Electronic Governance and Open Society: Challenges in Eurasia

The article presents results of a study of the problems, needs and ideas about the composition of decisions of a smart city when forming the concept of smart city for St. Petersburg. An independent survey of government officials was conducted. It was done in order to reveal their ideas about the composition of the necessary decisions for a smart city and also to compare results with a similar study for the population. The study of the population of St. Petersburg was carried out by a mass survey and in-depth case studies. As a result, significant differences in expectations from a smart city between these groups of stakeholders are shown. In addition, there were differences in the expectations of citizens with the requirements of international standards. The revealed effects confirm the hypothesis of the need for flexible and adaptive approaches to the creation of smart cities. Smart city should be positioned as an adaptive city for the needs of citizens.

In this paper we present methods, data and algorithms for simulating budget system in the model of the Russian Federation spatial development. We show the place of this task in methodology of our research and give a brief overview of the background results. Key objects of the budget system in the model are the federal budget, regional budgets and extra budgetary funds: pension, medical and social insurance. We determine revenues and expenditures of the budgets and funds on the basis of federal laws, Budget and Tax codes of the Russian Federation. Since the exact reproduction of excise rates and customs duties is problematic due to model aggregation, we calculate model rates of excises and duties for selected sectors on the basis of retrospective data presented on the budget system portal and in the federal input-output table. Structure of the budget expenses in the model was simplified by aggregating expenditure items into major groups correlated with sectors of the economy. Presented algorithm of the budget system simulates interaction of the federal, regional budgets and extra-budgetary funds with agents and organizations in the model. For validation of the budget system algorithms in the model we conduct retrospective modeling for the federal budget and the budget of Belgorod region in 2014.

The convergence of information and communication technologies became a determining factor for the increasing importance of smart cities technology implementation in city management. In this article the distinctive characteristics of the smart city concept, problems and new opportunities for urban governance are analyzed. The importance of smart city technology and the complexity of its implementation are highlighted. The network approach and analysis of the most successful global practices in the use of information technologies in urban governance are the benefits of this study and laid the foundation for proposing the desirable conditions for the smart city technology implementation in order to provide its efficiency. As a result these conditions can lay the basis for comparative analysis of the effectiveness of smart city projects implementation in different countries and can be used by local authorities as a strategy for smart city technologies practical application.

The paper assesses a model for a smart city development based on the citizens’ survey results. A survey of 600 Saint Petersburg citizens was conducted to reveal citizens’ understanding in three areas: (1) conceptual understanding of smart cities; (2) priority areas for smart city development (3) citizens’ attitudes, positive and negative expectations and risks. Correlation matrices were built based on citizens’ perceptions of the risk and were separated into technological, management and social categories. Of the ten selected indicators, six belong to the social group, one to the technological group and three to the management group. Findings suggest that (1) social aspects are especially important in smart city initiatives (2) conceptual understanding of smart city is still scarce; (3) awareness on priorities and risks associated to developments at the local government level is more pronounced.

Cities in the modern world are competing for resources – material, financial, scientific and, of course, human. They need investors, specialists, labour force for low qualification jobs with low wages and also tourists to adore their beauties and to bring money into the budgets. The important role in the attraction process is played by the city marketing and branding which are also some kind of resources giving new development possibilities and chances in the hard competition. It is a very new trend for modern cities to become “smart” and it is a question if “smartness” makes the city brand more attractive for various user groups or these groups are indifferent to the image of a “smart city” making the decision about the investing into the city, coming to live in this city or choosing the city as a place of interest. The situation gets even more complicated in the regions of mega-cities because of their size and complicated structure. They are not ordinary cities in a “normal” sense of the word but huge agglomerations. To make the agglomeration “smart” and to reflect this characteristic in a brand is a difficult task. The problem is not less important for St. Petersburg than for other European cities and agglomerations.

Two theories, often presented as bifurcated, dominate attempts to understand corruption in the social sciences: collective action and principal-agent. Both theories seek to explain when and why corruption happens, as well as how it can be addressed. With the ICT4D field often criticized for being under-theorized, the following study explores which theories are drawn upon to understand ICTs as an anti-corruption tool in developing countries. Through a literature review of 20 years of IS and ICT4D research, the study analyses 19 peer reviewed journal articles’ theoretical underpinnings together with methodological approaches as well theoretical contribution. The results find that even if a few studies declare some, often only cursory, theoretical underpinnings and influences, they infallibly fail to present a theoretically informed analytical framework detailing ICTs contribution to anti-corruption. In conclusion, with most of the papers containing no theoretical references, the field is still clearly struggling with theory. The article discusses the benefits with appropriating theory, such as principal-agent and collective action as well as more critical approaches to un-pack ICTs contribution to anti-corruption efforts.

Electronic participation tools are becoming increasingly popular among citizens as a means of communication with the authorities. Residents actively use dedicated websites and mobile applications to send electronic appeals on problems of the urban environment. In some big cities, it can be hundreds of thousands and even millions of messages annually. Big data allows for the analysis of civic activity and subjective perception of the environment by residents.In this paper, we studied the data of a popular Russian portal called Our St. Petersburg, which provides means for interaction between residents and organizations responsible for the elimination of environmental defects.A distribution of user activity was built based on the number of messages sent by them, which made it possible to identify groups of the most active participants. We identified the preferences of “activists” and “ordinary residents” among the most popular categories of complaints. It was found that activists are more likely to pay attention to citywide problems (for example, urban environment violations on the streets), while the majority of users are more focused on the problems of housing and communal services related to their apartment and house.

The aim of this paper is to critically reevaluate the capacity of the theories on the internet in politics to grasp the increasing impact of the internet to political space in all countries with rising internet penetration rate. At first, the paper clarifies the current level of the internet coverage around the world and Russia as one of the examples. The influence of the increasing impact of the internet for social spaces and the political space among them in countries with unlimited internet availability is discussed and the conclusion is drawn that the internet influence the political space in the most significant way. Secondly, the paper analyzes the main theoretical approaches to the internet role in politics and draws the conclusion on the shortcomings in the level of the theories and their nationally biased specifics. Finally, it is concluded that the existing theories are incapable to cover the complexity of the effects of the internet on political space. The importance of a macro-theory which can overcome the ideological biases that is characteristic for national approaches to the topic of the role of the internet in politics and can help to analyze the multilayered and controversial influence of the internet on the political space is emphasized.

The paper aims at contributing to the debate on whether open government impacts the quality of governance, and if so, identify the causal mechanisms that might be evident to support this impact. Using structural equation modeling, we test the sample of country-level data from 2014 to 2017, assessing the direct effect of open government on the government effectiveness, as well as its indirect effect via the levels of democracy and corruption. Our analysis confirms that open government may have positive effects on the quality of governance, but this effect is moderated by the level of corruption in a country.

The paper analyzes the methods of gamification in the practices of civic and political participation and it identifies research questions about the problems and prospects of this trend of social inclusion. Gamification creates a new experience of political actors, be it a leader, a political consultant or a representative of the masses; a review of the research allows us to clarify the actual “growth points” of social analytics of gamification. Particular attention is paid to cases related to game mechanics of urban participation, immersive journalism and the use of digital resources by political technologists in election campaigns. The analysis of the scientific discussion about urban participatory democracy revealed that the success of these practices is influenced not only by political will of the coordination potential of the local social structure but also by autonomy and financial capabilities of a political organization interested in civil participation and the design of the participation process. The possible examples of immersive journalism and its gamified product, newsgames, in Russian realities are such information resources as “Lentach” and “Meduza”. New digital products are actively used by politicians and political technologists at the federal and regional levels. In conclusion, the authors discussed the phenomena of interpassivity.

Currently, there has been growth of the digital economy and the informatization for most social processes. The managing socio-economic systems acquires a new specificity, both in terms of goals and means. Now special importance and prospects are opened up for the application of Big Data, Data Mining and distributed databases. The relevance of this work is to provide information support for the socio-economic management using large amounts of unstructured web-data. The research aim is the formalization of the social environment elements and decision methods of social profiling system. The concepts of social phenomenon, personal and shared social profile are formalized. Conceptual social profile models have been developed to describe the individuals and groups, as well as the complete social environment. The obtained results make it possible to systematize the social environment processes of collecting and analyzing data, providing the possibility of uniting the personal social profiles into groups and carrying out applied researches.

The emergence of super-applications is a complete game changer in how future governments will deliver e-services and interact with their citizens. With respect to this, the scope of currently established e-government stage models is exhausted. Therefore, this article proposes a “provident stage” as an extension of the Layne and Lee stage model, that adequately addresses the rapid technological development and evolvement of mobile- and smart-government solutions. We argue that super-applications can drive the transformation of e-government towards a yet unforeseen quality level: smart government. This article discusses that transition process, the influence of mobile government solutions in this as well as emerging citizens’ expectations for modern government service delivery.

This study systematizes the notion of the project e-governance as the method of maintaining consistent economic policy between the countries of the Eurasian Economic Union (hereinafter EAEU): the Russian Federation, Belarus, Armenia, Kazakhstan and Kirgizstan. The article defines conceptual space for the category “Cross-boundary projects e-governance for the EAEU countries”. The paper analyses project management development in the EAEU countries and union member states, identifies the development trends for the corresponding territories. The benchmarking reveals best experience of the e-governance projects at the state level. The authors propose and justify the EAEU cross-boundary project classification, which specifies and distinguishes the following notions: “EAEU cross-boundary IT projects of first priority” and “EAEU cross-boundary sustaining IT projects”. The article outlines the main development elements of the EAEU e-governance development institution: Strategic central project office. That is the organization, created by the Eurasian Economic Commission and dealing with planning and control of the cross-boundary project activity between EAEU members, providing methodological and administrative support that is in charge of creating project oriented project portfolio e-governance system, separate cross-functional projects e-governance system and EAEU programs e-governance system. The authors have worked out a simplified pattern of the proposed cross-boundary projects e-governance scheme in order to conduct consistent economic policy between EAEU countries.

Essential for digitalization all-as-a-service model causes the shift of state priorities from a simple provision of public information to the delivery of high-quality and efficient public services. This aspect brings a particular importance to the reengineering of public administration procedures aiming to provide public services at a new level. In this paper we propose the approach to the design and modernization of public services, as well as related business processes, which combines existing modeling methods with the enterprise architecture frameworks to ensure semantic interoperability not only at the data models level but using executable models of public service. We represent the method of public services development as semantic business processes in the context of enterprise architecture together with the results of its pilot implementation and evaluation.

While adoption of new technologies and supply of online services are in focus of measuring uptake of online services in maturity models, measurement of direct and indirect outcome and value creation for the internal and external end-users are only marginal addressed. Based on three vignettes from Norway, this paper argues that the importance of cost overrun is overestimated in the short run, while long-term benefits, as well as indirect benefits, are underestimated in public sector it-projects. We present a set of propositions for future government digitalization projects, bringing attention to the involvement of internal and external users, and bringing focus to balancing short term and long term direct and indirect costs.

The paper describes theoretical peculiarities of e-government technology introduction in suburbanized areas in the medical care of the population. The purpose of the paper is to analyze the causes, factors, characteristics and conditions of the introduction of e-government technologies in the suburban areas. The distinctive features in the needs of the population of urbanized areas of their behavioral attitudes when accessing e-government services. The study is based on the example of medical services provided to the population in the framework of the public health system in Russia.

Internet activism is one of the fastest growing phenomena in modern political practice. Due to the specifics of interaction within virtual networks, new forms of expression of public opinion have appeared, the role of an individual in the formation of the information agenda has increased significantly, and the time for information dissemination and feedback has been reduced. In this regard, the goal of this study was to create and test a methodology for assessing the involvement of users of social network sites in protest actions and campaigns on example of the “Voters Strike” action. I was possible to see that users, in many respects, played a significant role in the increased attention paid to the action both by the government and the media, and by the population. As a result of the study using the author’s methodology, it was possible to establish that, despite the high number of reactions, the overall involvement in the protest action “Voters Strike” was at a low level. From this we can conclude that the level of involvement depends on the ability of the initiator of protest activity to maintain a high level of user interest. Also, it was revealed that there is a significant difference between user activity and their involvement.

The choice of effective management decisions by city administrations on infrastructure development and resource allocation requires awareness of the processes that are going on. At the same time, the data for analyzing the situation are expensive and only a few cities in Russia can afford to purchase them. In this regard, the purpose of this study, conducted by UrbanBasis Robotics, was the development of methods for constructing an evolving model to assess the state of complex geographically distributed systems, taking into account the constantly occurring changes. It was decided to focus on the description of the dynamics of subject-object interaction at the micro level within the system as a key component of the concept of creating such a model. The concept of building the model includes a well-proven multi-agent approach. The paper provides a detailed overview of the trends in the use of multi-agents and their relevance for modeling the behavior of people and other mutually-influencing objects and processes. The principles for constructing models of changing the state of complex geographically distributed systems that take into account the dynamic properties of their constituent objects are formulated by the authors. The proposed method allows working with events of a measurable scale at the level of interactions between actors (subjects and objects) and their environment. The set of actors behavior models forms an integral model of the macro level. Software solutions for the implementation of this approach are structured in the form of a modular platform for multi-agent modeling of interactions in an urban environment. The practical result of this stage of research was the development of a client-server solution for modeling the states of complex systems in the tasks of analysis the movements and the interactions within an urbanized space. The OpenStreetMap online map data for a fragment of a real urban area is used as a template for the basis for movement. The simulation of the visualization is presented on the website of the live.urbanbasis.com project in the public domain.

The paper deals with the influence of e-government implementation on the struggle against corruption in Azerbaijan. We draw a conclusion that e-government implementation within the existing governing bodies can decrease corruption only to the certain point, corresponding the level of “overwhelming computerization” of the population.

The water area of the Northern Sea Route and the arctic zone of Russia has rather serious development limitations, connected with rather low level of information and communication support. Information and communication limitations have negative influence on the possibilities of the social and economic development of these territories. The most serious limitation seems to be low level of the security as a consequence of lack of information about the changes and limitations of monitoring and communication systems.The article justifies the need of creation of information system of infrastructure development forecasting along the routes in the waters of the Northern Sea Route in the context of global climate change. The system will be made to support decision making for the infrastructure development of the Arctic zone of Russian Federation that is the key macro region of the country playing a very important role in the social and economic development of Russia. The authors show the key factors, which determine the main requirements to the information and communication system in the Arctic zone and the main features of this system.

The use of information technologies for government or public administration (e-government) is an inherent and key element of any modern information society. It is difficult now to find a sphere where the IT would not be used. In Russia, one of the most conservative areas for the use of information technologies was the sphere associated with the implementation of state and municipal control and supervision functions. However, the State Program on Reforming Control and Supervisory Activities adopted in 2016 announced the necessity for widespread use of new information technologies in implementing state control and supervising. As a result, some of Russian state control and supervisory authorities introduced special electronic services and tools for online self-assessment, which are now actively promoted and serve for the organization of control and supervisory activities, partially displacing its traditional forms and methods. The paper provides a brief overview of existing practice of using electronic services for state control and supervising and suggests to introduce a set of regulatory principles for e-inspection tools.

This article describes the study results in the development of the method of natural language processing (NLP) of semi-structured Russian court decisions to improve the quality of knowledge extraction describing legal process. Improving the accuracy of information retrieval from electronic records of court decisions was achieved with using combination of TF-IDF and latent semantic analysis. As a result, the word combinations of facts of offenses and procedural facts that may affect the decision-making of the court are identified. The applicability of the results is shown on the example of development a decision tree ML model of the appointment of arrest or fine punishment if disobeying a police officer. Automated mapping of court decisions texts on Russian language is also possible use for the development of artificial intelligence systems and new generation decision support systems in law domain.

Maps and diagrams have long been used by science and education. The results and achievements of geography, astronomy, biology, economics have always been presented in the form of maps. Modern methods and tools of network science allow to deeper understand collaboration because relations between agents of activity are represented as a map. For many collaborative educational systems maps of relations between agents and activity products are built automatically. However, these diagrams are not used in educational practice as tools for better learning. The paper provides examples of how the diagrams were used in educational practice in order to support a group reflection of collaborative activities.

The goal of this paper is to identify the concerns of various stakeholders as well as limitations and enablers that affect the design of chatbots in the public sector. We are looking into a case from Ukraine, the LvivCityHelper bot solution, and describe the surrounding conditions and factors that determine the chatbot performance. The outcomes of the study are based on a comprehensive analysis of the state of the art and twelve interviews with experts who are involved in the LvivCityHelper bot project. The derived data is then exhibited as an exhaustive interpretation of stakeholders’ concerns on various aspects of chatbot application in public e-services. The key findings from the interviews are compared with existing work, and inclusive and exclusive crucial factors in effective chatbot services are defined. Finally, we provide suggestions and recommendations on how to fill the detected gaps that may improve the design, implementation and functioning of chatbot solutions that serve citizens’ needs.

The problem of information support of the operational-search activity of the subdivisions of the ES (economic security) and CC (countering corruption) on countering illegal banking activities is due to the fact that the information files of law enforcement, state and supervisory bodies in the database format are not sufficient for a variety of reasons efficiently and not fully, in spite of the fact that the information generated by them is capable of becoming the most important full data on legal entities and individual entrepreneurs and the features of their financial and economic activities. It is indisputable that in order to productively solve the tasks of countering illegal banking activities, an operational worker needs to have relevant and reliable information about the object of operational interest and the subject of the crime itself.The problem outlined above can be solved either by means of creating a departmental system for analyzing financial and business activities, which is quite expensive, or by using existing information and analytical systems, which requires solving the issue of the basis for access to relevant information resources.

Governments typically store large amounts of personal information on their citizens, such as a home address, marital status, and occupation, to offer public services. Because governments consist of various governmental agencies, multiple copies of this data often exist. This raises concerns regarding data consistency, privacy, and access control, especially under recent legal frameworks such as GDPR. To solve these problems, and to give citizens true control over their data, we explore an approach using the decentralised Solid ecosystem, which enables citizens to maintain their data in personal data pods. We have applied this approach to two high-impact use cases, where citizen information is stored in personal data pods, and both public and private organisations are selectively granted access. Our findings indicate that Solid allows reshaping the relationship between citizens, their personal data, and the applications they use in the public and private sector. We strongly believe that the insights from this Flemish Solid Pilot can speed up the process for public administrations and private organisations that want to put the users in control of their data.

Determining the procedure and approaches to automating real estate appraisal is an important condition for improving e-government on the basis of one of the key economic sectors throughout the state. The paper discusses a set of approaches to the analysis of factors affecting the pricing of objects that offer in a market of residential real estate. The components of the process of working with source data on real estate objects in Russia are described. Ways of extraction a structured description of particular factors, source data geocoding, merging data from various sources with the subsequent normalization of data for some factors are suggested. Testing of the proposed solutions was carried out on the basis of data sets for the Volgograd region: downloads from the ad placement site for the period from January to December 2018, data from the ReformaGKH website, the OpenStreetMap mapping project and the depersonalized information of the Unified State Register of Real Estate. Approaches to the analysis of physical (year of completion, type of object by period of construction, area of premises, number of floors of a building and floor of an apartment) and spatial characteristics of real estate objects were proposed and tested. The location quality factor is taken into account in the form of an integrated assessment of the results of the analysis of the density map of social infrastructure objects location. In general, the work offers step-by-step instructions on the formation and analysis of the information base, indicating specific sources and methods for calculating valuations, applicable for any region of Russia.

This paper provides a legal overview of the Russian secrecy regulations in one of the areas, namely communication secrecy, taken as a representative example to which big data technologies may be especially relevant if applied to analysis of masses of information that is sensitive, but at the same time very promising if processed by the big data instruments. The main legal challenge for processing of this information on a large scale is not only personal data laws, but also very special secrecy regimes of their kind. The authors analyze the applicable rules, heavily focus on detailed analysis of the voluminous case law, and provide argument for the directions of development of legislation that may enable more infusion of “open” big data technologies into these areas. The directions are focused around re-defining of legal concepts in this area, providing formal certainty of the definition of personal data and explicit recognition of anonymization techniques employing removal of “linking codes”. The authors use formal legal method and discuss the topic from the domestic legal perspective; hence, it may be useful, inter alia, for comparative legal research.

In this article the description of algorithm of an assessment of mood of the statement is presented with the accent on the context of user’s messages in social media. The article focuses on the fact that messages containing identical sentiment objects have different meaning that affects onto the evaluation of the sentiment of the message. An additional research objective is the identification of formal criteria for assigning messages to classes “core”, “periphery”, “non-relevant” to denote the role of the research relevance of the object key in the message. In this article, we have given several examples of authentic messages for each group.The method was tested on the empirical basis of more than 10,000 messages to assess the relationship of users of the social network VKontakte to the object of tonality – a form of employment “freelance”. The research methodology presupposes the use of basic and additional methods of data preprocessing, data augmentation, comparative analysis of the application of classification methods. The article includes comparative description of results of application logistic regression, support vector machines, naive Bayesian classifier, nearest neighbor, random forest.

The role of transparency and communications in central banking has risen significantly in recent decades. This trend accelerated with the advent of new information technologies, such as web sites and, more recently, social media, which allowed to disseminate information faster and among a larger audience. This paper presents a brief review of how central banks adopted those new communication channels over time. Main social media platforms used by central banks around the world are identified and differences among those platforms are described in terms of their application for different purposes of central banks’ communication policy.

The problem of elaboration of effective publication strategies of social media presence was not thoroughly studied in the context of Russian political communication. At the same time, this communication channel is becoming increasingly important on both Federal and regional levels as this exact channel provides broad opportunities related to communication with the audience, recruitment of new participants and receiving feedback. Based on the audience requests, politicians and press relations services build specific strategies of media presence, which could differ significantly in terms of its content and targeting.In this research, we conduct a comparative analysis of publication strategies used by politicians of different levels on their social network accounts. Qualitative analysis is applied to the content of the posts. We use taxonomy based on definition of the key topics highlighted by every political leader and text orientation: informing, persuasion, mobilizing or interacting.We also consider technical characteristics of strategies, such as use of video materials or external links in the posts. In order to evaluate the participation effect, we used metrics such as likes, comments and audience engagement rate. Data consolidation helped us to conclude that accounts of pro-government political leaders operate more in the informing mode and opposition use varied communicative models: informing, persuasion, and interaction in different combinations and in general are more “ingenious” in terms of content production.The research presents the variety of communicative strategies used by Russian politicians in social networks.

A critical review of modern domestic and foreign studies, reflecting the characteristics of the formation of information flows by Ukrainian network leaders on the problems of development of the Crimea in the Russian Federation aiming at the disintegration and deconsolidation of the Crimean community was done. On the basis of the carried out theoretical analysis and own research experience, a unique author’s method of analysis of the communication infrastructure of Ukrainian network flows, including social and media Analytics (using the online service for monitoring social media IQBuzz, total accumulated 1 000 000 relevant message), the method of social graphs (using the author’s software “Social graph” carried out the structuring of intra-group and inter-group relations of the most influential Ukrainian online network communities, the strategies of network leaders in the formation of user attitudes about the development of the Russian Crimea), cognitive mapping and discourse analysis of messages of Ukrainian blogs and online network communities (1200 relevant most meaningful messages, established linguistic methods of manipulation of the consciousness of the user audience). The article is devoted to the reporting about social network analysis, highlighting Ukrainian threads about the problems of development of Crimea on the types of generated discourses (Russian aggression, the illegitimacy of the annexation of the Crimea, Sevastopol and Russia, indoctrinate the Russian citizens and the discussion of the development of the Crimean community in the context of a referendum).