Muscovites’ Favorite Urban Projects Chosen Through Online Referendum Program
At the beginning of every year, Muscovites have an opportunity to vote for the city’s most significant projects during the previous year through the Active Citizen Portal.
The Active Citizen Portal was created in 2014. It is a system of online referendums that are designed to help the Moscow government make the city better. People are presented with expert opinions about every issue (expressing different views to give a multilateral perspective) to help them decide how to vote. The portal has attracted almost 2 million active users and has already organized more than 2,500 votes. These impressive numbers are possible because Active Citizen is extremely easy to use: you simply download an app and vote on any topic of interest to you. Moreover, the app will even suggest which polls are most relevant to each specific individual (for example, concerning a particular city district or problem). Every citizen gets scores for voting and can exchange them for various bonus prizes — free museum tickets, audiobooks, free parking hours, etc.
According to mos.ru, residents have been able to vote for one of the city’s Most Important Projects in the following nine categories: Transport, Municipal Services, Sport, Urban Environment, Culture, Education, Healthcare, Construction, International and National Recognition. The voting took place in three stages, with over 154,000 people voting in each of them.
Let’s look at some of the winning projects. In the City Environment category, the My Street program attracted most votes (25% of the total). This is a street renovation project which is aimed at making the streets of Moscow more enjoyable for walking and easier to navigate.
The most popular cultural project was an initiative to allow schoolchildren and college students to visit 90 Moscow museums free of charge (44% of the total number of votes!). Schoolchildren and students can now visit museums using their Moskvyonok card instead of buying a ticket. The Moskvyonok card is also used by pupils as an e-pass to enter the school building and pay in the school canteen, enabling their parents to monitor their spending and see what time their children arrive at and leave school.
An afterschool extracurricular club system won first place among the education programs. Second place was taken by another interesting project — the Moscow Electronic (e-school) School Programme (24% of votes cast). This includes electronic textbooks, online school performance records, attendance records, an online self-testing system and IT in classrooms.
Public transport is another area for innovations. 57% of voters supported the expansion of the Moscow Metro and introduction of new-generation Moskva trains with increased capacity, walk-through carriages and USB ports. Moreover, 10% of citizens supported the Moscow Metro app, which enable payment for tickets via the Troika travelcard (valid on all forms of public transport) from a smartphone. Previously, you could only pay in through a special terminal at a metro station, so the process has now become much easier.
Moscow is known for its multifunctional My Documents centres, which are introducing more and more useful services. For example, users can quickly have their conscript service card reissued, get registered with the army conscript office or re-register if they change their address, submit tax declarations and get their unique taxpayer number. Over 30% of participants in the Active Citizen votes recognized these changes as the city’s top services project. Other useful services include registering children with outpatient clinics and making traffic police appointments online via the mos.ru portal.
Even though the World Cup was chosen as Moscow’s main sporting event of 2018, it is important to pay attention to the smaller events and services. One of these is online selection of a sports club to match a child’s abilities, which are tested in a series of different exercises. The results are entered in an online form, which then suggests the most suitable activity.
Healthcare is a key focus area for any government, and Moscow is no exception. The innovations in this area are highly appreciated by Muscovites, 35% of whom voted to support initiatives including, for instance, a Telegram bot for making doctor’s appointments. In the past, this could be done online through mos.ru, but the Telegram bot makes the process even faster and easier. All the patient needs to do is to send a message including their state medical insurance number and date of birth. The online service will then offer a choice between a doctor’s appointment and current records (or cancelation of an appointment). Patients now have electronic medical files that they can retrieve at outpatient clinics. The files include information about the patient’s medical conditions, visits to the doctor, prescribed medications and sick leave. Specialists can see a pharmacy’s range of medications online and adjust their prescriptions accordingly.
High-tech medical care has quadrupled in scale while funding has increased by 12 times, with 21% of Active Citizen voters selecting this as Moscow’s main health-related achievement in 2018. Muscovites now have access to robot-assisted surgery, endovascular heart and blood vessel operations, positron emission tomography and other high-precision and diagnostic treatment.
None of the aforementioned achievements have gone unnoticed and some projects have received national and international recognition. And the people of Moscow have voted to show which they appreciate the most. For example, in 2017, Moscow won several prestigious awards, including the PIRLS 2016 global assessment in reading in the fourth grade. This was seen by 21% percent of voters as Moscow’s main achievement in 2017.
Twenty percent of voters agreed that the city should focus on making Moscow a comfortable place to live. Technology infrastructure projects were backed by almost 14% of voters. These included public access to Wi-Fi, technoparks, and an education system that links together schools, colleges, universities and research institutes. Thanks to these achievements, Moscow reached the finals of the forum prize in 2017.
