UDC 321.7:004.77

ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY: CONCEPT, PROBLEMS

O. V. Omelichkin

E-DEMOCRACY: CONCEPT AND PROBLEMS

O. V. Omelichkin

The article explores theoretical issues related to the use of new information technologies and the formation of e-democracy. The main problems and contradictions are analyzed. The prospects for the formation of e-democracy in Russia are considered.

The paper studies some theoretical issues related to the application of new information technologies and the formation of e-democracy. It explores the major challenges and contradictions of the process. The perspectives on the e-democracy development in Russia are subject to a detailed analysis.

Keywords Key words: information technologies, political communication, democracy, e-democracy, political participation.

Keywords: information technology, political communication, democracy, e-democracy, political participation.

IN modern conditions new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have a great influence on political life. The Internet, which forms a unified global virtual space, is of great importance. At the same time, new forms of public administration are being formed in the form of activities " e-government". Site systems are being created public institutions, parties and public organizations. In many countries, various methods of "electronic voting" are beginning to be used. As a result, politics is becoming more penetrating, public and spectacular. New forms of political communication cannot but have a significant impact on the processes of democratization. They led to the emergence of a new phenomenon called "electronic democracy", "network democracy", etc. It opens up new opportunities for citizens to participate in politics. IN modern science these processes have received a certain theoretical understanding.

J.-A. de Condorcet and other thinkers of the past. In the second half of the 20th century, new communication theories emerged. M. McLuhan saw the most important factor in the historical process in new information technologies and argued that the dominant type of communication also determines the type of society. After the pre-literate stage of the development of civilization and the stage of written culture, an “electronic society” (or “global village”) arises, which, with the help of electronic means of communication (infocommunications), forms a new multidimensional picture of the world.

Ideas that anticipated the advent of e-democracy were expressed at different times by C. Cooley, R. Park, J. Gallup, G. Lasswell, and others. O. Toffler was one of the first to record a new political phenomenon. In his book Future Shock (1970), he wrote about the emergence of "anticipatory democracy". Its essence was that the authorities, when making political decisions, should listen to the opinion of the people regarding possible consequences proposed changes. At the same time, citizens themselves, through interested groups, on their own initiative can apply with proposals

research and projects for the development of a country or an institution in government bodies. Initially, this form of democracy relied on traditional media, but with the advent of new technologies, its capabilities have grown significantly.

M. Castells states the crisis of the existing liberal model of democracy. He notes the need to move from a hierarchical system of government to a decentralized and networked one based on the development of local self-government and established horizontal links between citizens and authorities, as well as the widespread use of electronic communications.

Already in the 70s. in the United States, the first experiments began to create interactive telematics systems (in the form of "electronic city meetings"). In 1993, the first official state website of the White House appeared. Since 1998, all federal authorities began to use e-mail. The first elections over the Internet were held in 2000 in Oregon. In Estonia, local elections were held using the Internet in 2005. Another voting option involves the use of "electronic ballot boxes" that can work without being connected to the electricity grid and communication infrastructure. In Brazil, such a system has been used in municipal elections since 2000.

A portal has been created in Estonia that allows citizens to submit proposals for improving public administration and legislation, and come up with new initiatives. In Iceland and New Zealand, major bills are discussed this way. Similar examples could be continued. It is no coincidence that in 2006 the Council of Europe created a special committee on e-democracy (SAIBE) - an intergovernmental body consisting of representatives of 47 states that are members of the Council of Europe, as well as other international organizations.

As a result of such innovations, direct and feedback links are established between the authorities and citizens, working online and allowing them to conduct a continuous dialogue. This contributes to the prompt discussion of public

problems and allows you to achieve support from the population for decisions made. Thus, the nature of political governance is changing, taking on an increasingly democratic form.

The idea that the information society creates new forms and mechanisms of democratic participation is being actively developed in the scientific literature. R. Dahl wrote that interactive telecommunications systems help reduce the gap between the elite and the people, allow any citizen to ask questions and get easily accessible information about public problems in a form suitable for him. They "allow citizens to engage in discussions with experts, with political decision-makers and with ordinary compatriots" . Such democracy provides new channels of interaction between political subjects, expands the political audience and opens up new opportunities for informing and self-organizing people.

We consider e-democracy as a form of interaction between people and authorities, in which the processes of informing and involving citizens in politics, voting, joint discussion and decision-making, control over their implementation, etc. are carried out on the basis of the latest information and communication technologies.

The concept of e-democracy is being actively developed in modern science. Experts distinguish two directions in it - direct democracy (democracy of participation) and communitarian democracy. The first direction is represented by I. Masuda and B. Barber, who note the increased importance of direct participation of citizens in politics and the management of public affairs through new information channels. As a result, the political representation of professionals, officials and experts will gradually be overcome. Supporters of the communitarian approach (A. Etzioni, H. Reingold) note that various groups, associations, citizens interact in the electronic space, discuss and make decisions on a wide range of issues without the participation of professional intermediaries.

At the same time, some scholars speak of a qualitatively new stage in the development of democracy, indicating a kind of return to direct democracy with its absence of intermediaries represented by elected representatives, political parties and other structures. The introduction of new information technologies leads to the onset of the third (previously ancient and representative) era of democracy (L. Grossman).

It should be emphasized that the growing globalization of the modern world leaves a huge imprint on the democratic configuration of information networks. It weakens the control of nation-states over communication sources and promotes the wide and unhindered dissemination of political ideas and democratic experience.

However, many scientists believe that these changes affect only the technical possibilities of accelerating information processes and the provision of services, leaving the old social ties and relationships. The nature of power and political control does not change. The low level of political

civic culture and activity of citizens can devalue the full potential of the latest information technologies.

In this regard, experts note that new technologies have significant opportunities for manipulating public consciousness. Disinformation and lies penetrate any electronic networks.

They express the interests of very different political forces that control these channels. Newest technical means can also be used for anti-state terrorist activities.

This circumstance makes us doubt the democratic nature of the emerging information society. The Italian specialist D. Zolo speaks about the utopian nature of the very idea of ​​e-democracy. Availability of new interactive communication technologies (teleconferencing, public opinion polling systems, automated feedback programs, two-way cable TV etc.), allowing for constant public consultation and instant referendums, did not lead to the creation of a true democracy. The fact is that professional agencies involved in the field of communication, for the most part, work for profit and are guided by the interests of the ruling circles represented by large companies and the state bureaucracy. Therefore, they consistently hush up (or “talk out”) the most controversial social problems and stifle political innovation. This is also hampered by the growing specialization of political functions and the extreme lack of time and attention inherent in modern society. The continuous increase in the volume (redundancy) of transmitted information and the uncontrollability of processes lead to disorientation and apathy in relation to traditional collective forms of political participation and, accordingly, to the withdrawal of individuals into the sphere of private life. The author calls this effect "an intoxicating dysfunction" that replaces personal responsibility and participation.

Political practice shows that in a democratic society, political associations, organizations and other structures that usually act as intermediaries still enjoy great influence and actively use electronic means for your purposes. In addition, the technological systems themselves are the same social structures, as well as political institutions, and their activities are controlled and regulated by the state. The leading role in democracy continues to be played by various social groups and individuals who use them.

Therefore, state and public control over the mass media and the activities of the "invisible" political power is necessary. Only then the Internet and other information technologies can play an important role in the formation of democratic mechanisms of political participation.

At the same time, in modern conditions there is a noticeable reduction in direct forms of political participation. The number of political associations is decreasing. Periodically, the activity of people in the elections falls. At the same time, there is an expansion of symbolic forms of participation through the media. People become interested

observers of political events, connecting the need for knowledge and orientation in public politics with entertainment and organizing their own leisure. Such participation can result both in new forms of information exchange and self-organization of citizens, and in the imitation of democratic forums.

At the same time, it becomes obvious that, in general, ICT contribute to an increase in the level of political activity of the masses, involvement in politics of new social strata and groups (especially young people or the population remote areas), their accelerated mobilization during political campaigns, equal participation of citizens in the discussion and adoption of responsible decisions, collective control over state bodies. They expand the political space by virtualizing and doubling it.

At the same time, it is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of "electronic democracy" and "electronic government". Following other experts, we believe that the latter ensures efficiency and convenience in the provision of services to citizens by state institutions, informing them about the most important events. The democratic quality of the system is associated with additional opportunities in holding elections and personal participation of citizens in the discussion and adoption of political decisions. As a result, people get the opportunity not only to communicate their proposals and demands, but to control and partly direct the activities of public authorities.

The basic principles of e-democracy are enshrined in such an important international document as the Recommendations of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe CM/JEU(2009)1 on e-democracy. The Appendix to them defines the main directions and standards in its development.

Briefly, they look like this:

the main objective e-democracy is about supporting democracy and strengthening democratic institutions and processes.

It complements and interacts with traditional processes.

It is based on the democratic, human and cultural values ​​of society.

It is the realization of power in electronic form and includes informal politics and non-governmental actors.

Electronic democracy implements fundamental freedoms, including freedom of information and access to it, human and minority rights.

It ensures the expansion of political debate and the improvement of the quality of decisions made at all levels of government.

It can be used in various types democracy and at different stages of democratic development.

The goals and principles of e-democracy are transparency, accountability, responsibility, involvement, discussion, inclusiveness, accessibility, participation, subsidiarity, trust, social cohesion.

The media and other open sources play a key role in it. electronic platforms for public debate.

E-democracy is an integral part of the information society.

It is based on the following concepts: awareness, broad citizenship, participation, empowerment, inclusion, discussion.

She unites responsible persons and citizens in policy making, promoting social inclusion and community stability.

E-democracy enhances the international and global nature of politics and facilitates cross-border cooperation.

In general, e-democracy ensures that the opinions and proposals of the population and organizations are taken into account in the process of making political decisions and administration. It promotes the involvement of citizens in the political process in new, simpler and more accessible forms. Authorities directly interact with the people, their activities become open and effective on the basis of accelerating all procedures for discussion and adoption. management decisions and provision of public services. The goal of such a democracy is to optimize the activities of political institutions by eliminating unnecessary intermediary structures and information barriers, as well as direct and active political participation of the people in public affairs.

As part of this process, social networks of free political communication and cooperation and the wide dissemination of any information and projects are being created. On this basis, new social network political movements are being formed, which are gradually replacing traditional parties and political parties in the eyes of the audience. public organizations. For "implicit" communities and interest groups, such movements can become convenient form political organization and education, coordination of collective actions that ensure the situational mobilization of citizens and the development of political goals that unite them. They are characterized by the presence of many opinion leaders and the existing levels of information interaction. At the same time, all members of the network community remain independent and independent of any structures, voluntarily enter into political unions and assume any responsibility, guided by their own ideas and beliefs. Thus, the political configuration of society takes the form of a set of autonomous agencies and associations.

In Russia, there are all the prerequisites for the development of an electronic political space. Even now, the country ranks first in Europe and sixth in the world in terms of the number of Internet users. The total number of users is about 70 million people. The Internet is becoming the second most important source of news about events in the country and in the world after television. According to VTsIOM data (March 2013), the share of Internet users is 67% of the population, and 41% of them do it daily. Among those surveyed, 53% expressed confidence that the development of the Internet is beneficial to our society. It provides quick access to information and expands the possibilities for communication. However, 24% see more harm in this, because, in their opinion, this space is filled with “empty”, harmful information and negatively affects young people (“zombie”, stupidity) .

At the same time, the overwhelming majority of Russians agree that there are indeed many dangerous sites and materials on the Internet, and therefore it is necessary to introduce censorship and limit access to it for teenagers.

In July 2013, the fund " Public opinion” conducted a study, the purpose of which was to find out how widespread civic initiatives are on the Internet. It turned out that among those who visit the Internet at least once a month, 15% of the respondents showed civic activity. At the same time, over the past six months - a year they had to do the following on the Internet: speak out on social and political problems on blogs, social networks, news sites - 6%, visit the websites of parties, public (non-profit) organizations, political leaders - 5%, donate money to charitable foundations, strangers in need -4%, participate in Internet voting on political issues - 2%, post information about local problems on centralized services (for example, a garbage dump, a broken playground, etc.) -2% , join groups of parties / political leaders in social networks - 1%, disseminate information about social and political problems and events - 1%, join groups of public (non-profit) organizations, initiatives to solve public problems and help those in need of social

networks - 1%, sign petitions, bills, appeals on the Internet - 1%, participate in public examination of bills - 1%. Among active users, these figures are significantly higher. At the same time, 81% of respondents did not do any of the above.

It is obvious that political activity is still typical of a small part of Internet users. However, the study showed that people who show high civic activity on the Internet are more ready than others to unite for joint actions, tend to trust people from their environment. They are more likely to express their readiness to organize and participate in social events, as well as to donate money to various social projects.

E-democracy provides the population with various public services and information about the activities of relevant institutions, allows citizens to participate in the discussion of socially significant problems and the adoption of important decisions, in monitoring their implementation. Its main mechanisms are electronic voting, surveys, network communication in online mode, appeals and proposals of citizens, the formation of communicative communities and the organization of their activities. All this should contribute to the development of self-governing principles in public life and the implementation in new forms of the main civil rights and freedom.

A. A. Bashkarev

ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY AS A FORM OF POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

The work is presented by the Department of Political Science of the St. Petersburg State Polytechnic University. Scientific adviser - Doctor of Political Science, Professor S. M. Eliseev

The article is devoted to political communications in modern computer networks, and in particular to the phenomenon of electronic democracy. Classical concepts are considered in comparison with the opinions of modern scientists, the main priorities for the development of computer technologies are outlined as a tool for maximum involvement and participation in the political life of all members of society.

Key words: politics, communications, Internet, engagement.

The article is devoted to the political communications in the Internet, in particular the phenomenon of electronic democracy. Classical concepts are considered in comparison with opinions of the modern scientists. The author designs the basic priorities of development of computer technologies for maximal involvement and participation of all members of society in the political life.

Key words: policy, communications, the Internet, involving.

The concepts of e-democracy refer to theories that consider computers and computer networks as essential tool in a democratic political system. E-democracy is any democratic political system in which computers and computer networks are used to perform essential functions of the democratic process, such as the dissemination of information and communication, the unification of citizens' interests, and decision-making (by deliberation and voting). These concepts are different

by the possibility of using a direct or representative form of democratic government and by the degree of activity of citizens in the state. What these concepts have in common is the belief that the various properties of new media, such as interactivity, faster ways of communicating information, the ability to connect large numbers of users to each other, an abundance of information, and new user control over processes, can positively influence democratic political system 1.

The term “e-democracy” has at least two interpretations2. The first, earlier and more specific, involves the implementation of political activity through new information and communication technologies. The second, more recent interpretation of e-democracy is based on the scholarly notion that new technologies improve citizenship in the broadest sense, becoming the center of politics and governance.

The analysis of e-democracy is carried out in modern political science mainly in the context of the conceptual apparatus of traditional concepts of democracy: liberalism, republicanism and the theory of participatory democracy.

The liberal tradition, which took shape thanks to the work of J. Locke, considers the “democratic expression of the will of citizens” as a private element of the political system, structurally formalized within the framework of the constitution and involving the separation of powers and the legal regulation of legislative activity. The concept of teledemocracy largely draws its arguments from the economic model of democracy by E. Downes, which was formed in liberal political theory in the 1950s. This model is based on the idea of ​​rationality of political behavior: each actor seeks to maximize the result of its activities in the economic sense, i.e., to get more results at lower costs. With this approach, politics is viewed as a market, where competition and mutual exchange take place in order to obtain the most beneficial result. Two main premises economic theory democracies in this regard are the most important: firstly, “every government tries to maximize political support”, and secondly, “every citizen tries rationally to maximize the utility of the result of his action”3.

These premises determine the understanding of the features of a democratic system, in which both those who rule and those who are ruled act guided not by ideals, but by their own real interests. The attempts of any government (respectively, any political force in the form of a party) to maximize support pursue a pragmatic goal: to maintain its dominance or win dominant positions.

The notion of society as an originally political entity (societas civilis) essentially identifies democracy with the political self-organization of society as a whole and is based on the republican tradition dating back to Aristotle, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Hegel, Tocqueville. The state as a bureaucratically self-contained administrative mechanism must again become part of society as a whole.

An equally important area of ​​theoretical research within the framework of the republican political tradition has become the concept of "deliberative" (deliberative), reflective or reflective democracy. Its core idea is a permanent and as broad as possible political discourse in society, the results of which are determined not by the balance of power, but by the strength of arguments. The deliberative process acts as a “democracy of discovery” for the society itself of the meaning of the decisions made and their consequences. The model of deliberative democracy, developed by the German philosopher J. Habermas, suggests the ideal of a society of free and equal individuals who determine the forms of living together in political communication. The procedure for forming the opinions and will of the people should be conceived as a democratic self-organization, and the decision is legitimate, in the discussion of which the largest number of citizens took part4.

The relationship between civil society and the state, in the interpretation of Habermas, trans-

are formed in such a way that "the principles and structures of the rule of law are analyzed as a mechanism for the institutionalization of the political discourse of the public." At the same time, institutionalization is understood as both the rationalization of opinions and the enforcement of legislative programs. Deliberative democracy is not just the power of the opinions of the people, but rather the possibility of the power of reason, obtained in the institutions of communication between citizens. The purpose of communication is to reach consensus.

The concept of deliberative democracy is actively used in modern studies of the Internet as a democratic public sphere. Theorists of participatory democracy - J. Wolf, F. Green, B. Barber - remain true to the central idea classical theory democracy about ability ordinary people manage yourself; they believe that a democratic system of political power does not yet exist in full, that the status quo cannot be maintained, but that it is necessary to achieve a universal effective involvement of the masses in the political decision-making process. Against elite tyranny, a well-informed public is needed that can exercise democratic control through general elections and representative institutions. Civic literacy is characterized as a set of abilities that make it possible to function in a democratic community, think critically, act deliberately in a pluralistic environment. The Internet is seen as the most important means of establishing direct democracy.

In many Western studies, the main goal of e-democracy is declared to increase the level of political participation. Analyzing the role of the Internet as a guarantor of democracy is one of the most promising directions in political theory. Modern information technologies not only change

change the form of implementation of democratic procedures, but also the very essence of development social processes. Describing the role of new information technologies in the 21st century, R. Dahl notes: “We have barely begun to seriously consider the possibilities they open up and carried out the very first, timid trials on an insignificant scale”5.

The classical concept of democracy comes from the postulate: democracy is based on the common interest of the majority of citizens, which forms their common will. Nevertheless, in a post-industrial society, the former forms of solidarity are disintegrating, and a pluralization of positions and interests is emerging. Differentiation of ideas, principles, values, norms of behavior fragments civil society, hinders the achievement of the degree of agreement that is necessary for the democratic governance of society6.

End of XX century marked the transition from the "politics of interests and goals" to the "politics of values". Modern political science proceeds from the fact that the "old politics" - "party politics" (party politics), parties of the old type, based on a class basis, on the interests of social groups, the division of the party spectrum into "left" and "right", traditional electoral systems and systems of representation are gradually becoming a thing of the past. New ones take their place social movements and new social practices, including in the system of representation, the “democracy of participation” is expanding, the task of expanding the use of “direct democracy” has again been put on the agenda. The Internet plays an important role in this process.

It should be noted that mass political participation is only one of the many key functions of politics through the Internet. Equally important functions of the Internet that can strengthen the institutions of representative democracy are: providing conditions for the competition of parties and the competition of candidates,

activation and involvement of civil society, ensuring transparency and increasing accountability in the decision-making process, as well as their effective communication from power structures to citizens.

A key question in evaluating the role of information technology for democracy is how much governments and civil society will learn to use the opportunities provided by new channels of information and communication to promote and strengthen the basic representative institutions that bring citizens and the state together. Considered in this way, the opportunities for public participation created by new technologies are certainly important, but the Internet is also capable of generating information, increasing the transparency, openness of activities and responsibility of national and international authorities, as well as strengthening channels of interactive communication between citizens and intermediary institutions. These are special features, and the Internet implements some of them better than any other means. In particular, the Internet could provide a more suitable means of interaction in political campaigns for minority parties than traditional mass media (newspapers, radio, television); provide greater one-time access to information for journalists, official documents and current legislative initiatives and proposals.

The rapid spread of the Internet provides an opportunity for an unlimited number of people to quickly access the texts of draft laws at the stage of their preliminary development, as well as to the maximum amount of analytical information of an unclassified nature. By reducing the cost of receiving and transmitting information, a group of people who have the opportunity to participate

in the development and adoption of politically significant decisions, significantly increases - potentially to the level of the entire politically active population. As a result, prerequisites are being created for a gradual decrease in the acutely felt inequality of political opportunities for citizens of formally democratic states, which is predetermined by inequality in the distribution of property and income7.

Nevertheless, it would be completely unreasonable to leave without scientific analysis the problems associated with the dangers and risks of e-democracy, in particular the danger of manipulation of voting and election data due to the lack of sufficient data protection, the danger of dividing society into those who own information and those who who does not own (digital division), and, as a result, infringement of the principle of democracy of choice, there is also the danger of propaganda by criminal and extremist groups and their influence, especially on the younger generation8.

The discussion about e-democracy in recent years has shifted towards the discussion of e-government projects. In the Russian case, e-government means, first of all, increasing the effectiveness of the mechanisms of state control over citizens in the areas of tax collection, combating crime, etc.9 The Western approach implies, in addition to facilitating communication, strengthening citizens' control over the government, which the introduction of public performance indicators of the latter. It is important to note that if informatization is rapidly developing “at the top”, without penetrating into society, it deprives citizens of the opportunity to monitor the activities of state structures, check them, and therefore not only does not make the state more transparent, but can also strengthen the state’s monopoly on information. Electronization "from above" will thus give

the ruling elite additional opportunities to manipulate society and the individual.

The greatest prospects in Russia are the process of using Internet technologies to further expand opportunities existing system representative democracy and the development of “electronic democratization” processes. Its main meaning is to use the Internet in order to expand the access of voters and media representatives to legislative activities, reduce the costs of forming associations and associations of voters, and increase the efficiency of feedback between voters and their representatives in legislative bodies.

For Russia, the problem of “new despotism”, i.e., sophisticated and refined forms of manipulating society with the help of modern technologies communications, mass culture, political process. "New Despotism"

does not resort to open violence, the suppression of individual rights, the abolition of democratic institutions; The construction of liberal democracy is preserved, but its content (the functions of civil will) is emasculated. Thus, B. Barber points out that "new technologies can become a dangerous conductor of tyranny..."10, and thus the "new despotism" is able to take people's lives beyond the bounds of political existence11.

Technology, thus, can change the methods of regulation, but does not change their essence, and the dependence of the emergence of information openness as a consequence of the electronization of relations between citizens and state institutions cannot be called straight. The introduction of "electronic democracy" is not able to make the police state more open, however, it allows to improve the system of expression of will and increase the political participation of each member of society in cases of healthy functioning of one or another political system.

NOTES

1 Vershinin M. S. Political culture as a reflection of the political and communicative reality of society // Actual problems of communication theory: Collection of scientific papers. St. Petersburg: SPbSPU Press, 2004, pp. 98-107.

2 Vartanova E. Finnish model at the turn of the century: Finnish information society and media in a European perspective. M., 1999. S. 85.

3 Downs A. An Economic Theory of Democracy. New York, 1957. C. 37.

4 Habermas J. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989. P. 118.

5 Dahl P. On Democracy. M., 2000. S. 179.

6 Kovler A. I. The Crisis of Democracy? Democracy at the turn of the XXI century. M., 1997.

7 Vershinin M. S. Political communication in the information society. SPb.: Publishing House of Mikhailov V.A., 2001. S. 90-91.

8 Vershinin M. S. Political culture as a reflection of the political and communicative reality of society. pp. 98-107.

9 Peskov D.N. Internet in Russian politics: utopia and reality // Polis. 2002. No. 1. S. 37.

10 Barber B. Three Scenarios for the Future of Technology and Strong Democracy // Political Science Quarterly, Winter 1998-1999. Vol. 113. No. 4. C. 581-582.

11 Kapustin BG Modernity as a subject of political theory. M., 1998. S. 229.

The farther, the more people talk about "electronic democracy" everywhere. It has become a catchphrase, like "nanotechnology". But if it’s clear to everyone about nanotechnology that you won’t understand it so easily, you need special knowledge (and besides, they suspect that with the prefix “Ros-” this is generally bullshit and cut), then electronic democracy seems to be intuitive and, moreover, a good thing: democracy is generally good, but electronic, that is, without leaving home, via the Internet, well, this is modern, it probably gives more opportunities, and, in any case, one can be more independent from the authorities, or maybe , and in general, you can encrypt everything, let them try to get us ...

The elections to the Coordinating Council of the Opposition that took place in the fall fueled the general impatient expectation even more: now, we have registered in a reliable way (that is, we fenced ourselves off from doubles and bots and even figured out and neutralized the attack of the Mavrodians); then voted, elected deputies to our representative body; and besides, on our specialized Internet platform "Democracy-2" we can now "discuss issues" and "make decisions"... Electronic democracy, direct democracy, direct electronic democracy - go ahead!

Are these expectations too high? Is this really the reality of today, or is it just a project for the foreseeable future, or is it just dreams and myths about a golden age?

Before attempting to answer these questions, we must agree on what we mean by e-democracy. The various vague "umbrella" formulations offered here, and especially in the West, make it possible to put every creature under this umbrella in pairs, as in Noah's ark during the flood. Attempts to classify all this living creatures, that is, types of electronic democracy, are also diverse and contradictory. Below I will try, as far as possible within the framework of a newspaper article, to present several conceptual aspects and the current state of affairs in this area and show what is really significant projects the transformation of today's imperfect democracy cannot be born from good wishes alone plus access to the Internet; serious developments are needed, including programming, algorithmic and even mathematical ones.

I have been dealing with this topic for many years, mainly in the European context, and I have probably managed to make a lot of enemies there, constantly proving in articles and speeches at numerous conferences that most of the initiatives and arguments in this area are either obvious and do not contain a qualitative leap, or, conversely, cannot be implemented without serious conceptual justifications and algorithmic developments. There are almost no serious developments, most of the projects are treading water within simple tasks and existing mechanisms.

What is e-democracy? First, it should not be assumed that this is some fundamentally new form of democracy. Everything that can be done with computers and network communications can, generally speaking, be done without them; information and network technologies (hereinafter abbreviated as ICT) only provide an opportunity to do something faster, more accurately and, most importantly, on a much larger scale. Scalability is the main advantage. So, e-democracy is a set of types, forms and aspects of “just democracy”, expanding to a previously impossible scale and previously impossible efficiency.

Parenthetically, it should be noted that “electronic democracy” and “electronic government” are two completely different concepts. Whether to consider “government” as an agency for enforcing its citizens to comply with laws (regulator state) or as an agency for providing services to them (provider state) - in both cases we have a hierarchical structure of state institutions (“government”), somehow interacting with objects of regulation or subjects of service provision. Each such elementary interaction (for example, filing a tax return or obtaining a copy of a birth certificate), of course, can be greatly simplified by the use of ICT; the same applies to the interactions of state institutions with each other. The scope of all such applications of ICT is called “e-government”. The results should, of course, be transparency, less bureaucracy, more efficient public institutions, and so on. Everyone is theoretically interested in this - and those who obstruct these processes can be written down in advance as corrupt officials. And yet all this is by no means e-democracy, since it does not refer to the participation of citizens in the management of society and the state.

This participation of citizens itself may be limited to the election of representatives to legislative bodies (representative democracy) or give the opportunity to personally participate in the adoption of specific decisions. The second possibility is considered to be related to the field of direct democracy. In fact, however, there are many intermediate stages and gradations between pure representative democracy and ideal direct democracy. As for the actual representative democracy, here the conversation is mainly about electronic voting. Different options for rating voting, voting in many rounds, etc. – all this becomes possible thanks to IST. But final result it seems to be always the same: they chose their “representatives” and retired for four years (or more), they decide everything for us.

The most flexible form of representative democracy is the so-called liquid democracy, in Russian called "mobile" by some, "cloudy" by others. Each citizen can transfer his vote, in whole or in part, to any other citizen, and separately for each issue under discussion. On pension reform, let Vasya represent me at 40% and Kolya at 60%, and on interethnic disputes, I divide my vote even among my four representatives; at the same time, at any moment when I don’t like someone, I will take my vote from him and give it to another - or leave it to myself if I have a desire to make decisions myself ... Such fantastic flexibility cannot be realized otherwise than by a specially programmed network tool.

Let me emphasize: we are talking about the flexibility of the “decision-making” process, but not the process of “discussing and developing decisions”. This is a very significant limitation. Someone discusses some problems and develops solutions, and I either vote myself, choosing the solution I like, or remove myself, transferring my vote to those whom I trust. The option when citizens are invited to vote directly on some issues, without representatives, is the democracy of referendums, which has long been practiced without any Internet in many countries, most widely in Switzerland. It is this variant that is usually called "direct democracy" - as we will see in a moment, for lack of a better variant.

Indeed, the original and most authentic direct democracy - the democracy of the People's Assembly in Ancient Athens - did not consist only in the possibility for any citizen to vote on any issue. It also included the opportunity to raise any issue in the meeting* and participate in its discussion. It was thus "deliberative direct democracy", the highest form of democracy. Of course, they will immediately say that, firstly, not every inhabitant of Athens had this right (only a minority were citizens); secondly, although there were no restrictions for citizens under the law, but social restrictions acted - as everywhere and always, and not every citizen had a real opportunity to use this right to raise and discuss issues. And most importantly, in Athens there were a maximum of 60 thousand citizens, and the quorum of the assembly was 6 thousand, every tenth, and it was due to such a high percentage that the People's Assembly could be considered representative. And what about today, a country with 140 million citizens or even a city with 1 million - how can you organize any kind of discussion when any forum on the Internet is immediately littered and fizzles out in empty chatter and mutual abuse?

So, of course, we would like to have the opportunity to participate in the discussion of state or other socially significant issues; and it is clear that without the Internet it is definitely impossible. But here we have a computer at home, we have access to the Internet - and where is the platform where at least several thousand participants could discuss the same issue together, offer their solutions, compare and comment on them, process and bring them together - and only at the very end, if not agreed, by voting to choose one of the competing options?

There is simply no such platform, such a system or tool yet, neither here in Russia nor anywhere else in the West. There are many Internet forums, more or less specialized, more or less simulated. Such, for example, is the platform "Democracy-2" (website Democratia2.ru). It, of course, has a rich assortment of functions of voting, petitions, elections, delegating one's voice - but all these are precisely the mechanisms of a democratic CHOICE from alternatives proposed by someone before. Of course, any participant can propose a new topic or problem, but without efforts to focus the attention of citizens on the proposed problem and without a clearly developed procedure for discussing it, all activity in such a forum does not and cannot go beyond a few small get-togethers. Go to the site democratia2.ru, register, visit any topic that is currently being discussed - and you will see for yourself. The book “Cloud Democracy” by L. Volkov and F. Krasheninnikov describes and substantiates in detail the mechanism for delegating votes when discussing a particular problem, but nothing is said about the procedure for the discussion itself. Igor Eidman, an opponent of Volkov and Krasheninnikov, also passes over it in silence, criticizing the very idea of ​​delegating votes in his book "Electronic Democracy".

Why is the negotiation process so important? Is it really not enough to transfer to the Internet space the usual parliamentary procedures, according to which the parliaments of democratic countries, consisting of several hundred deputies, work at the very least? To begin with, we note that in a "living" parliament there is almost never a general discussion. Any issue, any bill is worked out first by the relevant committee and in parallel - in the party factions. The plenary discussion thus boils down to the presentation of an already prepared version and a confrontation of factional opinions, one opinion from each faction. The overwhelming majority of deputies in this procedure are mere extras, waiting for the moment when it will be necessary to vote, "as my faction orders." It cannot be otherwise: 450 people, all together and at the same time, cannot discuss anything in a “live” meeting.

But on the web, can they? And if not 450 people, but 10, 100 times more? And if the discussion is open to all citizens, as it should be in a true deliberative direct democracy, and, moreover, the problem under discussion does not leave indifferent a significant part of society? I bet that with an adequately chosen “acute” problem and after a wide campaign to alert citizens through various media channels, a well-organized Internet site will gather at least 50, or even 100 thousand participants in a week. Here are three such topics off the top of your head - you can easily continue the list yourself. 1. How should a publicly controlled and efficient law enforcement system be organized? 2. How to ensure the rights of national communities throughout the territory of the Russian Federation, and not only in territorial autonomies? 3. How to ensure the right of children to safety, health and education, without excessive control over the life of families and without infringement of the rights of parents (the problem of "juvenile justice")?

In each case mentioned, it is proposed for discussion not a ready-made bill with kilometers of formalities and an already fixed structure and ready-made solutions (or a carefully disguised absence of them), but it is precisely an acute topical problem that may require non-standard solutions, when the wider the circle of participants, the more likely it is to find such decisions.

When a bill already prepared at the top is being discussed, even with the opportunity not only to criticize it, but also to propose alternative versions of its individual provisions and points (this is called Consultation in the West, and in our country “public hearings”), then the attention of the participants is scattered between these many points; nevertheless, the activity of several hundred participants can sometimes concentrate on the key and most controversial provisions. We saw this in 2010 during the discussion of the draft law “On Police” initiated from above: 16,000 active participants, 22,000 proposals and comments ... And at the same time, except for the first few days of discussion, in the future, almost none of the new “proposers” read previous proposals already submitted. This can be seen from the distribution of the number of evaluations of new proposals: it quickly decreased to almost zero. As a result: a) many “equivalent” proposals were submitted, practically not compared and not discussed by the participants; b) the sorting of proposals and the selection of the allegedly most supported were carried out by the staff of some institution in the system of the Ministry of Internal Affairs, which reduced the public significance of the discussion to zero.

What does it say? About how quickly the “limit of attention” of each individual participant is reached, that is, the amount of information after which the new one is no longer perceived. Does this mean that the discussion of any problem in a community with thousands (or maybe tens or hundreds of thousands) of active participants is impossible in principle? Indeed, the Internet facilitates communication by removing the restrictions imposed by distance and time; but the Internet itself does not expand the possibilities of our perception - or expands them only slightly (and even then due to the greater superficiality of our judgments).

The authors mentioned above, of course, are aware of this problem and try to get around it in their own way: Volkov and Krasheninnikov postulate a decrease in the number of participants due to delegating some of their votes to others, Eidman a priori proceeding from the fact that each specific problem will attract to its discussion only a limited number of citizens, while all other citizens will simply ignore the discussion, "waking up", perhaps, only by the time of voting on the proposed alternatives. In both cases, the calculation is based on the generally low public interest in the problem under discussion.

Maybe this will be the case - when we already have full Switzerland for 100 years, peace and quiet, tranquility and prosperity, and only from time to time something needs to be slightly updated and corrected ... But to this level of democratic stability, not only we here in Russia it is very far away - this old Europe itself is now shaken by disputes and clashes, which no one expected 20-30 years ago, and, moreover, generated by real problems: a critical percentage of immigrants, the withdrawal of production to China and Southeast Asia, the instability of financial markets . In a large project that my European colleagues and I are going to launch in several European countries in the near future, we expect to choose an acute problem for discussion in each country, which will bring together at least 10,000 active participants.

How are we going to organize such a mass discussion? The newspaper article format does not allow you to go too deep into technical details. The basic principles are set out in several of my articles (in English), which the curious reader can easily find on the Internet. In a few words: the discussion of the problem begins after the participants get acquainted with the "expert reviews" provided to them on this topic. Participants' new proposals (as well as their comments - "posts" in Internet slang) are sent for anonymous review to other participants randomly selected by the system. Reviewing consists in assessing the quality of a new proposal (clarity, reasoning ...) and in expressing the degree of agreement (or disagreement) of the reviewer with the idea expressed in the proposal. At the same stage, the entire mass of posts that clearly contradict the rules of discussion are cut off: containing personal attacks, commercial advertising, leading away from the topic, etc. Note that this is done by the community of participants themselves, without the intervention of full-time moderators; and the initial mailing to randomly selected reviewers provides a certain guarantee of the objectivity of the quality assessment.

The system constantly groups and regroups (that is, distributes into several “clusters”) the entire set of submitted proposals, based on the available pairs of assessments and sometimes requesting additional ones. This clustering is carried out according to some algorithm, mainly taking into account the distribution of the "degree of agreement" of different participants with different proposals. The sentences within each cluster are then "ranked" by the system by their average quality score, so that at the top of each cluster is the sentence that (the system assumes) best expresses the idea of ​​all the other sentences in that cluster. In such a structured presentation, any participant can easily and quickly navigate to familiarize themselves with the main ideas expressed before submitting their new proposal or correcting or commenting on someone else's already written.

For example, a situation is quite real when in the first days of discussion of the problem posed, 500 different proposals were submitted, which were distributed by the system into only 10 clusters, corresponding to 10 different ideas contained in them. In parallel, the discussion participants evaluate, comment and edit the submitted proposals. At the next stage, the participants first try to "aggregate" proposals within each cluster, and then find compromise solutions for ideologically compatible clusters; but this process still needs to be clarified in many respects.

The described approach to direct deliberative (electronic) democracy undoubtedly contains many still open questions, the solution of which can only be achieved by further theoretical developments, verified in practical experiments. Here are some of those questions. How to organize the interaction between "experts" (carriers of knowledge on a given problem) and participants in the discussion (carriers, generally speaking, of different, sometimes even opposing value systems)? How to assess the objectivity of these experts themselves, moreover, in a way that is convincing for the participants? How to coordinate the discussion of various related topics or problems, including those that dynamically arise in the process of discussing the initial “core” problem? How to ensure the stability of the system, its "self-defense" from information attacks like the one that was undertaken by the Mavrodians during the elections to the opposition Constitutional Court? What types of trust ratings or other ratios might be useful to encourage constructive and parliamentary behavior among participants?

On some of these issues I have my own proposals, others have already been partially worked out in some experimental systems, mainly in the West. None of the existing experimental systems, however, is designed to be scalable to tens, maybe even hundreds of thousands of participants, a capability that may be in demand at the first attempt to apply it in the context of an open discussion of a hot topical problem, when participants know that the results of the discussion will either be taken into account by the current authorities, or will be included in the program of a broad opposition coalition. At the same time, projects of “open public hearings” initiated by the authorities based on systems like WikiVote! - although they can sometimes boast of a total number of participants and posts (however, several times less than in the above-mentioned discussion of the bill "On Police" on the website of the Ministry of Internal Affairs) - in fact, they break up into many discussions of individual items, each of which turns out to be far away not so crowded. But the very principle of direct democracy lies in the fact that in the absence of election, the legitimacy of the decisions made is achieved not only by openness, but also by a real mass character of the discussion.

A separate question: who can or should choose the most pressing issues for discussion? This question, oddly enough, is much simpler than the question of the effective organization of the discussion process itself, because the list of problems only needs to be arranged in order of priority, while the list of solutions to this problem has to be reduced to one. In the first experiments, probably, the problem for discussion will be chosen, so to speak, from above, but not by the authorities, but by the organizers of a specific project. In the future, the prioritization of problems can be carried out by the citizens themselves, as is already being done successfully, for example, in Iceland. In general, it should be noted that sparsely populated northern countries populated by sensible northern citizens (Iceland, Estonia, Finland) are at the forefront of state-supported experiments in the field of e-democracy.

So, a true direct democracy should enable all citizens to make their proposals and discuss them among themselves; a system that allows this to be done must be ready to "serve" a very large number of participants; such a system is impossible without the implementation of new and very specific algorithms, with the help of which the participants, each acting in a fairly free manner and without excessive efforts, can collectively achieve an agreed result.

This is a matter for the future; hopefully in the next few years. Thus, my answer to the question posed in the title of the article is this: e-democracy in its fullest, most open and most creative version of direct deliberative democracy is a real project, but not today's project, but tomorrow. This does not mean, of course, that the tools and methods available today should not be used; but don't expect too much from them. One should not expect today that "all your proposals will be considered"; for the majority of citizens, it will still be possible only to choose from several proposals made by the “most enterprising comrades”, the same Coordinating Council, for example.

* Over time, the right to “raise questions” was more and more assigned to the elected body (Council of Five Hundred), but really ALL citizens of the Athenian policy could discuss the issue raised by the council and offer their own alternatives.

ELECTRONIC DEMOCRACY BELOW VIEW

The phrase "electronic democracy" arose long before the widespread use of the Internet. When interactive cable television appeared in the American state of Ohio in the 70s, citizens got the opportunity to follow the meetings of the local administration, as well as express their opinion through instant push-button voting (later Professor M. Castells writes: “The Internet can be used by citizens to watch their governments - rather than by governments to watch their citizens").

Such an electronic citywide meeting showed that there was a technical tool for organizing remote meetings. social interactions, and already then gave rise to expectations that new communication technologies could ensure the implementation of the principles of freedom of speech. Teledemocracy technologies were widely used by Ross Perot during the 1991 election campaign, which forced his rival B. Clinton to follow this example. We will return to electoral technologies below.

The emergence of Internet technologies has greatly increased the influence of society on political power. The mechanisms of e-democracy have long been used in the West. An example is the Pirate Party. The fighters for freedom of information and copyright have become a serious social and political movement, spread their activity to 40 countries and won two seats in the European Parliament. Another example is the Active Democracy party, which has been active in Sweden since 2002. Canada, Singapore, Holland, Finland, Norway, Australia, and Estonia have made notable progress in this area.

According to Wikipedia, e-democracy (e-democracy) is a form of direct democracy characterized by the use of information and communication technologies as the main means for collective thinking and administrative processes (informing, making joint decisions, monitoring the implementation of decisions, etc.) at all levels, starting from the level local government and ending with international. In a broad sense, this means taking into account the opinions and involvement of citizens and organizations in political decisions and processes. The challenge for e-democracy is to ensure that citizen participation in public policy decision making was easier and simpler. E-democracy can help citizens become more involved in policy making, make decision-making more transparent, bring government closer to the people, and increase its political legitimacy.

Unlike e-government, which is created “from above” to serve the interests of the state, e-democracy is designed primarily to reflect the interests of citizens and, accordingly, be created “from below”.

In the previous material, it was shown that if the authorities communicate their intention to benefit the population, then the true motives for such initiatives are usually related to the implementation of laws, the use of funds, the implementation of plans, career considerations, etc. Only in rare cases do citizens get what really works and what they really need.

As a result, the influence of the virtual environment on the real life of the country is increasingly felt. The activity of people is increasingly manifesting itself in a new, informal capacity. The Internet is becoming not only an additional space for self-organization of citizens, but also a platform for asserting their rights and freedoms. The most notable public initiatives of recent times - both protest activity and mutual assistance - were carried out with the help of Internet communications. Social media in general and the blogosphere in particular are alternative media, in which the majority of Internet users have much higher trust than in the authorities and traditional media (according to the Levada Center, only 16% of citizens trust local authorities, and this the level of trust decreases every year).

The ideas of Government2.0 are gaining more and more supporters. The number of projects that make the Internet a tool for solving society's problems is growing, and their scope is expanding. Below we will consider some new public initiatives from various regions of the country, developing on the principles of e-democracy.

Let's start a brief review of initiative projects of public monitoring of power with the famous RosPil A. Navalny. It's a control system public procurement, on which, according to the president, "they steal a trillion a year." The site is dedicated to the fight against officials who use the public procurement system for personal enrichment. This is not just a collection of information about theft and collective indignation, but concrete work for each competition with the involvement of experts. The wide popularity of the project made it possible to unite the Internet wallets of ordinary people to fight corruption: when the fundraising for the operation of the project was announced, 3 million rubles were received in the first week. The total amount of orders for which violations were stopped exceeded 7.5 billion rubles.

Under the auspices of the Institute modern development there is a project by I.Begtin RosGosZraty, created to analyze and monitor public spending in Russian Federation and based on open and public data. Information is tracked by state grants and government contracts (at the expense of the federal budget, regional budgets and the municipal level).

The public procurement information service is offered by Innovative Search Technologies LLC. The IST-Budget website aggregates data on public and private tenders collected from five major electronic trading platforms. The task is to create a single free information space for searching and primary processing of information on public procurement conducted in the country.

A group of projects is dedicated to public monitoring of politicians' promises. L. Volkov from Yekaterinburg maintains the site DalSlovo.ru. All content that appears in the project is entered there by the users themselves. The logical unit that the project operates on is an objectively verifiable promise, a statement by a public person that contains specific deadlines. In the current reality, politicians make such statements completely irresponsibly and as often as they like. On the site, such promises are recorded and tracked using a calendar of deadlines, while it is easy to get information about government officials who have been “lit up” on the project site.

(The described service uses the collection and verification of information by an unlimited circle of people, this is a special case of the so-called crowdsourcing (from crowd - “crowd” and sourcing - “selection of resources”, the term was introduced by D. Howey in 2006). However, about the joint actions of many people for the sake of a single goal without material motivation, it has been known for much longer - back in 1714, the British government invited everyone to develop a simple method for accurately determining the coordinates of a ship. Lately many remarkable projects have been implemented using crowdsourcing technology, the most famous of them is Wikipedia).

The experience of DalSlovo.Ru is also used in other regions. As part of the Ulyanovsk City portal, the Word of Power project was implemented, designed to bring the government closer to the residents of Ulyanovsk and the region, to make government more open. As in Yekaterinburg, information about the socially significant promises of officials and the progress of their implementation can be added by all users of the portal (with the obligatory indication of the source of information).

Another indicator of the veracity of the statements of famous personalities: politicians, economists, lawyers, artists and other public figures is the Pravdometer project. Based on the results of checking dozens of applications, verdicts are issued, a “rating of truth-tellers” and a “rating of deceptions” are compiled.

In 2011, the Roskombribery project appeared for the public fight against corruption. The amount of recorded bribes exceeded 100 million rubles. Described over 750 episodes in 20 cities. There is a classification of bribes into categories, the ability to sort messages.

Author next project A 20-year-old student from Kazakhstan who has experienced various aspects of obtaining higher education. Based on his own and other people's experience, he created the Briber.info website, where you can complain about extortionate teachers. The user can leave a complaint about the teacher who demanded a bribe. All 40 universities of Kazakhstan are represented in this kind of black list. All complaints are subject to mandatory pre-moderation, their text is hidden from site visitors in order to prevent slander against honest teachers. After verification, the names of the "heroes" become public domain.

The latest action was started on the initiative of E. Chirikova, widely known as the leader of the movement "Ecological Defense of the Moscow Region" and "Movement in Defense of the Khimki Forest". Through the joint efforts of web users, a “black list” of government officials and business structures is being compiled that act to the detriment of Russian citizens, lobby for anti-people amendments to legislation, and develop natural resources in the interests of personal enrichment. The organizers write: “We want corruption to find its face. The meaning of our activity is to make unknown corrupt officials see that they are weighed and recalculated, that their deeds are publicly known. Over 60 Russian cities expressed their desire to join this action. The "People's list of traitors to the public interest" is constantly growing.

The Internet provides convenient means for implementing mutual aid and charity projects, where both those who need help and those who are able to provide it can apply. Here are some examples.

The well-known charitable foundation "Fair Help" of Dr. Lisa (E. Glinka) accumulates cash and donated items to provide specific targeted assistance, conducts charitable programs, including "Station on Wednesdays", "Kyiv Hospice", "Hospital for the Poor", etc. The Helping Hand Charitable Foundation works in a similar direction.

The Gift of Life Foundation was created by actresses Ch. Khamatova and D. Korzun to help children with oncological, hematological and other serious diseases. For incomplete 2011, children received over 450 million rubles.

Charitable Internet Foundation Help.Org (founder A. Nosik) unites the forces of Internet users in different countries to collect targeted donations for urgent social and medical needs (surgeries, expensive treatment, assistance to children's and medical institutions). The fund's motto is: "Out of every donated ruble, 100 kopecks reach the needy." The site contains a long list of those who received real help for treatment (most of them are children); in 2010 the amount of this assistance amounted to 55,897,364 rubles.

The website "Together" is, by its own definition, "a community of people who like to do good and right things." Among these cases is the purchase of a special chair for a boy Timofey with cerebral palsy from the city of Vyksa, repairs in the Kaluga nursing home and the purchase of operating equipment for the Kirov Central district hospital, equipping Selizharovsky with computers rehabilitation center for minors and much more.

Every day, Runet users throw away up to 10 tons of things they don't need, from old magazines to refrigerators and pianos. But these things may be very necessary for other users. Residents of 13 cities participate in the work of the portal Odam Darom. The creators say: "We want every thing to find its owner, so that some do not pay a lot of money to movers to throw away old things, and others to hucksters in thrift stores." The portal allows not only to donate unnecessary things and find the right things, but also to get advice from an experienced person, to take part in the development of charitable projects.

The non-profit organization CAF-Russia, the Russian representative office of the British Charities Aid Foundation, has launched an online project - electronic journal about charity "Philanthropist". The goal is to bring together a community of professionals and simply caring people on one platform to discuss and promote the ideas of philanthropy, to disseminate the ideas and practices of charity. For this, in particular, it is planned to use the possibilities of social networks.

The principle of crowdfunding - collective donations, joint financing of new projects by Internet users - is implemented on the site "From the World by a Thread", the first in Russia open area public funding for creative projects. Each project publishes an application for the required amount and the period for which it is supposed to be collected. If it is not possible to find the entire amount within the specified time, then the collected money is returned to those who supported the project. Another attempt at crowdfunding in the form of raising money for the implementation of an art and music project through the social platforms of the Naparapet service.

The next group of projects appeared thanks to G. Asmolov and his associates. The memorable summer of 2010 saw the launch of the first project, the Fire Relief Map. This site has become a database, on the one hand, allowing everyone to provide information, and on the other hand, systematize it according to relevance, time, place and type of message. On the Maps of Help website, you can track fires, deforestation and pollution environment, find out where and which of the fire victims need help, as well as find volunteers who are ready to independently restore the damage caused to nature and people, without waiting for instructions "from above". The project received the Runet Prize in the nomination "State and Society". Later, to provide assistance to those affected during frosts, the Cold Info service appeared, a map of operational monitoring of cold weather throughout Russia. Over time, these sites began to receive messages that were not related to the topics of fires, cold weather and man-made disasters. It became obvious that we need a single base where a person can turn for help and advice. This is how the idea of ​​the “Virtual Rynda” was born to coordinate mutual assistance. The objective of the project is to realize the potential of the network community, to establish cooperation between Internet users and non-profit organizations, government agencies and businesses. The authors warn: “We are not charitable foundation or organization. We do not provide any assistance personally and do not collect any funds. We act as a systematized database of requests and offers for help. Our task is to give people an effective means for coordinating mutual assistance, which, in fact, by its very existence stimulates it and increases the level of social responsibility of Runet users.”

After the tragedy in Japan, the same team created the Radiation Map. Its purpose is to provide a platform for collecting all reports on the level of radiation, especially in the Far East.

The Lisa Alert search and rescue team unites volunteers who are ready to go in search of lost and missing people at any time. "Liza Alert" does not accept financial assistance, but assistance in providing the detachment with the necessary equipment for searches is welcome.

So far, the KartaBed project (a map of criminal activity and a help service from neighbors) has not gained wide popularity. The existing service allows users to independently map information about criminal incidents using a website and an Android application.

Another group of projects aims to create public associations to solve local problems. Where the authorities, for one reason or another, do not fulfill their direct duties, the citizens themselves take up the matter.

In Perm, an open Internet platform "My Territory" has been created, a tool for interaction between city residents and representatives of authorities, organizations and services responsible for maintaining order in a certain territory, in a city, in a district. The service allows any resident to report various socially significant problems (an open manhole, a garbage dump, a broken traffic light, a hole in the road, a beer stall near a school, etc.), track their condition and evaluate the work of relevant services. Residents mark problem areas directly on the map of their city. Openness and publicity also force the relevant organizations to act quickly and more responsibly.

The project cooperates with regional authorities, in particular, an agreement has been concluded with the administration of Perm. Messages about problems from residents of the Perm Territory, registered on the site, are accumulated and sent to the document management system of executive authorities. Samara has become one of the most active cities in My Territory (perhaps because the mayor of the city began to actively use this project). The service is available in the web version and on the Android mobile platform. By July 2011, the site listed 4746 issues, of which 1013 have already been resolved and closed.

Similar problems are solved by the site "Fix your street" is an interactive Information system to receive and process applications for urban issues. The system makes it possible to timely respond to problems arising in the city and analyze the quality of work of service organizations. The somewhat awkward name, apparently due to the presence foreign analogues: English fixmystreet.com, Canadian fixmystreet.ca (as well as German gov20.de, Dutch verbeterdebuurt.nl, American SeeClickFix.com).

On the Just Russians website, a community of active citizens is being formed who want to change the country for the better, create a system of mutual assistance of citizens to solve social and political problems related to the action (or inaction) of state authorities. The site recalls that, according to the Constitution, “the only source of power in the Russian Federation is its multinational people,” and offers tools for coordinating the actions of activists from different parts of the country. The number of participants in the movement reached 3 thousand. A selection of headings gives an idea of ​​the range of issues raised:
Lipetsk officials left a 97-year-old veteran homeless
Let's stop the pollution of the Yauza and Moskva rivers
Police brutality in Altai
Victims of the raiders of the Krasnodar Territory
Corruption in the Chelyabinsk region
etc.

The site "IMHOnn Complaint Book in Nizhny Novgorod" is addressed to those who care about the fate of Nizhny Novgorod and who want to change the situation in the city for the better. Headings: Organizations, Work, Transport, Persons, Shops, etc.

In various regions, thanks to the Internet, citizens are uniting to fight pedophiles using the “bait fishing” method. On dating sites, they place profiles on behalf of 10-13-year-old children, enter into a dialogue with adults and arrange a meeting. The videos are then posted online. In St. Petersburg, there is a community "Rodcontrol" - a group of proactive parents who patrol the Internet space to protect their children. Let's also name the associations "Duri.net" (Voronezh), "APF Group" (Yaroslavl), "Stop, bastards" (Tambov), "Hunters for pedophiles" (Novomoskovsk).

"Killed roads of Pskov" public movement of Pskov motorists problems of bad roads, high prices for gasoline, traffic safety and areas for safety and order on the roads, which are united by driving cultures. information, facts, helpful tips. It is worth noting that this Internet movement has gained a strong reputation, its leaders are invited to meetings with the governor of the region.

Portal "Traffic from the window" carries out "people's video monitoring" traffic webcams of Internet users. The result is clear and reliable information about traffic jams, parking situations, snow removal, accidents, etc. The project offers network users to install webcams in the windows of their apartments facing the road, so that car owners can assess the workload of a particular area at a given moment. The developed technology allows you to give information without overloading the user's Internet channel. If a person does not have a webcam, he can get one from the project team or its partner store. The project operates in Moscow and the Moscow suburbs, with almost two hundred cameras in service. The Moscow traffic jam center, supported by the city government, is also trying to improve the transport situation in the capital. The essence of the proposed measures is the optimization of the use of the existing infrastructure. There are many places in the city where even small changes can significantly improve the traffic situation. The site contains proposals from motorists to eliminate traffic congestion (changing the mode of operation of traffic lights, rearranging signs, eliminating unauthorized parking lots) on the principle of "minimum costs - maximum results".

Recently, the community of motorists, outraged by the ugly state of roads and boorish driving style (especially the “servants of the people”), has noticeably intensified. Another project of A. Navalny RosYam is designed to unite citizens who are faced with the incompetence of road services. The user takes a photo of the damage to the road surface (pit on the road, protruding rails, sewer well, etc.) and uploads the photo to the site with reference to the map of the area. After that, the text of the letter to the traffic police is automatically generated with the requirement to identify the perpetrators, to bring them to justice under Art. 12.34 of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation and oblige to repair the damage. This letter must be printed and sent by mail or via the Internet using the services offered on the site. At the time of writing this text, out of 5816 defects noted, 581 have been fixed - not a bad result at all.

The site "Avtochmo" (board of shame for drivers) is an interactive gallery that contains the most outright violators of traffic rules. Photos are added by the users themselves (the license plate must be visible in the picture).

In the same row is the "Society of Blue Buckets" - a social movement whose members oppose the misuse of "flashing lights" (flashing beacons) by officials. For more than a year, various actions have been held, organized according to the principles of a flash mob; The site contains photographs with descriptions of situations.

Project "Where is the casino?" is a map of illegally operating casinos. The information is collected on the principle of people's monitoring. The project was highly appreciated by the country's leadership.

The information system "Democrator", created at the expense of the entrepreneur A. Pavlov, offers, according to the project manager A. Bogdanov, a mechanism for the implementation of e-democracy in Russia. This is a website that allows citizens to unite around common socially significant problems, jointly edit the texts of collective official appeals to state authorities and local self-government (a decision is made on the problem if it is supported by at least 50 people), track the status of work on appeals. "Democrator" can offer useful services to the authorities, providing monitoring of problems and feedback(monitoring and evaluating the quality of work of officials) and generally stimulates constructive work to solve problems, rather than protest calls. The program "Information Society (2011-2020)" sets the tasks of developing services to simplify the procedures for interaction between society and the state using information technologies; increasing the openness of the activities of public authorities; creation of services to ensure public discussion and control of the activities of public authorities. "Democrator" claims to implement these tasks, identify socially significant problems and solve them in a timely manner with the participation of citizens without bringing the situation to critical tension. However, there is another point of view: this project is beneficial precisely to the authorities, which, allowing citizens to unite around allegedly “socially significant problems”, uses it as a valve to “let off steam”. Approximately the same role is given to public associations by Minister I. Shchegolev, arguing that "Electronic democracy ... this means that ... without leaving home, citizens will be able to mark some kind of unrest at small enterprises, on the roads." As you can see from the other examples given, social networks allow much more.

Internet solutions to improve the quality of life. Interested citizens are well aware of what services they personally need (which means that they can become useful for others). Therefore, often these projects become extremely successful and even commercially profitable. An example is the GLONASS/GPS-based urban transport monitoring system developed in Ryazan. After its installation, local buses, trolleybuses and trams began to follow with almost one hundred percent regularity, because the movement of each transport unit is immediately displayed on the city map. The technology used in the project for monitoring the movement of public transport, equipped with GLONASS sensors, has interested a large company that plans to promote such systems.

Postgraduate students of the University of Nizhny Novgorod created the DorogaTV project, which in 5 years turned into useful service for 150,000 users and reached the inter-regional level. Agreements have been concluded with the largest data providers for building traffic jam maps, and our own video camera infrastructure has been created. Passengers receive information about public transport through the Internet and mobile phone. Among useful features route planning (using the points of departure and destination marked on the map, the service will tell you bus routes, as well as travel time, taking into account traffic jams); sms-forecast of the arrival of minibuses at the bus stops in Nizhny Novgorod; " public transport on-line” (software transmits coordinates and speed of movement directly to the screens of phones of passengers waiting for transport in real time).

The international Skillper site is a community of users, a collection of useful household tips and big encyclopedia experience. By matching user profiles, life experiences are exchanged between people who are similar in content. One of the most important sections practical experience citizens to interact with government agencies.

The quid pro quo community was created to bring together people who are ready to exchange free services. We sometimes lack familiar car mechanics, dentists, lawyers, tailors, massage therapists, nannies, translators, etc. On the site you can get useful contacts and acquaintances, offer your services, just make friends. But the participants in the PIF movement (from the title of the book by K. Hyde “Pay It Forward”) do good deeds disinterestedly, without expecting a reciprocal service. This movement (a kind of "chain reaction of kindness") has gained momentum in the last decade. the main idea: You can change the world with just three good deeds. If each person helps three others, and they do the same, then the baton of good deeds will be passed on, increasing their number exponentially. The author of the idea is B. Franklin, who in 1784 suggested that the debtor, instead of returning the money, “pay off” like this: “When you meet another decent person in a similar difficulty, you must repay me by lending this amount to him, insisting that he repay your duty in the same way." And in Russia, many bloggers associate themselves with the PIF movement; perhaps their actions will soon become visible.

The Surdoserver (assistant in learning sign language) is designed to help deaf and hard of hearing people, as well as anyone who wants to access online resources of Russian sign language and sign languages ​​of the world. The project is being created at the Institute for Control Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Internet project "Listen to the news" is a unique opportunity to listen to fresh (updated every hour) information from news feeds. A separate Internet portal for visually impaired people is being formed.

The social operator of the OP, according to a given schedule, makes calls to the number of your elderly relatives - landline or mobile. When connected, the subscriber can listen to an interesting message, but if the phone is not picked up, the system will send an emergency call to the number specified by the customer (paid service).

The Alter Russia Virtual Republic project was created as a democratic Internet platform for discussing and developing citizens' initiatives. Each registered user of the portal can propose his own legislative initiative or his own amendment to the existing laws of the Russian Federation (“if I were president…”). All proposals adopted by a majority vote of the user community are brought to the attention of officials, ministers, deputies and leaders of political parties of the Russian Federation.

Effectively.rf (Kazan) - complex automated system assessing the managerial competencies of employees of state and commercial structures in order to plan personal and group development using the 360-degree methodology. Each participant evaluates himself, his leader and subordinates. The system randomly selects people for cross evaluation. At a presentation in May 2011 with the participation of the leadership of Tatarstan and Sberbank of the Russian Federation, it was noted that it is not inferior to the decisions of the largest Western companies in the field of personnel assessment, after which an agreement was reached on the application of the system in the country's largest bank. Service Effectively.rf is able to conduct a comprehensive assessment of state and municipal employees with minimal time. Competence assessment allows you to create a personal development program for each employee, a group development program and form a personnel reserve.

The project of the Komi Expert Society (KomiExpO) is aimed at creating a communication Internet platform for interaction between government, business, science and society. Information flows are accumulated in three directions:
. news reports that provide information content to corporate, personal and state "decision-making systems";
. messages of the most active bloggers of the Komi Republic;
. scientific and methodical publications.

The project “Public Construction of the Image of a Russian School Graduate 2020” is being implemented by WikiVote! with the participation and support of the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation, the Forum analytical center and the Public Opinion Foundation. As a result of the project, it will be possible to find out what personality traits and practical skills a school graduate should have in 10 years, according to representatives of various strata of modern society.

Vyborov.net information resource about elections in Russia. On the site you can get acquainted with the programs of parties, pre-election videos and TV debates, regions where elections are held with the latest news.

There are many Internet platforms for collective discussion of various issues. Public examination of current draft laws is implemented on the website of the Public Opinion Foundation, here again we are dealing with crowdsourcing. A number of Internet resources organize large communities of citizens united by close views on the processes in society. Among them is the Hydepark information and discussion portal. Its materials are formed by users by posting news and journalistic materials. In fact, Hydepark is the first social network for middle-aged people created to discuss and solve various issues of life, receive exclusive information and communicate directly with famous people. The site has 2.5 million members, more than 280,000 daily visits, about 1,200 blog entries and more than 20,000 comments per day. Approximately half the corresponding figures for the Newsland news discussion portal.

Let's name a few resources of information and reference character. Legal reference system Pravo.Ru. Rusturn service for scheduling appointments at Russian consular offices in Rome, Milan, Barcelona. On the map of the district policemen of Moscow, you can find out the name and hours of reception of your district policeman (although the information seems to be outdated).

The above list of projects does not claim to be complete, but it makes it possible to trace the diversity of their topics and the breadth of geography.

The discussion of e-democracy issues would be incomplete without an analysis of electoral technologies. There are a huge number of polls and polls on the Internet all the time for a variety of reasons: who will win the football match, will President Obama interrupt his vacation due to a hurricane, how many cars do you have in your family, and so on. This allowed the optimists to see a direct connection between e-elections and e-democracy, to talk about a new stage in the ancient Greek agora or the Novgorod veche. Indeed, each vote can be taken into account directly, without intermediaries in the form of deputies and delegates. On this occasion, there is a suitable quote “from the President” (as before, “from the classics of Marxism”): “I am absolutely sure that the era of the return from representative democracy to direct, direct, with the help of the Internet” is coming. However, let's not forget that the requirements for serious voting and Internet polls are markedly different. First of all, there are questions about the authentication of the voter and the exclusion of falsifications. The mechanism exists electronic signature, but it is not clear how this corresponds to the principle of secret ballot. Some offer to receive special one-time cards at polling stations, but if you still have to go to the polling station, the main convenience disappears (in Kazakhstan, there were attempts to send pin codes by mail, but this system did not work). According to the Estonians, they have solved these technical problems; there, in October 2005, the world's first official voting via the Internet took place in local government elections. Electronic voting was carried out in parallel with the usual one, about 10 thousand people, or about 1% of the total number of voters, voted via the Internet. Moreover, a law has appeared in Estonia that, starting from 2011, allows elections of the supreme power not only via the Internet, but also from a personal mobile phone (it is no coincidence that there are proposals to rename the country to E-stonia :). There have been limited experiments in conducting online voting in elections in the United States, but there the National Institute of Standards and Technology released a document from which it follows that the technologies used today are not capable of ensuring the proper security and integrity of elections over the Internet and telephone networks.

In Russian practice, attempts to automate certain aspects of the electoral process have so far not been crowned with noticeable success. The odious "GAS Vybory" is rightly called the All-Russian scam. In March 2009, an experiment was conducted on an electronic poll of voters. At 13 polling stations in five regions, they were offered, in addition to the usual paper voting, to express their will using the Internet and mobile communications. In the city of Raduzhny, Vladimir Region, mobile phones were used for this purpose (they required downloading the necessary software). Voters in the city of Vologda, the Petrovsky farm in the Volgograd region and the village of Kargasok near Tomsk received a disk at their polling stations. In Nizhnevartovsk, the survey was conducted using an electronic social card. During the single voting day, there were 270,000 attempts to hack the system. The technical aspects of such experiments were discussed during the meeting of the chairman of the election commission with representatives of the Internet community (see transcript). However, even a successful solution technical problems will not be able to remove legal barriers to electoral technological progress: Russian legislation does not yet provide for the possibility of virtual elections.

In the summer of 2011, a member of the Yekaterinburg regional duma L. Volkov and President of the Institute for the Development and Modernization of Public Relations F. Krasheninnikov presented their book (more precisely, a 64-page brochure) Cloud Democracy. In our opinion, main value of this text is a scathing critique of the costly and inefficient modern representative democracy (chs. 2-6). That alone is enough to recommend reading the book. But in its 3rd part, the authors propose a model of the democracy of the future. There are three main technical ideas. Firstly, it is proposed to measure the will of voters more than once every 4 years, but more often - the Internet allows you to do this as needed. The second idea is the ability to delegate your vote to one or another representative, and not necessarily one - you can various issues in which they are experts (with the right to withdraw it at any time). The third idea, called “enforced honesty,” is that the level of openness of information about applicants for some positions in the political system increases more and more as the importance of the position for which they apply increases.

The second sentence raises the most questions. The delegation of votes is likely to result in their purchase. Rural old people, the homeless and some other categories of the population who do not have computers and are not going to use the right to vote will gladly sell this right, as in the days of voucher privatization. Doctors, teachers, policemen, soldiers, officials will voluntarily-compulsorily give the right to vote for themselves to their superiors. Factory workers will be forced to entrust their votes to their bosses. There is a danger of the final transformation of politics into business, and the parliament - into a political joint-stock company.

There are other controversial places in the book, but the authors themselves are aware that in modern Russia it is impossible to quickly provide all citizens with means of authentication, to solve the problem of digital inequality and the lack of access to the network for so many voters. Thus, the introduction of "cloud democracy" is not a task for the next decade in our country. You should not be upset about this, it is much more productive to develop and promote achievements in this area, while simultaneously tightening the infrastructure and raising the level of literacy of the population. It is already possible to try to make the elements of e-democracy available to those who are ready and would like to participate in it. And in the fall, the authors of the book presented the Democracy-2 website. This is a kind of electronic parliament - a system of distributed decision-making by a large group of people, combining the best features of direct and representative democracy and assuming an absolutely transparent approach to the development and adoption of decisions on all topical problems of the political and public life of Russia. As B. Nemtsov points out, this is “a platform unique for Russia, where you can openly and without censorship discuss any issues from paid fishing to ethnic crime. At the same time, a voting mechanism is proposed to determine which of the points of view enjoys the maximum support. In the absence of a parliament and wide public discussions, this is obviously a breath of fresh air. Then everything will depend on the level of people's involvement in the project. If it turns out that there are hundreds of thousands in the electronic parliament, then even the most insolent government will not be able to ignore them.

The Internet provides a unique opportunity for citizens to come together to work together to realize their rights. Social media allow you to conduct discussions and organize any community. New technologies of electronic communications provide individuals and groups with such wide access to information and opportunities for discussion that it makes the existence of authoritarian political regimes even more difficult. At the same time, authoritarian regimes are trying to control the Internet, restricting citizens' access to it and creating their own versions of "electronic government". The ruling circles are not interested in the introduction of real e-democracy, as this limits its power. The authorities understand that technical means already allow society, regardless of the ruling elite, to create elements of e-democracy, i.e. alternative sources of power in society. Under these conditions, the only way to restrain the activity of society is to seize the initiative and put the processes in the Internet space under the control of the authorities. The self-organization of young people also poses a threat to the authorities (and this is an important resource for the opposition). Therefore, pro-government youth projects are directed against politicized youth, or to include them in the system of political governance.

Here one could recall Manezhnaya Square and the "Arab Spring", but we will not delve into the socio-political aspects of electronic democratization and blame the Internet for the shortcomings of the authorities. After all, often people unite, desperate to get an adequate response from the state to their natural rights and demands. Symptomatic in this regard is the magazine headline “To hell with him, with the state!” in the material about the activities of the activists of the Tugeza website.

The Internet creates a technological opportunity to take democracy to a higher level. Whether this historic chance will be realized, we all will soon find out.

* * *
The author dedicates this series of two articles to the memory of Oleg Valerianovich Kedrovsky, a wise and principled person, an outstanding professional in the field of scientific and technical information, who created the journal Information Resources of Russia 20 years ago and headed it until 2011.

Literature:
1. Polyak Yu.E. Electronic democracy, top view // Information resources of Russia. -2011. - No. 5. - S. 5-10.
2. Polyak Yu.E. Regions on the way to e-democracy. Report at the VII International Scientific and Practical Conference "Regions of Russia: Strategies and Mechanisms for Modernization, Innovative and technological development". - M., INION RAN, May 27, 2011