A significant share of what gets sent to RosPil consists not just of examples of corruption and violations, but of general chaos and carelessness in the spending of budget funds. A week ago, we received a message about electronic student gradebooks in the Ulyanovsk Region. There was even a Kommersant article on the subject: Electronic gradebooks will be introduced in the Ulyanovsk Region. It is expected that 26.5 million rubles a year (about 26.5 million rubles annually) will be allocated from the regional budget for this purpose. The regional government does not intend to hold a competitive tender for the project’s developers and is recommending the SimKat portal project instead. Teachers and IT specialists note that there are far more advanced and cheaper versions of the software available. * In this case, the question “why no tender?” is not the most important one. The real question is: why is any of this needed at all? These electronic gradebooks have already been churned out in a whole bunch of regions. Why not just take one from there? Are schoolchildren in Ulyanovsk really going to be upset that the software was made in another region? The most well-known electronic gradebook is the Perm one. Let’s look carefully at a map of Russia. We see that Perm Krai and the Ulyanovsk Region are in the same federal district—the Volga Federal District. That means that Perm Krai Governor Oleg Chirkunov and Ulyanovsk Region Governor Sergey Morozov spend time together at least twice a month, wearing out their pants at pointless Volga Federal District meetings. They sit side by side, playing games on their iPads while pretending to be busy with something important. Both governors are extremely tech-savvy: Both have LiveJournals: ch*irkunov ** and **sergeymorozov73 **Both have Twitter accounts: @chirkunov and @morozov_si I assume that, in keeping with state policy on innovation/modernization, they’ve also each gotten themselves a Tamagotchi and an electronic compass. So the question is: how do we get these high-tech Chirkunov and Morozov to contact each other in order to save budget money? It would also be good to involve Education Minister Fursenko, who should probably be concerned that every region is making its own electronic gradebook. It would probably make sense to hold one decent, honest tender, create a single system, and hand it over to the regions free of charge. Of course, we’re talking about a very small amount of money on the scale of the country, and even on the scale of the Ulyanovsk Region. But I’m willing to bet that right now, on the desk of the head of the Ulyanovsk Region’s education department, there are a dozen letters from school principals saying that the roof at their school is leaking, and every thaw brings cheerful dripping onto the heads of students. So even very small sums of money are badly needed in the Ulyanovsk Region. I suggest that bloggers O. Chirkunov and S. Morozov do the following obvious things: Get in touch and agree on free use of the Perm system in the Ulyanovsk Region. Put forward an initiative to standardize electronic gradebooks across the entire country. If point 1 of this super-sophisticated plan leads to budget savings, each should contribute 1,000 rubles from personal funds and send it to support the RosPil project. O. Chirkunov is, of course, welcome to contribute a larger amount, since he is officially a dollar millionaire. We await your response, gentlemen governor-bloggers. Update: We all understand that there is a difference between the cost of developing a system and the cost of maintaining it. We also understand that maintaining one system is cheaper than maintaining a million different ones. We understand that money wasted on development could instead be spent on maintenance. Besides, it is obvious that the more users (students) a system has, the cheaper it is to service each individual user. Update 2: In the Volga Federal District, besides Perm, there are also local electronic gradebooks in Tataria (Tatarstan) and the Samara Region. Update 3: Uhhhh.... I’m not lobbying for the Perm system. Governor Morozov can perfectly well take one from any region (where it’s offered for free or for little money); the choice is very large. Update 4: People are telling me that the best-known system of this kind is Dnevnik. According to its own statistics, it has connected more than 5,000 schools. It is completely free for the region, for schools, and for users.