The Ulyanovsk region will host the third ceremony of “WeGO Smart Sustainable City Awards”.

The event will take place on 28^th June within the framework of the Fourth WeGO General Assembly which will be held in a Russian city for the first time in history. Among the participants of the grand ceremony are the President of World e-Governments Organization of Cities and Local Governments (WeGO), the Mayor of Seoul Mr. Park Won-soon and the Governor of the Ulyanovsk region Mr. Sergey Morozov.

Earlier Sergey Morozov addressed the leaders of WeGO with a suggestion that the Fourth General Assembly should be conducted in the Ulyanovsk region. The Ulyanovsk region has been actively collaborating with WeGO since 2010, in November 2012 the region was elected Vice President City of the World Organization, and in September 2013 it was chosen to be a European Regional Office of WeGO.

The awards of the international contest will be presented to the authors of the best projects in the field of electronic governance and ‘smart city’ projects. This year the contestants are developers of 76 projects from 56 different cities of the world. Only 18 of them will be recognized as the best ones by the World Organization.

There were six nominations the participants could apply for: Open city, Digital inclusion, Innovative Smart City, Sustainable city, e-Government Service and Cooperative city.

The jury includes representatives from Brazil, Great Britain, Germany, Indonesia, Canada, China, Russia, Sudan, Finland, Switzerland and South Korea. The jury evaluated projects presented on the official site of the contest: ‘WeGO Smart Sustainable City Awards’ http://awards.we-gov.org. Kirill Svyatov, the dean of the Department of Information Systems and Technologies in Ulyanovsk State Technical University, has also taken part in the selection of the winners. ‘The evaluation was conducted according to several criteria, the main of which are the scale of the changes, the quality of the elaboration on the project, innovations, the usage of information and communication technologies. In the Ulyanovsk region there are projects which could take good positions in the rating of WeGO. We hope that in 2020 (the award is conducted once in three years) we will see successful projects in the field of electronic government from the Ulyanovsk region. On the whole, the participation in the WeGO General Assembly will contribute to the dissemination of experience from different countries throughout the region and will allow us to use it for stable development of electronic government and for increasing the quality of the citizens’ life’, said Kirill Svyatov.

The WeGO award was established in 2012. The goal of the international contest is the promotion and practical application of innovative information and communication technologies for increasing the efficiency of work of state and municipal authorities and accessibility of services for citizens, for the exchange of experience in the sphere of innovational strategies of development and the projects of ‘smart city’.