Presented at the workshop Citizen/Government Interfaces
Budapest, June 11, 2001
Interaction between government and citizens in information exchange is critical for building an information society. However, in Russia it seems that the tendency of the opposite may prevail in the political area, while from the administrative perspective closer interaction and improved access to government information is inevitable.
This report discusses the quality of access to government information at the federal and local levels and focuses on barriers to effective information use.
1.
Federal Level
Practically any official information provided by federal ministries and agencies can be found today at their official web-sites. As of June 1, 2001, 23 out of 24 federal ministries have their own Internet sites. Controversially, the only ministry that has no official site is the Ministry for Federation Affairs that is in charge of federal government support, including information support, to local governments.
The information that is provided by these sites usually includes news, regulations and laws related to activities of a ministry, biographies of key persons, and, in some cases, contact information for different departments, but not on services provided within this entity. Thus, going to the site of, as an example, the Ministry for Anti-Monopoly Policy and Entrepreneurship Support, you can hardly find there any information on available government financial resources for small and medium businesses, guidelines on licensing and certification procedures etc. The information published online is organized rather around how the ministry operates in its physical facilities, while the information on the public sector covered by this and other ministries is beyond of the site framework.
The design of the Ministry for Finances’ site can be considered as an exclusion, not as a rule. Under the IMF requirements, and in accordance with the IMF methodology, the site provides data on the federal budget execution monitoring. The monthly updated information includes, for example, key economic indicators for the budget implementation, revenues and expenditures data, data on the external debts of the Russian Federation and others. A monthly monitoring of budget execution by 89 subjects of the Federation has been also conducted and provided at the site. As for the budgets of municipal bodies, that total 14,000 in Russia, provided budget data cover exclusively past years, from 1995 to 1998.
As for the frequency of updates of other sites, it is very low – 11 sites have been updated less than monthly, and 8 sites have been updated weekly. Only 4 sites out of 23 have been updated daily, and even several times a day.
In general, while designing the sites, a model of ‘government activities’ has been used. In its research on e-Government leadership throughout the world, the Accenture consulting company found the feature is typical for an early stage of e-presence of governments. In its report 2001, the Accenture emphasizes that the model does not work efficiently, and that on-line presence should be based around what the citizen wants to do, rather than how the agencies are organized.
By the moment, the only Russian ministry that provides service through the Internet is the Ministry for Taxes. In 2001, for the first time, it posted tax declaration for individuals to be fulfilled and sent electronically. However, in absence of the Law on electronic signature, each person had later to come to a relevant tax inspection to confirm the data provided.
Speaking in terms of consultations, the level of interaction between the Federal Government and local citizens is low. It is reflected in the site design - only 6 ministry sites have interactive pages where visitors can ask questions and participate in teleconferences.
What are the barriers to citizen access and use? These include:
1. Legislative barrier.
The legal framework providing public access to information and IT, is still under creation. The basic law in this area is the Law on Information, Informatization and Information Protection.
Draft law on Right of Access to Information is being under review of the State Duma since 1996.
Other laws needed for effective citizen/ government interaction and information exchange (currently under review or to be developed in the nearest future) include:
Law On Commercial Secret Information.
Law On Personal Information.
Law On Electronic Signature.
Law On Electronic Commerce.
Law On State Informational Standards and Norms.
In fact, while the legal framework for public access to government information is underdeveloped, in my opinion, it is not the main barrier for information exchange.
2. Technical barrier.
As of March 1, 2001, government agencies, both federal and local, have been equipped with more than 800,000 desktops (according to the information provided by the Department on Government Information). It means that more than 70% of government employees use PCs in their routine work. However, only 2% of them have Internet access; PCs are being used mainly as typewriters.
On the part of the population, according to the results of surveys conducted by independent agencies such as Public Opinion Fund, ROSTIT, Comkon, and others, more than 3 mln Russians (2% of the population) use the Internet regularly. Within 1999-2000, the Internet audience had increased by three times. Modern telecommunication infrastructure has been formed. The Ministry for Telecommunications reports that in Russia there are 32 mln phone lines, or 21,3 lines per 100 people.
Large Russian cities are far ahead as compared to smaller cities: Novosibirsk is leading with 34,1% PCs connected to the Internet, the figures for Moscow and S.-Peterburg are 33,2 and 32,8% respectively.
Therefore, technical shortage of equipment is not critical impediment of information access.
3. Lack of demand for government information – significant at the federal level.
What Internet resources are Russian citizens looking for? 27% of citizens who took part in opinion poll, conducted by the above independent agencies, mention free of charge software; 22,7% - computer games; and 22,5% - entertainments. Government information was mentioned by no respondents. These statistics may also reflect the quality of information being provided.
4. Administrative barrier.
There are no laws and regulations obliging government officials to provide an open access to the information of public interest. As a result, the responsibility to upload the daily information on their activities is not included into job descriptions of government employees. In the absence of such regulations, the information, as an example, on operation of lifting the Kursk submarine from the bottom of the Barentz Sea is kept as state and commercial secrets, although the operation has been financed with public funds.
5. Lack of policy.
However, the problem is more significant than just obliging civil servants to post government info regularly, as it reflects the lack of coherent and user-friendly information policy.
Firstly, government of Russia is still not considered by politicians and public administrators as an agency for providing public services to citizens. Instead, it is run as an agency for ruling, controlling, regulating, and permitting/not permitting activities of its citizens. If the first model is accepted, then the improvement of providing services through increasing access to services and to information would be an objective. In the other case, if regulating function of the government is of high priority, then limited access to the government services and to information on them is logical.
Secondly, Russia still lacks a policy in the area of development of e-technology. In February 2001 the Russian Government recognized the necessity of having a national policy on e-development. Three ministries, Ministry for Economic Development and Trade, Ministry of Education, and Ministry of Telecommunications, together with the Higher School for Economics and Bureau for Economic Analysis were assigned to develop the Program entitled “Electronic Russia”. The program was developed amazingly fast – in May 2001 it was already submitted to the Russian Government for review and approval.
The Program sets the following objectives to be achieved within the period from 2002 to 2010:
Ø To create e-government in Russia;
Ø To promote new information technologies into the Russian markets (deregulation strategy to reduce administrative barriers);
Ø To develop infrastructure for promotion of new information and telecommunication technologies; and
Ø To promote education reform on IT.
Within the part related to the creation of e-government, the Program has the following specific objectives:
· To transform the documentation flow within the government agencies of all levels into the electronic format;
· To establish an electronic interface between the government agencies and businesses,
· To ensure, through the Internet, a public access to all the government information.
· To create telecommunication and information environment favorable for the development of e-government.
The program also involves creation of a governmental portal.
However, it is still in the making, and resembles a declaration rather than an action plan.
Thus, on the federal level the main obstacles to increasing the public access to government information is the lack of sound demand on the part of citizens, on the one hand, and the lack of government policy in the area, on the other hand.
2.
Oblast’ level
The oblast governments do not include the topic on its political agendas, their activities are closed and unclear for local citizens. All the oblast and republic governments have their official web-sites, however, they look like a printed guide for visitors in electronic format.
3.
Local government level (cities and rayons).
The situation here significantly differs from the federal level. Local governments have much more driven demand for local citizen participation in local programs. To date, they have developed understanding of the fact that the authorities cannot function only by means of using their administrative resource, particularly after the August 1998 financial crisis and after the decrease of subsidies from the federal government. Local governments understand also that for such participation to be successful, citizens should be fully and adequately informed on policies, programs and daily practical activities of local governments.
On the other hand, local communities are more motivated to receive adequate information from their local governments, for substantial amounts of funds may be available for distribution through municipal bidding, competitions for social service projects, small and medium business support schemes, and as grants. Furthermore, local communities are interested in receiving detailed information of local governments on licensing, registration and other government services.
Key areas of citizen participation include strategic planning, implementation of social programs, drafting and implementation of policies towards small and medium businesses.
To build an informational bridge to local communities, local governments broadly use all the components of municipal information system: municipal information centers, municipal libraries, mass media, municipal web-sites etc.
Key challenges for local governments nowadays:
1. Forming their own municipal information resources and linking them into a functional municipal information system. Part of the problem relates to the fact that entities of federal subordination, major private enterprises and other entities that are not subordinated to local authorities do not have to provide any information about them to local administrations. Statistical data are usually either collected by individual government departments based on their own approaches and principles (like, for instance, the Taxation Administration data do not follow the same standard as the data collected by local authorities), or not provided at all, with the reference to “commercial secrets”. That is why is it critical to adopt a federal law on information foundations of performance of local government agencies. The draft law is currently being prepared.
2. In addition to this challenge of collecting information, there is a challenge of unification of information. Wherever municipal information databases have been formed, they followed different local standards. In order to make these databases compatible, they need to be standardized.
3. The most critical challenge is to change the purpose of municipal information resources from that of being used by the administrations themselves to the open information resources to be used by communities – that is, transforming information from private asset of governments to public asset, using the terminology suggested by Richard Heeks in his “Information Systems for Public Sector Management”.