I mean, a real worm.

The fact that Russian officials had become devout fans of Twitter is not news anymore. Their enthusiasm has even been credited for the explosion of the Russian “tweet-o-sphere” over the past several months, so much so that the administration of the microblogging website has announced a plan to launch a Russian-language interface for its users.

Yet, it was a different matter that topped the Twitter-related news in Russia on Wednesday, October 13. Apparently, as the Kremlin was hosting an honorable guest – German President Christian Wulff – on Tuesday evening,  the dinner menu for Governor of Tver region Dmitry Zelenin included an extra shot of protein: a live earth worm. The tweet-o-enthusiastic governor managed to take a picture of the unwanted guest and shared it on his microblog along with a comment which, according to RIA Novosti[RUS], read:

Things like this happen even in Alexandrovsky Hall. Along with beef you’re also served lettuce with live earthworms.

The Moscow Times pointed out that the Governor had an additional comment:

It’s an attempt of sorts to show that the salad leaves are fresh.

The Kremlin was certainly not happy with these comments. Sergei Prikhodko, President Medvedev’s top foreign policy adviser, told RIA Novosti [RUS] that he found Zelenin’s comments to be “irresponsible” and “stupid”:

Fortunately, I deal with foreign policy issues; however, I would, probably, advise my lawyer-colleagues to introduce a provision in the guidelines for the evaluation of governors’ activities that would allow them to be fired ‘on grounds of idiocy’.

Prikhodko also advised everyone to think twice, from now on, before inviting Zelenin over for dinner.

The photo along with the tweets have since been removed from Zelenin’s feed. However, the story still managed to get several prominent mentions:

REUTERS reported on the incident, contextualizing it within the general issue of tweet-o-mania among Russian officials, as well as the convoluted relationship between the President and the regional governors in the country.

The Moscow Times picked it up, too, with a little follow-up, highlighting that Zelenin’s spokeswoman declined to comment on why the governor removed the tweets and the photo. The article also featured comments by Kremlin’s head chef, who was quick to clear himself of blame. (As a side note: it is worth pointing out that the piece mentioned that Prime Minister Putin’s grandfather was the personal cook to Lenin and Stalin. Just a side note!)

The most interesting mention, however, is certainly that by Russia Today TV, which not only featured two separate segments on it, but also had managed to capture the actual photo, before it was removed (see the videos here and here). Weird public diplomacy: I guess they did not consult Prikhodko before airing or publishing these.

Another interesting comment on the matter came from the mock @Kremlins_Wife user on Twitter, who wrote[RUS]:

And just in case you are wondering (according to RT)…

…The fate of the worm is unknown.

UPDATE [12:40 p.m., EST]: The Kremlin worm is apparently live and well, and it has come out of hiding: later on Thursday it registered an official Twitter account of its own @KremlinCherv, posting comments and asking for attention. At the time of this writing, it already has 779 followers.

The first Tweet read:

@DZelenin Thank you, Dmitry Vadimovich. I am a star now!

The Celeb Worm also re-shared its previously removed portrait.

Yet, the most noteworthy update so far has been:

Brothers, eat salads. I’m the last worm of democracy!

As for Governor Zelenin, apparently he has run into real trouble, with a full-scale investigation launched into the case. According to Russian news agencies [RUS], a preliminary examination of the photograph has revealed that it did not correspond to the location and presentation of the plate at the table. If the photo is found to be indeed fake, Mr. Zelenin can “face charges based on the existing legal code.”

Credits: Flickr CC Search Antigua

This article originally appeared on Global Voices, and was written by Alexei Sidorenko.

For the past two years, we have witnessed the Russian blogosphere becoming more and more empowered by technology. Although the bloggers’ abilities are quite limited, they have already attracted attention of both the Russian and international media.

Until recently, the technological level of online transparency initiatives remained quite low. The majority of IT professionals were not eager to join civil society activists and their initiatives. The evidence of this can be seen on technology blogs (e.g., habrahabr.ru), where numerous “technocrats” fall for the traditionally cynical explanation of civic activity (the bottom line of the discourse can be described as “conspiracy of the West”).

In 2010, this seems to have changed. As technology is getting more and more accessible and easy to develop, more online initiatives appear and are planned to be launched in late 2010 and 2011.

Russian transparency projects can be divided into five main groups:

> Official and semi-official transparency websites (e.g., zakupki.gov.ru, rosspending.ru),

> Chaotic transparency communities (individual investigative bloggers and LJ communities),

> Online representation of civil activist NGOs (e.g., golos.org, publicverdict.ru),

> Next-generation social networks dedicated to transparency and civil rights activism (e.g., democrator.ru, taktaktak.ru), and a growing number of Ushahidi-based projects.

1. Official and semi-official transparency websites

Work on putting public procurement data online started in 2006 with the launch of zakupki.gov.ru, a catalog of major public expenses. Since then, a number of other official and semi-official websites have appeared (e.g., statetenders.ru, igz.hse.ru). All these websites have poor interface and a low level of data accessibility. These flaws and the lack of interactive functions lead to the emergence of LiveJournal communities dedicated to the analysis of the most bizarre deals.

In July 2010, Rosspending.ru was launched to solve the visualization issue. Ivan Begtin, the creator of the project and one of the Russian Gov 2.0 evangelists, took the data and presented it in a more user-friendly and understandable way. Despite the lack of social networking as well as Semantic Web functionality, the portal has been inspired by data.gov.uk and data.gov and is the best example of the Russian government data visualization so far.

2. Chaotic transparency communities and individual investigative bloggers

A number of non-institutionalized LiveJournal communities have taken up the watchdog functions that traditional Russian NGOs simply fear to conduct. GV has been covering their activity recently.

Individual investigative bloggers have probably had more impact than the LJ communities. The New Times called [RUS] eight most prominent investigative bloggers (Alexey Navalny, Alexey Dymovski, Alexander Malyutin and others) employees of a “self-made Ministry of the Interior”:

[…] общество провело черту между собой и милицией. В интернете обнаружились диссиденты в погонах, подменяющие собой Департамент собственной безопасности МВД, рассказывающие властям и согражданам о коррупции в органах и деградации службы. А блогеры стали искать и находить виновных в преступлениях, взяв на себя роль и уголовного розыска, и департамента экономической безопасности, и милиции общественного порядка. Пока власти рассуждают о реформе МВД, народ начал свою.

[…] the society has drawn a line between itself and the police. Dissidents [in uniform] turned up on the Internet, filling in for the internal affairs division of the police, telling the authorities and the citizens about corruption and degradation of service. And bloggers started to look for and find those guilty of the crimes, assuming the role of the criminal investigations department, and the department of economic security, and public order units. While the government is discussing the police reform, the people have started their own [reform].

3. Online representation of offline NGOs

“Traditional NGOs” still struggle with new tools. This happens for several reasons: the lack of vision, resources, and external conditions. There is an exception, though – golos.org, which has introduced two online transparency tools – The Election Hotline [RUS] and the Fact Bank [RUS]. (GV wrote about Golos’ Election Hotline project here.)

4. Next-Generation Transparency Tools

So far there are only two projects in this category – democrator.ru and taktaktak.ru. Both were launched in 2010 and share social networking functionality (everyone can register, comment and take part in the site’s activity) and issue-based structure.

Democrator.ru helps citizens to discuss and prepare petitions and official appeals to the authorities, and monitors the issues by publishing official responses from the authorities. Taktaktak.ru connects citizens and lawyers, facilitating discussion of various issues and search for possible solutions. Both projects are of a very high technological level and represent unique transparency solutions.

5. Ushahidi platforms

The first Ushahidi in the Russian language was installed in Kyrgyzstan and was initially called “aikol.kg.” Later the project transformed into save.kg. Altynbek Ismailov, a Bishkek-based IT specialist, wanted to start Ushahidi for reporting the “Osh massacre” events, but didn’t have enough time so he implemented it for the Kyrgyz Constitution Referendum that followed the tragic events. After the success of the referendum monitoring, Ismailov with his team is planning not only to monitor the upcoming election but also to use Ushahidi for reporting all kinds of problems.

A month ago, Russian-Fires.ru (”Help Map”) was launched. The project’s success brought to life numerous initiatives that are expected to start within the next few months. The topics of the planned projects include: observation of the upcoming Belarus election, reporting on the state of the highways, monitoring and fast response to civil rights violations (the so-called “Help Map 2.0″), monitoring in the city of Ufa, etc.

More technology = more transparency?

So, is Russia becoming a more transparent place then?

Blogger and journalist Igor Bogatyrev (aka LJ user Allan999), said in an interview to GV that in today’s Russia, the progress of technology in transparency is accompanied by the progress in perfecting various techniques of surpassing the transparency measures. Not to mention the “grey” money, which is not registered in any public account (according to some estimates, the “grey area” accounts for half of the country’s GDP). Grigoriy Melkonyants, deputy director of “Golos” Association, said that in the election field, corruption and fraud techniques have evolved so far that the transparency technology has a lot to catch up with.

More transparency initiatives that have appeared within the past year will neither eliminate corruption nor introduce the rule of law in the country. What they can do is to create an environment where information is efficiently verified, anti-corruption signals are distributed fast, and people from remote areas are united by transparency platforms and helping each other with no other mediator than a website.

Illustration CC FlickR by cabbit

Amen.

In the UK, the crowdsourcing experiment was meant to take place on this website: Programme for Government.

The British coalition government (also known as ConDem, for those of you that are misinformed, its Conservatives + LibDem) were elected on a mandate to introduce ‘a new era in politics‘, which was to begin by austerity measures and cuts aimed at reducing the astronomical public debt.

The coalition pledged to ‘crowdsource’ their policies via the named website so that citizens (more like netizens) could have an impact on the issues that affected them, especially the cuts which were (and still are) to affect the welfare system, and which laws should be abolished. The website covers issue from A to Z, from banking and civil liberties to transport and Universities.

This measure could have provided the answer to the 21st century post-ideological world. It could’ve empowered the people to precisely have a say, a greater say, in their government’s doings.

What instead happened is what many had predicted: the status quo prevailed. Though 9500 comments were posted on the Programme for Government website, none of them were deigned with an answer. All of them have been binned an ignored.

This is not the first episode of its kind. The US government has been experimenting with crowdsourced urban planning for a while. This experiment being less ambitious and bold than the one proposed by the UK government, it is still ongoing.

Websites like mySociety have introduced similar participation-enhancing tools, but they are independent.

Information-sharing technologies allow for a new institution that can break the barrier between the individual and the government. This vision can be taken even further, by publishing government data and promoting transparency, openness and collaboration.

Let’s at least hope this first #FAIL will be followed by a few more #WIN.

__

For more information, we recommend you read Simone Novek’s “Wiki Government”.

Flickr CC Photo Credits : Djeucalyptus, Seanbonner.

The OpenNet Initiative and Reporters Without Borders – in collaboration with Internet World Stats and Wolfram Alpha – released their annual report illustrating the governments which apply a “pervasive and substantial level” of internet censorship on their web users. The outcome is astonishing: at one time or another, 1.72 billion people have been potentially subject to online censorship. This figure equates to 25.3% of the global population.

According to Reporters Without Borders China, Vietnam, Iran, Syria, Egypt and Burma (Myanmar) are the countries in which censorship is applied as a form of repression against political opponents. Just as an example, 72 people have been imprisoned in China alone due to subversive activities within the online sphere.The arrest figures are still worrying in countries like Vietnam (17) Iran (13), Syria (4) Egypt and Burma (2). No data is available for North Korea.

Woorkup – a website that gathers blog posts on different issues including technology and web freedom – published an info-graph on the 27th which explicates such staggering figures.

Clic to check the full info-graph

In the 21st century panorama, it is increasingly clear that web freedom is inversely proportional to the despotic nature of a given government. According to another RSF report – “Living Dangerously on the net” published in 2003, China employed around 30000 civil servants with the sole purpose of policing internet providers. It is safe to say that seven years later this number has likely grown exponentially. Around 10,000 websites are restricted and the figures are set to rise.
In a response to the numerous accusations – possibly head-started by the withdrawal of Google at the beginning of this year – the Chinese government published a white paper on June 8 this year explaining and defending such strict control over online content and activities as a matter of national security.

In a move against this worrying trend, Reporters Sans Frontières has also announced on June 29 that it will open an “anti-censorship” shelter within Paris in partnership with the communications security firm XeroBank, which will feature an encryption software able to circumvent censorship , and will be connected online through an anonimity network. RSF also has plans to launch a website which will host any banned content, reminiscent of Wikileaks, the whistleblower portal lead by australian former hacker Julian Assange, that has been causing havoc for releasing confidential information on US army actions in Iraq, as well as private emails belonging to Sarah Palin’s personal account. An RSF spokesperson said

At a time when online filtering and surveillance is becoming more and more widespread, we are making an active commitment to an internet that is unrestricted and accessible to all by providing the victims of censorship with the means of protecting their online information

Crédits Photos by j / f / photos