E-governance: Russia closer to the user than Switzerland
The project aimed at systematically evaluating and comparing Russian and Swiss e-Governance on a National level. In order to do so, this research has for the first time in history applied entirely new scientific computer-based multilingual content measurement systems combined with a systematic comparison of semantic search data in both countries.
All e-Government portals have been measured on a scale between 1.000 (covering all search interests) and 0.000 (covering none of the searched contents). The key findings of this research project are:
Russian public administrations (PAs) communicate slightly closer to their citizens interests as compared to Swiss PAs. The scores that determine the proximity of the PAs content to the user interest are 0.582 for Russia and 0.543 for Switzerland . This means that only a little more than half of the entire electronic information which is published by National Governments, meets the active interest of the users or citizens in each country.
Closest to what users (citizens) actively search in Russia and in Switzerland are the following PAs websites : The Russian Federal Pension Fund with a score of 0.788 and the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC www.deza.admin.ch ) with a score of 0.766.
Russian PAs on national level use rather free or unlicensed open source technologies with a better communication effect than Switzerland which applies rather expensive proprietary technologies with slightly less effect on the user-friendliness.
Russia offers much more information on digital archives than Switzerland. The same Russia offers comparably more information also on enterprises. Both countries offer a similar amount of information about foreigners. The frequency of topics around military and security issues is high in Russia, whereas in Switzerland high frequency topics are economy and labour. Common contents in both countries treat politics of course but also diseases, motherhood, money laundry and innovation.