The coronavirus agenda is gradually disappearing. On Thursday, Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin visited the youngest city in Russia - Innopolis. It is interesting that the prime minister’s first regional trip six months after his appointment took place precisely in an innovative city created for the development of information technologies.
The COVID-19 pandemic stirred officials and forced them to think about digitalization of the state. And it’s not only about meetings and government meetings, passing through video-conferencing, which we are observing now. In the future, it is about the complete transfer of the state to a digital platform. It was with this message that Mikhail Mishustin came to the government in January, and the wheels began to spin! And the pandemic just gave them extra acceleration.
We see that the acceleration was so strong that the wheels even began to slip in places. For example, we all remember how, at first, the Social Monitoring app was whipping up: the application could require a person to take a selfie at night, fail, fine, even if the person did not leave the house and so on. In fairness, I should note that the errors were quickly corrected. The head of DIT Moscow, Eduard Lysenko, at the CIPR House conference, which I moderated at the end of May, said that the application was developed and launched in just a month, and only then they began to make it more service-oriented.
A month has passed since the abolition of the regime of self-isolation in Moscow. We have almost forgotten the digital passes, QR codes for moving around the capital and Social Monitoring. But it became obvious to everyone that the digitalization of the state is the immediate prospect of our country.
We are already seeing how online education is booming. Of course, the forced transition to online has become a stress for the education system, teachers and students. Stress, which partly saved the coming summer. However, for the future this experience was obviously useful: online services will continue to develop, although, of course, there will not be a complete replacement of the living educational process with digital platforms.
Online healthcare is developing - online consultations of people with coronavirus who are easily ill can increase the effectiveness of doctors and also protect them from the risk of infection. China has become a pioneer here - now 191 medical institutions and about 100 Internet hospitals provide online receptions related to coronavirus. And Russia is not lagging behind in this regard: already by the middle of the pandemic in Russia, Moscow doctors had conducted more than 170 thousand consultations via video link for patients with coronavirus who are being treated at home.
Even the power departments of Moscow during the pandemic period adjusted their roles: the analysis of the data collected by various information systems became primary in decision-making.
Advances occur even in procedures such as elections. Traditionally, these procedures are extremely conservative in any state.
For example, the American Congress in 1845 decided to hold the election of the US President on the first Tuesday of November. The fact is that because of the poor roads, many Americans spent the whole day getting to the polls. Therefore, in order not to miss church services, we decided to make Tuesday the day of voting. Why in November? Just by this month, agricultural work was basically ending. And this fall, as before, the US presidential election will be held on the first Tuesday of November.
In late May, Vladimir Putin signed amendments to the law on Russian elections. The law allowed the Central Election Commission to conduct "remote electronic voting" in any region of the country in elections at all levels. And a month later it was possible to vote on amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation in an online format.
During the DIGA House, I had the opportunity to ask Russian officials about the possibility of online voting in the presidential election in 2024.
To this, the Minister of Digital Development Maksut Shadaev replied that it is necessary to start implementing online voting from the management of apartment buildings and from public hearings, so that by 2024 people will get used to this format and begin to trust it.
Technically, there is no problem in organizing mobile voting. The only question is whether the state can ensure the trust of citizens in this procedure. It seems that this will be what the next four years will need to do.
We have created digital reality for our convenience, saving time and reducing costs. Today, convenience has become the main driving force of digital reality, which has become an integral part of our lives. And there is no reverse movement, but the accelerated forward movement amid new challenges is obvious to me. And the main advantage of the new reality is that we can build it with our own hands. So how convenient it is for us.
The author’s point of view may not coincide with the position of the publisher.