April 17, 2013 at 11:58iGrajdanin: social service for caring people
In the Smart-Soft corporate blog, we decided to publish not only information technology related articles. Today we will focus on social services in which the company is directly involved. Our CEO Andrei Davidovich, who is also the managing partner and one of the creators of this interesting project, talks about the iGrajdanin website .
They started talking about e-government in Russia at the beginning of the 2000s and since then many ideas have been implemented. First of all, I mean the portal of public services, which is now used by hundreds of thousands of people in our country. There are other projects launched, as they say, from above. This is very good, but there is a huge problem - the available services operate fragmented. The lack of a single entry point prevents network users from effectively interacting with government agencies: for example, to send a message about an illegal dump, you will have to find a department dealing with this issue (at least its email address) and then independently monitor the execution of the appeal.
In 2012, we launched the iGrajdanin information collection and processing service, based on the principles of crowdsourcing, from citizens . It is relevant mainly for residents of Kolomna near Moscow (the project was created by caring citizens: Andrei Lezhnin, Anton Smirnov, Karen Ter-Oganov and the author of this article), but it is rapidly expanding its sphere of influence throughout the country thanks to the high activity of Russian Internet users and the support of Smart-Soft ". For six months, the service has grown and “registered” in fifteen cities, and the developers have debugged the mechanism for interacting with local administrations: I want to emphasize the positive experience of cooperation with the capital’s government — as yet few complaints from Muscovites are worked out very clearly, to the end.
Interacting with the site is very simple (this is an important difference from government projects): just register, log in (authorization via Facebook and VKontakte is supported) and you can report problems. The main task of iGrajdanin is to give messages the status of official appeals. People write here about the road and municipal services, the social sphere, the work of transport, etc., express ideas on how to make life in the city more comfortable. The service automatically sends data to the official responsible for solving the problem and monitors the processing status of the application. In fact, it is a kind of gateway between users accustomed to a convenient interface and a bulky state machine.
With iGrajdanin, as they say, we got to the point: six years after the adoption of the law on the procedure for considering appeals (including electronic) of citizens, officials stopped openly ignoring it and the appearance of such resources is quite natural. They allow you to make information public and this is a good incentive for the executive branch - when the whole city learns about a problem, it becomes difficult to ignore it. Of course, critical publications on blogs and social networks were before, but they did not have an official status and could not pay attention to such things in state structures.
Created a few months ago, the service is constantly evolving: in 2013 we plan to release a mobile application for iOS and Android that simplifies interaction with users. In addition, a rating of officials and special projects will appear on iGrajdanin for problems that are not solved by the authorities, but can be removed by the civilian community. Our most important task is for officials to work more actively with iGrajdanin - they will create a personal account for them to track the process of solving problems.
Unfortunately, not many government agencies want to work with an existing service, preferring to create new products and trying to impose them on network users. There are serious difficulties with the lack of reaction to official appeals within the time limits established by law. I think the point here is related to the inability to control the analytics of the system of fears - the ineffective work of a particular artist on our site is clearly visible. Meanwhile, with the help of such resources, any official can raise his rating, but only the initiative from below will make him interact with citizens through projects created by the community. The more popular the service becomes among the population, the more difficult it is to ignore it, so I urge everyone to actively use iGrajdanin.
They started talking about e-government in Russia at the beginning of the 2000s and since then many ideas have been implemented. First of all, I mean the portal of public services, which is now used by hundreds of thousands of people in our country. There are other projects launched, as they say, from above. This is very good, but there is a huge problem - the available services operate fragmented. The lack of a single entry point prevents network users from effectively interacting with government agencies: for example, to send a message about an illegal dump, you will have to find a department dealing with this issue (at least its email address) and then independently monitor the execution of the appeal.
In 2012, we launched the iGrajdanin information collection and processing service, based on the principles of crowdsourcing, from citizens . It is relevant mainly for residents of Kolomna near Moscow (the project was created by caring citizens: Andrei Lezhnin, Anton Smirnov, Karen Ter-Oganov and the author of this article), but it is rapidly expanding its sphere of influence throughout the country thanks to the high activity of Russian Internet users and the support of Smart-Soft ". For six months, the service has grown and “registered” in fifteen cities, and the developers have debugged the mechanism for interacting with local administrations: I want to emphasize the positive experience of cooperation with the capital’s government — as yet few complaints from Muscovites are worked out very clearly, to the end.
Interacting with the site is very simple (this is an important difference from government projects): just register, log in (authorization via Facebook and VKontakte is supported) and you can report problems. The main task of iGrajdanin is to give messages the status of official appeals. People write here about the road and municipal services, the social sphere, the work of transport, etc., express ideas on how to make life in the city more comfortable. The service automatically sends data to the official responsible for solving the problem and monitors the processing status of the application. In fact, it is a kind of gateway between users accustomed to a convenient interface and a bulky state machine.
With iGrajdanin, as they say, we got to the point: six years after the adoption of the law on the procedure for considering appeals (including electronic) of citizens, officials stopped openly ignoring it and the appearance of such resources is quite natural. They allow you to make information public and this is a good incentive for the executive branch - when the whole city learns about a problem, it becomes difficult to ignore it. Of course, critical publications on blogs and social networks were before, but they did not have an official status and could not pay attention to such things in state structures.
Created a few months ago, the service is constantly evolving: in 2013 we plan to release a mobile application for iOS and Android that simplifies interaction with users. In addition, a rating of officials and special projects will appear on iGrajdanin for problems that are not solved by the authorities, but can be removed by the civilian community. Our most important task is for officials to work more actively with iGrajdanin - they will create a personal account for them to track the process of solving problems.
Unfortunately, not many government agencies want to work with an existing service, preferring to create new products and trying to impose them on network users. There are serious difficulties with the lack of reaction to official appeals within the time limits established by law. I think the point here is related to the inability to control the analytics of the system of fears - the ineffective work of a particular artist on our site is clearly visible. Meanwhile, with the help of such resources, any official can raise his rating, but only the initiative from below will make him interact with citizens through projects created by the community. The more popular the service becomes among the population, the more difficult it is to ignore it, so I urge everyone to actively use iGrajdanin.