Gregory Asmolov
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I was born in Moscow, lived most of my life in Jerusalem, spent 3 years in Washington DC (where I did MA at GW). But now I live in London and my major role is doctoral student at PhD program in New media, Innovation and Literacy at the London School of Economics media department. The topic of my research is development of online political institutions and ICT based models of governance in crisis situations.
I also worked as a consultant on information technology, new media, and social media projects for The World Bank, American Councils for International Education, and Internews, and was a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Previously I worked as a journalist for major Russian daily newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, and served as news editor and analyst for Israeli TV.
Alexey Sidorenko and I were founders of Help Map, the crowdsourcing platform, which was used to coordinate assistance to victims of wildfires in Russia in 2010 and won a Russian National Internet Award for best project in the “State and Society” category.
My Russian blog (since 2002): http://pustovek.livejournal.com/
You can reach me through Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/asmolov
Latest posts by Gregory Asmolov
13 October 2011
Russia
Andrey Soldatov and Irina Borogan, famous investigative journalists, describe [ru] software and methods used by Russian security services to monitor the Internet. Journalists argue that while Federal Security Service (FSB) can easily monitor Russian social networks (like Vkontakte, Odnoklassniki and others), it has problems with monitoring foreign platforms (like Facebook and others).
10 October 2011
Russia
#CпасибоПутинуЗаЭто (”Thanks to Putin for This”) hashtag that resembles the Soviet “Thanks to the party for this” became a “Twitter sensation” according to the Wall Street Journal and a “Twitter storm,” according to The Moscow News. The campaign that was started [ru] by a pro-Kremlin blogger Vladimir Burmatov as a way to greet the Russian PM on his 59th birthday, turned into a wave of cynical verses by Russian Internet users.
27 September 2011
Russia
A graduate of Strelka Institute Andrey Goncharov gave an interview about his final project an online game “Crowdsourced Moscow 2012″. According to the interview the game can contibute to real democracy and allow people to participate in reshaping the offline public space of their city through online.
Russia
A journalist from “Afisha” magazine had succeded to attend a secret meeting in the underground Moscow bunker dedicated to the training of a new generation of pro-Kremlin Internet activists organized by a leader of “Nashi” youth movement Vasiliy Yakemenko. Yakemenko demanded from pariticipants to initiate citizen Internet-based campaigns and argued that the main goal of these activities is a stuggle against any threat to stability in Russia.
26 September 2011
Russia
Nikolay Kononov, a columnist of Russian “Forbes,” says [ru] that the Internet will be the only space where real politics will take place in the era of new Putin's presidency. In an article “12 Years in the Internet” [ru] he predicts that the virtual politics will be able to penetrate to the real world, once real crisis emerges.
16 August 2011
Russia
Russian Communication Ministry submitted to President Medvedev a project for legislation update that would allow using “Creative Commons” (CC) copyright license in Russia, newspaper Vedomosti reports [ru]. The project is a follow-up to a meeting between Medvedev and leaders of Russian Internet community [en] where the president promised to support CC.
11 August 2011
Russia
Russian expert for open data criticized President Medvedev's initiative [RUS] to put more government data online. The criticism revolves around the lack of transparency, a question of what data should be published and the lack of public discussion around this issue.
Russia
The number of Twitter accounts in Russian crossed the point of one million, according to recent reseach [ru] by Russian Internet company Yandex. Now, Russian speakers publish around 370,000 tweets a day (comparing to 150,00o a year ago). The percentage of daily active Twitter users (of the total Russian speakers) is currenlty lower, but those who write on daily basis are more active.
7 August 2011
Russia
Russian government submitted a new anti-extremism legislation for approval to the Russian Parliament. News agency ITAR-TASS reports that according to the news legislation, distribution of extremist content online can be punished with 5 years in jail. Vzglyad website explains the legislation treates the publication of content in blogs as public distribution and makes the status of blogs similar to status of mass media.
Russia
Thousands of people participated in the event “Bloggers against garbage” that happened in dozens of Russian cities. A special community was created in Livejournal that includes many reports about the event. People used Twitter, Facebook, Vkontakte and other online platforms to coordinate the blog-based subbotnik [ENG]. The event was an initiative of a blogger Sergey Dolya.
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