The Master`s students were presented activities of Situational Center as well as its` online services “St. Petersburg`s Open Data” and “Our St. Petersburg” developed for communication of the government and society and for simplifying bureaucratic runaround.
“At the seminar students will learn modern information systems used by St. Petersburg government and maybe offer new ideas connected with mobile applications for urban needs,” said Andrey Chugunov, head of State Information Systems Management Chair.
Situational Center of St. Petersburg was organized in 2005, in the lead-up to G8 Summit 2006 to coordinate work of Government`s departments.
“We pick up information from different sources and demonstrate it to governor, vice-governor and other officials who make important decisions. Furthermore, the Center organizes video conferences for representatives of different departments who can discuss and solve various issues without spending time for organizing face to face meeting,” said Andrey Kashin, representative of Information Affairs Committee.
Situational Center of St. Petersburg also gives access to all governmental data bases. Thus the center serves as an effective tool for governmental control of large projects and emergencies that require close cooperation of state officials. The Center helps to solve every day urban problems. For example, one can easily control street cleaning when a city is covered with snow.
The students asked Mr. Kashin about competencies required for a specialist of Situational Center.
“The main activities of the Center are organizational issues; that is why it is not enough to be only IT expert. Furthermore we need engineers,” underlined the expert.
“St. Petersburg`s Open Data” is a platform, which fuses together all useful information about the city from administrative and service departments. According to Pavel Rybalchenko, representative of St. Petersburg Information and Analytical Centre, it is difficult to understand what kind of information is the most relevant because currently the service is not very popular among dwellers. The experts constantly enlarge data bases so as to inform people of the latest news. Mr. Rybalchenko also noted that assistance of young experts from one of the best St. Petersburg`s universities is necessary for the development of the projects.
The master`s students shared their ideas of how to modernize the system. They offered to sort online complaints by topics so as to develop type answers that would be sent as reply. Pavel Rybalchenko also offered students to work on other ideas that would be applied for developing the online service.
