On 11 October 2005 Nezavissimaya Gazeta (The Independent Newspaper) published an article by Andrey Vaganov “Will Russian Regions Be E-Regions?” (text in Russian). The author discusses the results of the conference “Readiness of Russian Regions to the Information Society and E-Government” conducted within the framework of InfoCom 2005. According to A. Vaganov, the conference cannot be narrowed down to simply “qualitative-evaluations talks”, it resulted in quantitative ratings - Index of Russian Regions’ E-Readiness-2005 and Rating of Russian Regions’ E-Government Readiness 2004-2005.

The Index was developed by the IIS Directorate for Monitoring the Information Society Development with support of the Russian Ministry of Information Technologies and Communications. It aims at creating an information and analytical tool for developing, conducting and amending the policy for the Information Society development on federal and regional levels.

Sergey Shaposhnik, Head of IIS Directorate for Monitoring the Information Society Development, and Yuri Hohlov, Chairman of IIS Board of Directors, expand on the subject.