"Vremya MN", April 23, 2003

On April 25, 2003, an award ceremony of the contest "The best region in the field of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT)" will take place in the Congress Center of the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry. This contest has taken place within the Electronic Russia federal task program. The results of the contest will demonstrate which Russian regions can boast of a developed information infrastructure in education, business, medicine and state authorities. One should hardly expect that all of the 45 regions, which submitted an application for participating in the contest, St. Petersburg, the Chelyabinsk and Krasnodar regions among them, will display a similarly high level of the ICT development in all these spheres; anyway, the goal of the contest is not just to have an objective picture of ICT development. The received data will be necessary for the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, which supports the contest, for working out measures for the further development of each and every region. Another important goal of the contest is the popularization and spreading of ideas and values of an open information society, involving business communities and state institutions in reforming the economy using information and communication technologies.

The organizer of the contest is the RBC company, which has been operating on the Russian market of media and information technologies for 10 years.

A commission, which includes government officials, scientists and the leading specialists in the ICT field (Yury Khokhlov, Tseren Tserenov, Mikhail Dvorkovich and many others) is completing the analysis of the information, received from participants, in order to choose the winners in the following nominations: "State support to regional informatization", "Accessibility of ICT", "The use of ICT for regional development", "Human capital" (the public's readiness for active use of ICT) and "Business environment". The regions, where all these aspects and conditions for using ICT are the most developed, will be the winners of the contest. Deputy Minister of Economic Development and Trade Andrey Sharonov will present prizes to representatives of the winning regions.