for those who would make a difference

Tag: E-Government

Russian Federation – e-Government Digest

Recently we launched our new project – we’ll try to collect here all of the news about development of e-government in Russia. Russian Federation, as we all know, is the largest country in the world and consists of 8 federal districts, which combine the 83 regions of the federation. That is the most important feature of our country which influences the development of the e-government there.

The e-government development processes in the Russian regions take place unevenly; the model of interaction between levels of government in e-government is still in its forming stage. The implementation of e-government is taking place in two ways: federal and regional.

As in other countries the Russian e-government development is taking place in several directions:

  • Organization of internal electronic workflow between various government authorities;
  • Providing the electronic government services to citizens and business segment;
  • Providing access to open public data via the government websites and the sites of state structures;
  • Moving of the officials into the web to start their official blogs and regional blogs;
  • Social and crowdsourcing projects implementation in the gov2.0 sector.

Once  a week we’ll publish the most important news of the e-government development in Russia, about new projects and achievements in that field.

Continue Reading

Open data is data that delivers results

Image via Wikipedia

I struck a nerve around open data, as I mentioned in my earlier article, when I stated that “XML is simply a markup language, a container for data. Is it one of the most preferred containers? Absolutely. However, open government data is not synonymous with XML. Open government data is simply government-owned data that can be mined in order to create useful information. It can be in XML, PDF, text files, print outs, etc… The key point is that the data is being released for others to use to create value from it, not the format that it is released in”.

Initial comments on twitter argued that open data had to be XML, then opened up to being any open, non-proprietary format. For developers I would absolutely agree that this makes sense. It’s much easier for developers to work with open formats like CSV and XML vs. proprietary formats like PDF. Developers, however, are not the leaders of open government.

Continue Reading