Civic social network “New Russia”

Good day. I want to introduce you to our project, which appeared on the Internet in early December - a new social and social service.

Until recently, a rather small number of people were interested in political events in our country. In addition to businessmen and journalists, mostly just some activists. There was an opinion about the tacit agreement between society and the state, which was expressed in the idea of ​​“income in exchange for power”. But in connection with the latest events at the elections and numerous rallies throughout Russia, this thesis was untenable. Many began to think about what will happen next and how to deal with it.
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Meeting the requirements of the times, the activity of bloggers and civilian leaders has increased - they began to look for options to communicate their position via the Internet. But it turned out that it is quite difficult to do this, because besides the ideological disunity among themselves, their potential audience was spread over various resources. The solution to this problem was the emergence of a platform for communication, the civic network “New Russia” - an independent social media and blog platform for public discussions.


We paid particular attention to the technical part of the site, as it should be user friendly and provide maximum opportunities for communication and information dissemination. We offered to create the specialists of Evrone company, whose approach to work we considered optimal.

The project was implemented in agile development (scrum) on Ruby on Rails. New Russia was created using the best technologies on the market. For example, the commenting and personal message service was created through pub / sub: as soon as a new comment appears, the user on the page with this post receives a notification and the ability to update the block with comments. The private messaging system was implemented via faye on the same principle and allows you to create personal and group correspondence in real time.

Taking into account the tendency in the world Internet to integrate all existing social networks among themselves, we have made possible the service of broadcasting records from Livejournal, You Tube, Vimeo and Google+. A separate interesting task for developers was setting up imports from LJ. All broadcast posts are processed and appear on newrussia.org with a slight delay. Only the allowed tags remain, and the pictures in the post are selected to create a preview. To simplify registration on the site, you can log in through your Facebook, Twitter, Livejournal and Vkontakte accounts, and you can add your favorite posts to your pages on other social networks.

When entering the site, by default, you can see the tape of the most popular posts, which are displayed in the top by voting. “New Russia” is a community governed by the users themselves. Each user has a certain rating, which shows the status and stimulates the writing of high-quality texts.

The choice of agile development methodology was ultimately a definite plus. At the end of each week, we evaluated the work done, made edits, and discussed the terms of reference for a new iteration. The site was launched in just two and a half months. The attention that has appeared in the days of elections to the State Duma did not come as a surprise to us and did not affect the performance of the site, since it was originally designed for high loads.

We launched the project in early December, and he immediately attracted attention. On the very first day of public work, newrussia.org gathered in social networks and on its website more than 33,000 supporters who supported the demand to release all participants in rallies for holding fair elections in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other cities. Over the next week, the site was visited by more than 150,000 people. Later, on the eve of the actions scheduled for December 24, we posted a single map of rallies held throughout the country. It also aroused the interest of many, and some well-known bloggers replied on their pages on the web.

What are the differences in “New Russia” from other similar resources? The first is, of course, a social and public orientation - there are not so many specialized sites that would be oriented towards the formation of a civil society through a direct dialogue of users. Most often in this role are news or analytical sites, but they have a rather low feedback.

The second advantage was the idea of ​​combining users of different platforms on one site. Despite the existence of other social networks, they still have a number of drawbacks. LiveJournal - one of the visited political sites on the Runet - is developing slowly and lately after DDOS attacks it is unavailable. In addition, over the years, many have accumulated a huge amount of complaints to him. Vkontakte and Facebook are not very suitable for publishing large texts, various party sites are very narrowly focused. Attempts by the state to draw attention to themselves through social services also turned out to be quite conditional in the end - the credibility of the government fell dramatically, and this was only the fault of the officials themselves. So the need for the emergence of a project that could take the dialogue of society and the authorities to a new level is long overdue. We hope that newrussia.org will be able to fill this gap, help unite people of different political views and this will eventually lead to positive changes in the political system.

Our social network has attracted a large number of different people and, summing up some intermediate result, we think that our efforts were not in vain - in a matter of weeks hundreds of users took the first steps to create a new communication space, which in the future will improve relations between society and the state.

“New Russia” is a portal for people who have their own position, who want to live in a free society, receive objective information, unite with like-minded people, share their opinions and point out existing problems.

We fully implemented on the site what we planned initially. But time does not stand still, and in the future we, of course, will improve what we can and introduce new services. If you have any ideas or any suggestions, we will be glad to hear them and discuss implementation options.