Before the New Year, I finally want to present our RosPil project, which we plan to devote a lot of attention to in 2011.
Although “present” sounds a bit odd when talking about RosPil. A few weeks ago, I posted a short message on Twitter: “testing the RosPil website,” and after that, quite unexpectedly for us, a whole bunch of blogs and both Russian and foreign media outlets wrote about the project (even the Financial Times ran a full article). Many thanks to everyone for the promotion. The idea behind the site is very simple and grew out of our cheerful exercises with a sharp stick against Mr. Eyebrows and other state-contract looters: Anyone who wants to can submit information to the site about public procurement tenders that clearly look like kickback schemes. Through the site, we find and register experts willing to help expose the crooks. Experts write assessments, and lawyers draft complaints to the anti-monopoly service and other agencies. If someone actually needs to show up in person before commissions, in court, and so on, then I do that together with my colleagues. RosPil is still in test mode, but things are moving along quite briskly. Here are the stats.
About 1,500 users have registered as regular participants in the project. About 120 people have signed up as experts willing to provide written opinions on various issues. We are getting a lot of reports about “kickback tenders.” Right now there are around two hundred in the queue (meaning visible to us, but not yet to everyone else). About half of them are nonsense, but the other half are real reports of public procurement cases with clear and obvious signs of corruption. It is perfectly clear that at the first stage we are not in a position to process and prepare even 15% of the incoming information effectively. But we will try. When I say “we launched the project,” first and foremost I mean a truly wonderful person named Pavel Senko. He does not have a LiveJournal account, but he does have Twitter. Pavel is a programmer working in California, in that very Silicon Valley. In other words, he is one of those people whom President Medvedev has been calling on to help Russia with their skills and expertise. And that is exactly what he is doing. When we were, as usual, suffering over the fact that we had an idea but no technical implementation for it, Pavel simply sent an email saying: here, I’ve already done almost all of it. Several colleagues and activists joined in as well. My own role, really, is that from time to time I write encouraging emails along the lines of, “Come on, guys, let’s push.” By now, many of you are probably wondering: who is going to pay for all this? A fair question. At the moment, RosPil requires no spending, only unpaid work. But we are proceeding on the assumption that eventually the project will have 3 to 4 people working on it full-time. And here I have a surprise for you, dear readers. **You will be the ones paying for all of this. **3 to 4 people on fully official, above-board salaries would cost about 2 to 3 million rubles a year (roughly $65,000 to $100,000 at the time). We will raise this money from everyone, and I think we have every chance of doing so. I myself am ready to contribute 30,000 rubles a year (about $1,000 at the time), plus cover some minor expenses. I am sure we will find several thousand people willing to donate small amounts from time to time for a good cause, provided there is absolute transparency and the spending is reasonable. The technical side of collecting the money is not yet fully clear, but we are working on it. After all, in America, people raise huge sums through $25 donations. And we will too. So there it is. That is all I want to say about RosPil for now. Join in the work. Because even today’s news—that some obscure “Osnova Telecom” did in fact get the 4G networks without a tender, or that “In Russia they have invented, and will soon begin producing, a phone identical to the iPhone 4”—kind of tells us: The RosPil project is guaranteed plenty of hard, intense work.