Elia Kabanov's column.

Photos by Maya Shelkovnikova.

I attended the event, which was regarded by the American delegation as an opportunity to get acquainted with the experience of Russian NGOs in using IT for solving social problems. The hosting side, in their turn, considered it to be a chance to tell about their successes in the field of  the application of the obtained grants.

The result of the meeting was sad: no one got what they expected. American participants have not heard about the Russian experience and the so-called "public figures" from Novosibirsk found themselves in an awkward situation when they realized how useless and uninteresting their projects were.

Ashton Kutcher, an actor and a co-founder of The Demi and Ashton Foundation, formulated the expectations of the U.S. participants from the meeting by telling how his Twitter had helped him raise $100.000 to fight malaria in Sudan. The Russian side wasn’t prepared, though, to give any particular account of its activities to only resort to promising statements that in their work they use e-mail and plan to start creating websites.

"Evidently, most of the Russian participants were absolutely ignorant and incompetent, - recalls Eugene Vasilkov, a product marketing expert from 2GIS. - Americans asked a very specific question about how we use the Internet to fight for civil rights, and all that Russians could come up with was talking about e-mail, an unbeknown radio station and their cooperation with local police. I am ashamed".

We tried to somehow fix the situation, when Ilya Ponomarev, a member of the Russian Parliament, asked Howard Solomon, Director for Russian Affairs at the National Security Council, to call local bloggers - Elia Kabanov and Artem Loskutov.

"Almost everything that was said in the best case looked like a story about using Internet skills for the sake of mastering Internet skills - says the artist Artem Loskutov. - At some point closer to the end, if I’m not mistaken, the ambassador literally demanded to hear the opinion of bloggers, because "civil society is not only about NGOs; in the first place, it has to do with certain active people” somehow or other. When Elia Kabanov gave me a call, I told the story about how Internet technologies had made me go to prison and helped me to get out of it".

Artist Loskutov told the audience about his involvement in the organization of the public campaigns called "Monstrations" and how it had attracted the attention of law enforcement to him. He described how the police had put a package of marijuana in his bag which led to the court authorizing his arrest. Loskutov described the chronology of the public campaign in his support, which had started in blogs and then with the help of the media came to the streets of many cities inside the country and around the world. Of course, a possible proximity of the conviction added up to the personal appeal of this story - the next hearing of Artem’s case will be held on February 24th; the prosecutor had demanded a suspended sentence sentence of one year.

During the Loskutov's monologue the Russian participants nervously giggled, some of them wished they could disappear at that very moment, whereas the Americans listened to him with their mouths open. Once Artem finished speaking, several of them told him they were ready to offer Loskutov help and support.

Probably, it was the main achievement which made this meeting worthwhile. It was certainly not the speeches of some fake volunteers, nor the moderator ignoring the participants, but a sincere reaction of foreign IT specialist and diplomats on the state of affairs in Russia.

Text by Elia Kabanov.
Edited by NovosibirskGuide.com, Ernesto Garcia Melijov.