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ITMO University (St.Petersburg, Russia)E-Government Center

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Olga Filatova,St. Petersburg State University

Andrei Chugunov, Lyudmila Bershadskaya, Dmitrii TrutnevITMO University(St. Petersburg, Russia)

E-Governance and E-Participation Services: an Analysis of Discussions

in Russian Social Media

CeDEM14. International Conference for E-Democracy

and Open Government

21-23 May 2014,

Danube University Krems, Austria

Russian Context

In international practice, the development of e-participation mechanisms in public life for citizens and political decision-makers are no longer considered new research topics.

In Russia, the e-participation portal intended for citizens’ applications was launched in 2013.

Therefore it is only now possible to ascertain the first trends in how the process is advancing in Russia.

The comparative execution of research becomes particularly relevant due to the fact that the indicators of “Strategy for Information Society Development in Russia” implementation include items relating to the position of Russia in major international e-development indexes.

Research methodology & instruments

Social media, being a popular and active field of mass communication, can be the subject of research and a source of information, including information about the demand for online government services.

The eGovernment Center ITMO University conducted a specialized survey in June-August 2013.

Today, there are more than 30 computer-aided tools for searching and analysing information from social networks.

The social media monitoring service IQBuzz (http://iqbuzz.ru/) was selected as a research instrument.

IQBuzz as a research instrument

IQBuzz - commercial tool provides social media monitoring, including web crawling such resources as LiveInternet, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte, Yandex.Blogs and the video hosting services RuTube and YouTube, as well as various news, entertainment, topical and regional portals.

During the monitoring process, the keywords on a set of topics relating to the sphere of e-government and online services were selected by the authors.

As a result, a list of eight rubrics comprising 35 topics of key requests was made. After that the web crawler started working.

Topics

Based on manual analysis of the collected posts and documents, two rubrics with non-relevant documents were excluded, but three more rubrics with additional key requests were added.

The monitoring was conducted on the following topics: e-government, online services, multi-functional centres, public services, governors’ blogs,

authorities’ web-sites, e-petition portals, e-cards and e-signatures.

Russian E-Participation Portal

The Russian Public Initiative (RPI - https://www.roi.ru) appeared in April 2013.

This e-petition portal is operated by the Foundation for Information Democracy, a non-profit organization led by former RF Deputy Minister of Communication.

The timeframe of the monitoring

This portal had become the subject of discussion among Internet users even before its opening, from its inception in 2013.

The timeframe of the monitoring was the period 01.01 - 31.07.2013.

19,200 documents on these portal topics were found as a result of the research.

Discussions on the topic “e-participation” on Russian social media

The audience for these topics was formed from readers and subscribers of news portals as well as Russian oppositionists’ posts.

Events in 2013

The main information bursts in the discussion relating to the RPI are correlated with the following events in 2013: The Foundation for Information Democracy became executor of the

RPI project (March 5-6); Dmitry Medvedev issued orders on RPI portal creation (March 16-17); Start of voting on RPI portal (April 12-13); Head of the Foundation for Information Democracy responded to the

charge of an illegal increase in the number of votes against A.Navalny’s initiative (May 29-30);

Discussion of "100,000 votes collected, what will happen next?" (July 5-6);

Discussion of the initiative to repeal the law on arbitrary blocking of Internet resources № 187-FZ (July 10-11).

Conclusions

As a result of analysis, we can conclude that the Internet community has been actively interested in the RPI portal from the very beginning of its work and furthermore it is possible to discuss specific initiatives placed on the portal in relation to the growing interest.

The research results showed the scale of discussions on social media on e-petition topics, retrospective flashes of discussions and the demand in this information field among Russian citizens.

Conclusions

The Internet community actively discusses the process of obtaining public services, various ways of providing servicing via the Internet and websites of government and public bodies. The recently instituted Russian e-petition portal accounted for the greatest proportion of the discussion audience (6,700,000 people) in comparison with other topics.

Social media users discuss official news about e-government projects and oppositional posts. As a rule, these discussions are not long-lasting. Internet users even started publishing jokes on these topics. The subscriber audience of these humorous stories can be up to 900,000 people.

Conclusions

Generally, male audiences’ main interests relate to political topics, discussions, voting for petitions, etc. Internet users from the 26-35 year-old age group dominate among the authors of posts in all rubrics.

The results of this study demonstrated the suitability of using social media as a source of knowledge about the attitude of citizens to the most important issues for them. Such knowledge is vital for good governance and policy making.

The research revealed the necessity to improve the process of text tonality identification and to engage the involvement of experts in linguistics in the research.

Conclusions

The researched topics are closely connected with political decisions and discussions of law adoption, which provide emotive aspects, i.e., approval or disapproval of any type of law. This circumstance hinders the computer-aided assessment of text tonality.

Acknowledgements:

This research has been supported by Russian Foundation for Humanities in the framework of the project “Electronic communication between government and society: a study of sociodynamics and institutionalization processes“ (№ 13-03-00603).

Welcome!

International Conference ««Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in EurasiaElectronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia» (» (EGOSE-2014)EGOSE-2014)St.Petersburg, Russia, 18-20 Nov 2014

http://egov-conf.ifmo.ru/

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ITMO University (St.Petersburg, Russia)E-Government Center

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GG22GG Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru) Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)

Olga Filatova, associate professor at the Department of Public Relations in Politics and Public Administration at the St. Petersburg State University filatovo@gmail.com

Andrei Chugunov, director of eGovernment Center ITMO University chugunov@egov-center.ru