President Medvedev Plans Our Own Silicon Valley in Russia

Today the president of the Russian Federation Dmitry Medvedev has appeared with his annual address to the Federal Assembly (the Parliament of the country). These addresses serve to voice out the intentions of the head of the country for Russia’s near future and are usually watched carefully by everyone who is interested in the direction the country will go in during the next few years.

This year’s event is unusual at least for one aspect: it has been prepared in collaboration with thousands of Russian internet users. The draft speech was initially published online as a lengthy article by the president and he invited all the citizens to voice their opinions out via the Kremlin official website – and people were definitely very willing to participate given more than 18 thousand comments received.

Since the resulting speech focused a lot on various IT issues, I wanted to point them out because these issues obviously matter a lot for me as a citizen of Russia – and if the intentions declared actually turn into reality, they will matter a lot for the entire world as well so they are probably worth keeping an eye on from the very beginning.

So the entire speech was focused on modernization of the overall Russian economy and making sure the country evolves from the current orientation towards natural resources exploration to more advanced industries, including information technology and science.

And in the process of this modernization the main measure is creating in Russia our own version of Silicon Valley – a research and development center where all the scientists, programmers, and innovators will find favorable conditions to live and work in, developing and implementing the latest technologies in order to build an economy that will be more technology-oriented than it currently is.

Foreign scientists and specialists will also be welcome in this new Silicon Valley as it will be easier to come and work here than ever – and the conditions offered to such specialists will be competitive enough to encourage them to work in Russia and implement their achievements here if local human resources are not enough.

There are certain measures that have already been announced that are intended to take Russia to become the next Silicon Valley. The main thing is IT infrastructure: the entire country should be covered by broadband internet access by 2015 – and you should realize that it is for a country where you can’t even get to many places by car and the only transport that exists is a helicopter that will get you anywhere even if there are no roads at all (and yes, such places are abundant in Russia).

At that internet access and other digital services provided via the new fiber-optic infrastructure should actually be affordable to all the population, including people paying unrealistic amounts for creepy slow access now.

I don’t know how realistic all of this actually is but Mr. Medvedev is the first country leader who pays such attention to information technologies and everything related to them – supporting them everywhere he can and publicly demonstrating his affection to the internet. Now if his ideas (some of them suggested by Russian internet users, remember?) actually turn into reality, Russia could definitely play a more visible role in the world IT landscape – and I’m not quite sure about how pleased the current leaders will be.

Via (in Russian)