Collective Decision-making System “VMESTE!” (“TOGETHER!”)

Background Information

•State program of the city of Moscow “Open Government,” designed for 2012—2018.

•Resolution of the Moscow Government No. 234-PP, “On Interactive Communication of Executive Authorities of the City of Moscow with the Public of the City of Moscow,” dated April 15, 2013.

Goals of the Initiative

•To involve the maximum possible number of people in city administration.

•To improve the quality of administration by combining the knowledge and experience of citizens and public officials.

•To facilitate the dialog between people and authorities.

Parties and Partners to the Initiative

The key partnership here is public-community. The project is a channel of direct communications between city authorities and the community.

Citizens:

•participate in city administration on a regular basis;

•make a difference in the administrative decision-making process (put forward their ideas, take part in votes, monitor administrative actions).

Authorities:

•have a quick feedback mechanism;

•have resources on the development, implementation and monitoring of city programs.

Resources Used for Implementation

On the part of the authorities:

•Funding from the city budget, allocated for the activities of municipal authorities responsible for project coordination.

On the part of the communities:

•over 3,300 volunteers (monitoring problem-solving in the gorod.mos.ru project)

•independent experts (moderating ideas in the crowdsourcing project crowd.mos.ru)

Innovation for the Initiative

It is a revolutionary project.

The “VMESTE!” system gives citizens an opportunity to influence administrative decisions at all stages:

•experts from the community propose their ideas on crowd.mos.ru;

•a wide audience evaluates crowdsourcing ideas and selects the best ones on ag.mos.ru;

•the government implements the decisions backed by the majority of votes on ag.mos.ru;

•the quality of the implementation can be evaluated on gorod.mos.ru.

All the tools of the “VMESTE!” system are available to people, integrated into the work of municipal authorities, interconnected, and handle the real issues faced to the city.

That way, the project translates principles of online democracy into practice.

Innovation has been applied in

city management and administration.

Obstacles and Solutions for Innovation

Obstacle: People’s distrust in their ideas and voices being heard.

Decision:

•Specified procedure of processing inquiries from citizens;

•A system of public reports;

•Engagement of independent community experts in the projects.

Obstacle: Distrust in good-faith tallies in online referendums

Decision:

•Real-time voting stats;

•Release of results;

•Depersonalized tallies are also uploaded to data.mos.ru, an open-data portal, and are available for any further research and verification.

Obstacle: Quickly increasing load on the service functionality and personnel accounted for by popularity of the services.

Decision:

•Technical upgrade of the service hardware (bringing in more servers and backup loops, adding caching servers for acceleration of work);

•Streamlined classification of users’ online queries with automatic distribution to relevant authorities responsible for execution;

•Limited number of queries per user per day.

Obstacle: Disaggregated data on city infrastructure facilities.

Decision:

•Elaboration of interaction patterns with data providers and data input regulations;

•Integration with the city’s open data repository on data.mos.ru;

•Information updates based on input from public scrutiny.

Obstacle: A risk of committing an error when assigning a specific issue to responsible officials.

Cause: city infrastructure facilities report to different municipal authorities.

Decision:

A system of arbitration between municipal authorities in finding out areas of responsibility.

Outcomes and Assessments

We describe large-scale transformations that concerned all segments of Moscow’s urban life, making it more convenient and comfortable.

crowd.mos.ru

•70,000 ideas have been suggested by citizens over the past two years;

• More than 1,000 ideas have been put into practice;

•The best ideas are included in nine city programs.

Most important transformations:

•Upgrade of the healthcare sector in Moscow;

•New public transportation routes;

•Measures to improve environment in the megalopolis.

ag.mos.ru

•1,700 ballots over the past two years;

•1.3 million participants;

•850 initiatives have been implemented.

Thanks to the activity of Muscovites:

•The city is being modernized (80 renovated streets, 300 landscaping projects for courtyards and playgrounds);

•The megalopolis is becoming “greener” (more than 400,000 trees and shrubs have been planted);

•Working standards of outpatient hospitals, schools, libraries are changing;

•Sale of alcoholic energy drinks is prohibited in the city, as is entrance of non-ecofriendly motor vehicles.

gorod.mos.ru

•800,000 users;

•1,500 resolved issues daily.

Public scrutiny helps:

•Find prompt remedies to city troubles, such as out-of-service traffic lights, long lines, issues of the housing services and utilities;

•Monitor the work of contractors involved in improvement work;

•Eliminate shortcomings in the work of local authorities.

Methods Applied

Measures to increase availability, accessibility and convenience of the tools:

•Mobile and web-based versions of the projects;

•A unique hi-tech platform;

•A proprietary methodology of analyzing user activity.

Measures to disseminate and to win people’s trust:

•A defined procedure of giving replies to citizens’ queries and inquiries;

•A system of public reports;

•Engagement of independent community experts in the projects;

•Incentives to most active citizens (awarding points for taking part in online votes, personal meetings with the city mayor).

Measures to elevate the project status among officials:

•Involvement of more than 200 authorities and 300 private companies in the projects;

•Personal responsibility of officials for the quickness and quality of responses to citizens’ inquiries;

•Development of legislative initiatives based on collective decisions made by the community.