On December 3, the 17th National Prize ceremony, Runet Prize 2020, was held. Awards were given for contributions to the development of the Russian segment of the internet. This year the event was held in a combined format – the ceremony was streamed online on the Runet Prize site, Культура.рф portal and on Youtube, whereas the offline event had a limited number of invitees – first of all, Runet Prize 2020 nominees and, of course, their support teams.
In 2020, the prizes were awarded for the 17th time. Overall, 1,170 applications in 14 categories were submitted this year, which is an absolute record throughout the history of the Prize.
The Runet Prize 2020 ceremony began with a video address by Sergei Kirienko, First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Executive Office, who was quick to point out that thanks to the prize winners the country’s residents were able to resolve their issues during the pandemic. “I would like to specially thank the Runet Prize winners and all members of the community who made such a tremendous contribution to fighting the coronavirus. A number of initiatives were carried out by Russian internet companies, free consultations from doctors, the arrangement of transportation of doctors to patients, free telephones for doctors and many other drives that were crucially important not only for traditional audiences, that is, young people. But today, the capabilities of the Internet industry have become vital for a large number of older people who were forced into lockdown. Even the simple warmth of human communication was made possible only with your help,” Sergei Kirtienko said.
This year, the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ established a special category, Domain.РФ Tenth Anniversary + Universal Acceptance,to mark the anniversary of the Russian national Cyrillic domain .РФ. The category received 20 applications from companies that make a substantial contribution to promoting Cyrillic inter-domain routing and the Russian language in the internet – registrars of domain names and state organisations, internet portals and web studios, online studios and even online dictionaries. It is worth noting that the winners were given not just the standard statuettes with .RU, the Runet’s logo, but statuettes bearing the logo of the Cyrillic domain .РФ.
Before announcing the winners, Andrei Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ, said, “Today we honor those companies that put their heart and soul into the development of the Cyrillic domain, to promote the Russian language in the Internet, as well as those who work on the technological track to ensure Universal Acceptance allowing Cyrillic domains to be fairly received by all Internet services and sites.”
The winners in the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ’s special category Domain.РФ Tenth Anniversary + Universal Acceptance are:
- V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Instituteof theRussian AcademyofSciences
- Federal Agency for Tourism (Russiatourism) (portal МирПутешествий.рф)
- RU-CENTER
The Organizing Committee also gave special awards to the head department of the Association of Documentary Telecommunications at Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics, and the portal ГодЛитературы.РФ.
New words, including those related to the Internet and digital technologies, are added every year to the Akademos academic spelling resource, which was established by the V. V. Vinogradov Russian Language Instituteof theRussian AcademyofSciences. Thus, in the past years such words as blockchain, blockchain technology, webinar, wiki project, wiki marking, wiki site, wiki technology, dislike, podcast, selfie, hashtag and others gained entry into the resource. The authors of the resource have now prepared a new, improved and enlarged, edition. Its electronic version can be viewed at http://orfo.ruslang.ru.
In 2020, the Federal Agency for Tourism (Russiatourism) launched a portal that offered hundreds of thousands of people affordable opportunities for traveling around Russia. This is the official portal of the Tourism Cashback Program, which is designed to boost the accessibility of inbound tourism.
It is not the first time the accredited registrar of domain names in the .RU and .РФ domains, RU-CENTER, has been awarded the Runet prize. Last year the RU-CENTER registrar got an award in the category Contribution to the .RU Domain Zone Development for the highest user accessibility. This registrar has the largest number of branches and sales offices across Russia. The company is among the biggest promoters of Cyrillic domains, primarily .РФ, and holds regular campaigns aimed at increasing the number of registrations in the national domain zone. RU-CENTER also has a package of services called Business Lite, which allows users to quickly create a site in the .РФ domain using a special design kit.
The Department of Electronic Data Exchange Technologies at the Moscow Technical University of Communications and Informatics (MTUCI) has deployed a hardware and software system that is based on domestic technological solutions. By using an innovation stand, applied software was adapted so that it would operate on the architecture of Russian-made workstations. In June 2020, students of the main department of Association of Documentary Telecommunications (ADE) at the MTUCI defended their Master’s theses on the design of the Standard National Module of Studying Internet Technologies (TOMIIT). These theses serve as complementary material for the TOMIIT manual and tutorial in the discipline Principles of Internet Technologies, which deals with multilingualism in the web, such as internationalized domain names (IDN) and email address internationalization (EAI), as well as the principles of universal acceptance.
The ГодЛитературы.рф portal was launched in 2015. A year later it was transformed into a special project of the Rossiyskaya Gazeta newspaper, which now operates practically around the clock, with five to 10 new submissions appearing on the site daily, which range in topic from news reports to analytical materials, “reference lists,” opinion columns by famous writers, as well as exclusive photo, video and audio materials.
All the winners in the special category Tenth Anniversary + Universal Acceptance will take part in a news conference to wrap up the anniversary year in celebration of the ten years the Russian top-level domain .РФ has been in existence. The news conference will be held at noon on December 15 at the TASS Press Center. Also participating in the news conference will be Andrei Vorobyev, Director of the Coordination Center for TLD .RU/.РФ; Sergei Plugotorenko, director of the Russian Association of Electronic Communications, Alexander Ivanyuk, president of the Russian Association of Documentary Telecommunications and other experts.
The live streaming of the news conference 10th Anniversary of the .РФ Domain: The results of Year and the I Support the .РФ Project will be available on the official site and in the TASS Press Center’s Facebook group.
