On December 21, the results of the 8th national competition of internet projects for children, adolescents and youth, Positive Content, organized by the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ and the Smart Internet Foundation (Domain .DETI), FRI and ROCIT, were announced. This year, 610 participants applied in eight main and seven special categories; about 500 of these resources involving children and young people in active life on the network and beyond, were accepted for the competition.
Competition submissions included traditional websites, and also blogs, online media resources, video channels, social network groups, offline and online games, and apps adapted for the most popular mobile platforms. The biggest number of applications were in the main categories, Best Educational and Cultural Institution Websiteand Best Group on Social Networks. The special category Best Website for Children was also very popular.
As in the past, the participants represent all nine federal districts in Russia. The leaders in terms of participants were the Moscow, Samara and Sverdlovsk regions. The top five also include St. Petersburg and the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Area, closely followed by the Nizhny Novgorod and Chelyabinsk regions, as well as Bashkortostan and Tatarstan. The Trans-Baikal Territory, the Komi Republic and the Yamal-Nenets Autonomous Area were at the bottom of the list with only one application each submitted from these regions.
The Positive Content 2018 winners include large national projects as well as small regional ones. The full list of prize winners is available on the official website of the competition.
The Positive Content Contest has been held since 2009. Over this time, about 5,000 positive public internet resources have participated.
The contest organizers and staff engaged in dialogue with the creators of positive content across Russia note that the main problems that prevent developing positive content extensively are the lack of direct organizational support and continuous funding for projects. Most positive content projects are developed by enthusiasts and do not generate income for their creators, but require investment for development.
Speaking at the annual news conference yesterday, President of Russia Vladimir Putin noted that state support for positive content on the internet is being provided and will continue.
“Now, with regard to supporting the Russian segment of the internet. Yes, it is the right thing to do, and we are already doing so. We have grants, I am not sure about the exact amounts, but they are measured in hundreds of millions of rubles. These grants are related to content, and we are allocating, I believe, 144 billion rubles to this end. Overall, we officially allocate about 400 million rubles for this type of activity, so we are doing this and will continue to do so,” the President said.
According to ROCIT Director Sergey Grebennikov, users are willing to pay for the content they want. If this content is informative enough, parents are willing to pay for it to be available to their children.
“Today, any support for positive content primarily involves the media. But in our opinion, this is not enough, because not every producer of positive content should and can be a mass media outlet,” Grebennikov commented, adding that there is no organization that functions as a fund and distributes state financial support. “It is necessary to establish an organization to primarily help web resources receive funding for the development of positive content, and most importantly, to help them monetize it,” he said.
“The main goal of our competition is to contribute to filling Runet with high-quality digital products that meet modern information security requirements, as well as provide all-out support for the creators,” said Viktoria Bunchuk, Project Manager at the Smart Internet Foundation.
“Another major goal of the competition is to increase the digital literacy rate of users of the Russian internet segment through popularizing projects with positive content,” added Andrey Vorobyev, director of the Coordination Center. “Together with our partners who organize the competition, weare implementing many educational projects that share this mission and generally contribute to improving the quality of internet content.”
The winners will be awarded in February 2019 as part of the 2019 Cyber Security Forum. Each finalist will be personally informed of the time and place of the event in January.
All competition participants and finalists will also be awarded the Positive Content digital quality mark. More information about this will be published later on the project website or on its official social media pages.
