This infoDev project is being run by Freedom Channel, a Russian-led NGO based in Somerville, Massachusetts and Moscow, Russia. Freedom Channel is organizing and managing a process whereby representative international experience in telecommunications and informatics policy making is gathered, evaluated, and presented to relevant government officials and other stakeholders in Russia for use in their own deliberations. The process is intended to lead to a constructive, high-level dialogue between Russian experts and policy makers and leading foreign professionals in this important area. The goal of the project is to open up, inform, and illuminate the national telematics policy debate in Russia in order to promote stated World Bank goals of transparency, accessibility, and competition. Peter Knight is serving as the infoDev Task Manager for this project.

The first disbursement of Grant funds was made in March, 1997, and the project has a website in English and Russian where you can follow the progress of the project, including working documents, and make comments.

On 16 and 17 June 1997, a workshop was held at the University of Massachusetts, Boston to discuss the second draft of a paper by William Wiltshire, Best Practices for Regulating Telecommunications in the Russian Republic: Drawing on the Experiences of Selected Countries that have Boldly Gone Before, and extensive comments on the paper by Timothy Schwarz and Clifford Chance commissioned by the World Bank’s Economic Development Institute (EDI). Over twenty people participated in the workshop, including Gennady K. Volkov, Deputy Chairman of the Russian State Duma’s Committee on Informatization and Telecommunications; Vladimir A. Serdiuk, CEO of ComCor, a Moscow telecommunications company;  Freedom Channel staff, World Bank staff, and representatives of various NGOs, private sector firms, and the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Click to see photos from the conference.

In addition to providing a thorough review of the Wiltshire paper, which was revised and put on the project website, a major achievement of the workshop was to elicit strong encouragement for the development of a Telematics Institute of Russia to provide objective, technically sophisticated advice to Russian policymakers. The establishment of the Institute was one of the objectives of the Freedom Channel project, and was established in 1997 with the name Russian Information Society Institute, which by May 1998 had offices in Moscow and St. Petersburg in Russia, and also in Washington, DC..

Peter Knight made a short presentation on the Freedom Channel project at the Global Knowledge ‘97 Conference organized by the Government of Canada and the World Bank, 22-25 June 1997.

With support from USIS’s Moscow office, Freedom Channel organized a Russian delegation to visit the United States to study telecommunications federalism in March 1998. The trip included a visit to the World Bank and participation in a conference on “New Media and the New Russia” organized by the Annenberg Public Policy Center.

A final conference for the Freedom Channel project was held on 14 May 1998 in Moscow. About 50 Russian and foreign attendees participated in the conference held in conjunction with a major telecommunications conference, Svyaz 98. The project website has copies of the final project report and papers presented during the conference.

Click to see some photos of the Moscow conference.

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