calendar of events and newsletter with information on closed events, competitions, tenders and grants, trainings and workshops. Moreover our subscribers are having an opportunity to get a significant discount on events of our partners around the world.
A lot of people ask me “what event we could visit?”, “how can I find a team?”, “where I can show my project?”. And I decided to unite all of them in one calendar of events. Our mission is to unite all of the community-leaders at one place, to inform them and make their jobs a lot more effective. The project has its own narrow niche and has its own target audience at partner countries and excellent growth prospects. I consider Startup Afisha as the crowdsourcing project. Some services at Startup Afisha are being created by the representatives of startup-community. I believe that crowdsourcing model could be really effective.
In addition to calendar we have a list of important services:
- communities and innovation leaders guide;
- Job service which can help you find a team for your startup;
- Startup-school section – contains practical information for entrepreneurs;
- Recommended books and some more initiatives
The short term mission of Startup Afisha is to develop the partnership between communities and events, so the entrepreneurs would be able to take part in events with discounts, use the crowdsourcing model of project development, involve the community and opinion leaders in the regions to collaborate with Startup Afisha, create club-history and to integrate into international startup-communities.
The project has been launched in December 2010 and now serves as a single entry-point for all entrepreneurs, investors and organizers of startup-activities in Russia.
Web page of the project — http://startupafisha.ru
Facebook page — http://www.facebook.com/StartUpAfisha
Twitter account — @startupafisha
As you might know as part of my initiative on e-government development I’m running the Gov2Project — the government projects and social government initiatives incubator in Russia.
And from now on we start the brand new series of Worldwide Gov 2.0 Digest on the blog pages.
I advice all of you interested in the e-government development to follow the @gov2project on twitter and visit our Facebook page — Gov2Project
Sarah Granger — successful entrepreneur, web-innovator and author of dozens of publications — was an invited speaker from the USA to take part in Startup Women Forum that took place in the beginning of April 2011. After the Forum she shared her impressions with local and foreign media. And now I’m sharing the story with you…
Puffed sounds of “I Left My Heart inSan Francisco” were filling the air of the conference-hall. The picture looked familiar to me: the hall was full of participants, mainly women with smartphones and designer purses, who were drinking coffee and sharing talks. It was hard to believe I was in Moscow again. Last time I had been inMoscow in 1989 when Soviet military troops had surrounded the Red Square and the lines for the bathroom tissue had been blocks length. This time I was not as a tourist in the country. I was invited as a speaker to the first innovative forum for Russian entrepreneurs – Startup Women.
Within the recent Government21 conference in Moscow we are publishing an interview with Alan Silberberg — founder and CEO of Silberberg Innovations. Speaker at the panel discussion on the Government21 Conference. We were discussing the Gov2.0 future and Open government Experience in USA.
Watch the video below:
March, 2011 – April 14, 2011
Network of Justice. Rules of online filing claims has been approved. The Supreme Arbitration Court has developed a temporary regulation lawsuits filing claims over the Internet. The new system is called “My referee”. This service allows you to initiate the process, further documents must be submitted in paper form. The court will process the application in about two days, and either accept it or send a refusal.
New multifunctional center of government services has been opened in Jurga, Kemerov region.
Municipal authorities and the regional department of information technologies examined similar structures in other regions (There are more than 166 similar centers in Russia) and tried to adopt the best practices in their center. You can keep track of the stage and verify the date of execution of a document online.
Regions of the Volga Federal District are creating the unified database of electronic projects — document management, electronic charts and receptions — to freely use the inventions of each other. To date, each region solves three problems by itself: the creation of electronic documents, e-government services portal and e-cards citizens. Region government leaders decided that regions are wasting moneys in no vain by creating own versions of e-government and now starts to create the unified database. continue reading
RIA Novosti published my interview about recent Startup Women Forum and women entrepreneurship movement.
After my visit to “Women 2.0” in the Valley I thought, why shouldn’t we arrange something like that in our country. SoI talked to Maria Kosenkova : always wanted to work with her on some joint project. Dictum – factum. The first Startup Women Forum was conducted in April 2011. We didn’t suppose to have a conference, and the idea of the procedure was like that: series of workshops at once, contest, projects selection, project development. Let’s say, a sort of a virtual incubator. However, after a while we understood that we did everything right. There is a lack of communication in our country. I don’t mean parochial snobbish conversations, but talks on business and with people who have real stories of success.
I’m very glad that “star speakers” attended the event. It seems to me, we gathered real cases and practitioners’ pieces of advice. We’re very grateful to them. It is perfect that there was interaction with the audience. We’ve got lots of positive feedback from many people saying that the conference was very clear and practical. That’s what we strived for.
The whole programme followed the plan, such as: one’s brief bio, own example of a start-up, was it successful or not, and why; the project story; answering the questions of the audience. During the first session I asked who the participants were, and it turned out that many of them resigned their positions in large companies and decided to start their own business.
We were just discussing that in the country where a large proportion of the population is female and where the big business is runmostly by men, the fact that small and medium businesses are started and run by women is quite justified. Moreover, it’s more logical to do business on the Internet because of low entry barrier and project dependence on the team. And HR is mostly for women, the percentage of intuitive decision making is high, like “to do or not to do; to trust or not to trust”. Also one should consider the fact that the female audience of the Web is increasing. This means that end consumers often turn to be women.