Electronic Municipality 2011 Forum

The 2nd “Electronic Municipality 2011” all-Russian forum of practical solutions was held on March 23 and 24 at the House of Friendship of Peoples in Izhevsk. The list of participants included over three hundred representatives of municipal, regional, federal bodies of power and IT companies, experts.

The forum was held with official support provided by the Russian State Duma Committee on Local Self-Government, the staff of the Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of Russia to the Volga Federal District, and the Government of the Udmurt Republic.

The participants discussed problems of building electronic settlements and the implementation of municipal informatization target programs; technical and technological approaches to the protection of state and municipal authorities’ information and citizens’ personal data; practical examples of employing up-to-date information technologies in municipal budget planning and implementation of the Federal Law No. 210-FZ “On the Organization of the Provision of State and Municipal Services” and the Federal Law No. 8-FZ “On Ensuring Access to Information Regarding the Activities of State and Local Self-Government Authorities”; problems arising in the course of the informatization of municipalities.

The opening session of the forum was attended by Ilya Massukh, Deputy Minister of Communications and Mass Media of the Russian Federation; Viktor Yakimov, member of the Russian State Duma Committee on Local Self-Government; Mikhail Kosoy, Assistant to the Plenipotentiary Representative of the President of the Russian Federation to the Volga Federal District; Yury Pitkevich, Chairman of the Government of the Udmurt Republic; and Vladimir Pereshein, Deputy Chairman of the Government of the Udmurt Republic-Minister of Informatization and Communications of the Udmurt Republic.

Ilya Massukh stressed that the importance of topics discussed at the forum would be impossible to overestimate, as it is at the municipal level where principal services to citizens are rendered: “Russian citizens don’t live in a country in abstracto, but in their specific municipalities.” He also observed that the Udmurt Republic is a fairly advanced region in the area of informational society development successfully implementing systems enabling the practical use of universal electronic cards in the sphere of public health services, a region that has certain developments in cartography.

Integration of municipalities into a common electronic interaction structure is a task that has been set to Russian Federation subjects by Chairman of the Russian Government Vladimir Putin, and by life itself. Starting this July, Russian citizens will be able to exercise the right to not to present additional personal information if it is already available in appropriate databases.

The participants in the forum noted in the final document, the Forum Resolution, that as of now an efficient model for the introduction and functioning of electronic government technologies is yet to be found. Many aspects of informatization can’t be realized without support from IT businesses and local scientists, without establishing public-private partnership in this sphere.