1. GG
BB CC
ITMO University (St.Petersburg, Russia)
E-Government Center
GG
GG2С2С
GG22BB
BB22CC
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Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)
Olga Filatova,
St. Petersburg State University
Andrei Chugunov, Lyudmila
Bershadskaya, Dmitrii Trutnev
ITMO University
(St. Petersburg, Russia)
E-Governance and E-Participation
Services: an Analysis of Discussions
in Russian Social Media
CeDEM14. International
Conference for E-Democracy
and Open Government
21-23 May 2014,
Danube University Krems,
Austria

2. Russian Context
 In international practice, the development of e-participation
mechanisms in public life for citizens and political decision-
makers are no longer considered new research topics.
 In Russia, the e-participation portal intended for citizens’
applications was launched in 2013.
 Therefore it is only now possible to ascertain the first
trends in how the process is advancing in Russia.
 The comparative execution of research becomes
particularly relevant due to the fact that the indicators of
“Strategy for Information Society Development in
Russia” implementation include items relating to the
position of Russia in major international e-development
indexes.

3. Research methodology & instruments
 Social media, being a popular and active field of mass
communication, can be the subject of research and a
source of information, including information about the
demand for online government services.
 The eGovernment Center ITMO University conducted a
specialized survey in June-August 2013.
 Today, there are more than 30 computer-aided tools for
searching and analysing information from social networks.
 The social media monitoring service IQBuzz (
http://iqbuzz.ru/) was selected as a research instrument.

4. IQBuzz as a research instrument
 IQBuzz - commercial tool provides social media
monitoring, including web crawling such resources as
LiveInternet, LiveJournal, Facebook, Twitter, VKontakte,
Yandex.Blogs and the video hosting services RuTube and
YouTube, as well as various news, entertainment, topical
and regional portals.
 During the monitoring process, the keywords on a set of
topics relating to the sphere of e-government and online
services were selected by the authors.
 As a result, a list of eight rubrics comprising 35 topics
of key requests was made. After that the web crawler
started working.

5. Topics
 Based on manual analysis of the collected posts and
documents, two rubrics with non-relevant documents were
excluded, but three more rubrics with additional key
requests were added.
 The monitoring was conducted
on the following topics:
 e-government,
 online services,
 multi-functional centres,
 public services,
 governors’ blogs,
 authorities’ web-sites,
 e-petition portals,
 e-cards and
 e-signatures.

6. Russian E-Participation Portal
 The Russian Public Initiative (RPI - https://www.roi.ru)
appeared in April 2013.
 This e-petition portal is operated by the Foundation for
Information Democracy, a non-profit organization led by
former RF Deputy Minister of Communication.

7. The timeframe of the monitoring
This portal had become the subject of
discussion among Internet users even
before its opening, from its inception in
2013.
The timeframe of the monitoring was the
period
01.01 - 31.07.2013.
19,200 documents on these portal topics
were found as a result of the research.

8. Discussions on the topic “e-participation”
on Russian social media
 The audience for these topics was formed from readers
and subscribers of news portals as well as Russian
oppositionists’ posts.

9. Events in 2013
 The main information bursts in the discussion relating to the
RPI are correlated with the following events in 2013:
 The Foundation for Information Democracy became executor of the
RPI project (March 5-6);
 Dmitry Medvedev issued orders on RPI portal creation (March 16-17);
 Start of voting on RPI portal (April 12-13);
 Head of the Foundation for Information Democracy responded to the
charge of an illegal increase in the number of votes against
A.Navalny’s initiative (May 29-30);
 Discussion of "100,000 votes collected, what will happen next?"
(July 5-6);
 Discussion of the initiative to repeal the law on arbitrary blocking of
Internet resources № 187-FZ (July 10-11).

10. Conclusions
As a result of analysis, we can conclude that the
Internet community has been actively interested in
the RPI portal from the very beginning of its work
and furthermore it is possible to discuss specific
initiatives placed on the portal in relation to the
growing interest.
The research results showed the scale of
discussions on social media on e-petition topics,
retrospective flashes of discussions and the
demand in this information field among Russian
citizens.

11. Conclusions
 The Internet community actively discusses the process of
obtaining public services, various ways of providing
servicing via the Internet and websites of government and
public bodies. The recently instituted Russian e-petition
portal accounted for the greatest proportion of the
discussion audience (6,700,000 people) in comparison
with other topics.
 Social media users discuss official news about e-
government projects and oppositional posts. As a rule,
these discussions are not long-lasting. Internet users even
started publishing jokes on these topics. The subscriber
audience of these humorous stories can be up to 900,000
people.

12. Conclusions
 Generally, male audiences’ main interests relate to political
topics, discussions, voting for petitions, etc. Internet users
from the 26-35 year-old age group dominate among the
authors of posts in all rubrics.
 The results of this study demonstrated the suitability of
using social media as a source of knowledge about the
attitude of citizens to the most important issues for them.
Such knowledge is vital for good governance and policy
making.
 The research revealed the necessity to improve the
process of text tonality identification and to engage the
involvement of experts in linguistics in the research.

13. Conclusions
 The researched topics are closely connected with political
decisions and discussions of law adoption, which provide
emotive aspects, i.e., approval or disapproval of any type
of law. This circumstance hinders the computer-aided
assessment of text tonality.
 Acknowledgements:
This research has been supported by Russian
Foundation for Humanities in the framework of the
project “Electronic communication between
government and society: a study of sociodynamics
and institutionalization processes“ (№ 13-03-00603).

14. Welcome!
International Conference ««Electronic Governance and OpenElectronic Governance and Open
Society: Challenges in EurasiaSociety: Challenges in Eurasia» (» (EGOSE-2014)EGOSE-2014)
St.Petersburg, Russia, 18-20 Nov 2014
http://egov-conf.ifmo.ru/

15. GG
BB CC
ITMO University (St.Petersburg, Russia)
E-Government Center
GG
GG2С2С
GG22BB
BB22CC
GG22GG
Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)Electronic Government Center (http:egov.ifmo.ru)
Olga Filatova, associate professor at the Department of
Public Relations in Politics and Public Administration at the
St. Petersburg State University filatovo@gmail.com
Andrei Chugunov, director of eGovernment Center
ITMO University chugunov@egov-center.ru