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CN in Russia - through NGOs Networks to Community Networks
Non-profit organisations in our country are the front-line troops tackling civil society and development issues. Social change is often a "thankless" matter and NGOs have to work with no resources available for promoting their ideas or for attracting appropriate attention from sponsoring agencies, government and business. It always comes up as a value-added service for them if they are in need of something. The establishment of active local NGOs new organisation structures (Networks, partnerships, coalitions etc) with participation of majority local social structures (small business, mass-media, NGO, local Governments etc) should be a good sustainable base for creating community informational networks in Russia and their empowerment in international projects in the field of community networking. The network should give equal possibilities for the residents of this territory for ICTs access and for the ability to set their own information at the community's web-server. The problem raised here is that while we are witnessing a technological and information revolution, rapid development of the internet is a huge part of social-oriented institutions in Russia, except those few megalopolies that are still being placed in strict information hierarchy. The information owner sets the criteria and price for its dissemination, and this is mostly not affordable for a vast majority of the Russian NGOs. That makes them not only miss one of the most significant achievements in information and knowledge distribution systems but dampens their spirits further, since every day that they lack technological achievements, the harder and more painful it will be for them to continue implementing their missions. The Internet has broken the information hierarchy by eliminating obstacles to global information sharing, thus equalising the relationship between those who own information and those who want it. The Internet provides a lot of information, but trusted sources are still needed to introduce it, to educate, to handle it, filter and interpret it, to turn it into knowledge. Whilst it is only a tool for NGO activities and much more is required to achieve their goals but the use of the Internet for information sharing has to do with being socially active, as the ultimate ground for any further development. One of the primary objectives in establishing information community network is to extend access and use of local, regional, national, and international information and communication services to the local public who might not otherwise have the possibility of such access. Of equal importance is the ability of civic networks to offer this same public the ability to publish information. This can prove to be of vital importance giving "voice" to such groups as non-governmental organizations, educators, government agencies, religious organizations, senior citizens, etc. But the most important objective of civic networking is to establish broad consortium of participants from various sectors of local community life who agree to work together to develop a shared information and communications resource of genuine benefit to the local community. Through the program we wish to help communities develop their own information services and supplement this software for constructing interactive bulletin board systems, email list servers, interactive chat sessions, etc. The community networks will provide software which will allow access to basic Internet service such as email, World Wide Web, telnet, ftp, etc. However, it will also make possible the easy construction of a WWW accessible version of the local information and communications network. The software must support local language content (initially handling Russian and English languages) and must provide facility for handling the different Russian character set encodings. Current activities on CN in Russia So far almost all projects connected with development of non-profit access to information resources services (above all Internet) and Russian NGO sector in Internet have been implemented through educational institutions, particularly through a number of universities.It is worthwhile describing such projects as "University Internet Centres" supported by Open Society Institute (George Soros Foundation) for free public access to Internet. Another example of successful project is non-profit initiative Friends & Partners Civil Networks. This is a cooperative Russia-U.S. planning and demonstration project supported by the Ford Foundation, Eurasia Foundation and other interested organizations. It aims to promote development and wide-spread availability of advanced telecommunications technologies and civic networking to enhance the delivery of social services and generally serve public interests; to promote access to government information and increase civic participation; and to support the advancement of an nationwide civic networking infrastructure in Russia. The main strategy of this project is a building of national Friends & Partners network through setting up a number of regional centres of free public access to informational resources (Internet) on the base of existing active social groups. The third example is, is Russian-British project "Gardarika" which will become a start-up experimental ground for our research. Together with its British partner Community Education and Development Centre (CEDC) Studio of Computer Design "Gardarika" organised the Centre for support of public initiatives in St.Petersburg on the basis of RCHI - Russian Christian Humanitarian Institute. It includes arranging of educational investigation centre of the problems of a non-commercial sector. Besides in Vyborg, Leningrad oblast, a municipal centre of support of NGO was set up. On the basis of the municipal centre, a group of specialists from Great Britain, St. Petersburg and Vyborg surveyed the principles of the cooperation between NGO, municipal administration, business and mass media. Also a working model of the regional informational net of NGO support was created (St. Petersburg-Vyborg). It allows users of this network (non-commercial organizations of the region) take advantage of Internet in their activities. This project laid down the foundation for creation of the regional network of NGO'sin the territory of Leningrad region. Internet in Russia - statistics Russia: Number of Internet users stands at over three millionOn the threshold of the third millennium Russia is lagging behind many other countries in the use of world computer technologies, a survey revealed. According to the survey conducted by the Obshchestvennoye Mneniye (Public Opinion) foundation, 51.04m Russians or 55.9 per cent, are hardly aware of the existence of the global web: 20.3 per cent of them said they had heard nothing about the Internet before being polled and 35.6 per cent declared they had heard "something". Judging from the result of the survey, 10.3m Russians, or 11.3 per cent, have access to the Internet at work, at home or at their friends'. The number of actual users is only 3.3m people, or 3.6 per cent. The web mainly remains "something in the capital" as Muscovites make up one-fourth of the users. The inhabitants of St Petersburg come next. But the interests in the Internet is growing in the major cities of the Ural, Volga and South Federal Districts. A total of 69,610 people were polled in 115 cities located in 65 federal constituents. ITAR-TASS |