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E-Transparency 2010: State Websites of Armenia Far From Perfect

The website of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Armenia was recognized as the most available state web resource as a result of a survey conducted among 40 state websites, more available than those of the RA president, National Assembly, Government and Constitutional Court of Armenia.

“Our website has been twice reconstructed: last time we were supported by the OSCE office in Yerevan. Our application of international practices helps the visitors to easily find information on our website,” Shahen Tonoyan, head of Public Relations Department of the RA Prosecutor’s Office, told JNews. 

The survey has been conducted by the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression (CPFE) taking into consideration the efficiency of posting information on the websites, accessibility and usability of information.

The website of the Prosecutor’s Office of the Republic of Armenia was recognized as the most available state web resource as a result of a survey conducted among 40 state websites, more available than those of the RA president, National Assembly, Government and Constitutional Court of Armenia.

“Our website has been twice reconstructed: last time we were supported by the OSCE office in Yerevan. Our application of international practices helps the visitors to easily find information on our website,” Shahen Tonoyan, head of Public Relations Department of the RA Prosecutor’s Office, told JNews. 

The survey has been conducted by the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression (CPFE) taking into consideration the efficiency of posting information on the websites, accessibility and usability of information.

The websites were surveyed in 3 groups. The first group involved websites of the RA ministries and government-affiliated bodies (25), the second group contained 10 websites of province adminstrations(marzes) and the third one included websites of the RA President, RA National Assembly, RA Government, RA Constitutional Court and RA Prosecutor’s Office.

The 177 selected criteria were assessed by four standards: presence/absence (i.e., how perfectly the information exists on the site), completeness, urgency (efficiency) and accessibility.

“The main observation was conducted in September-October 2010, and possibly there might have been changes in some websites after it. This survey is of systematic characteristics, and now observations for the next monitoring are being implemented. The results will be published in April. We hope that the surveys will encourage rivalry, this resulting in the improvement of the websites belonging to the state institutions,” said Ashot Melikyan, head of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression, while publishing the results.

The survey methodology has been developed in Saint-Petersburg (RF) by the Institute for Information Freedom Development (IIFD). For several years already the Institute has been monitoring websites of the RF official institutions and publically representing the results.

The high[[wysiwyg_imageupload:66:]]est assessment among the ministries deserved the RA Ministry of Transport and Communication, the RA Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and the RA Ministry of Education and Science, respectively. 

“Reputation of the Ministry of Transport and Communication could have been higher, however the website contained information, particularly on the new services offered by the cell operators, reminding a concealed advertisement,” says the final report.

The Ministry of Transport and Communication insists that the mentioned information is not a concealed advertisement as it has been posted on the media section of the website and taken from the media publications.

“We post here articles concerning our sphere. They cannot be considered as an advertisement,” Gohar Khanvelyan, chief specialist of Public Relations Department of the Ministry of Transport and Communication, told JNews.

The Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression has criticized the Ministry of Transport and Communication reporting also that the attached files are difficult to access, “they are opened either as a PDF or after more than one, even after 5 mouse button clicks.”

“We understand that PDF format complicates the process, that is why we have decreased provision of information in that format to minimum,” said Khanvelyan.

Anyway, transparency of the Ministry of Transport and Communication was assessed more than 50 percent. This is the highest grade on the list of ministries.

The last place of the list was occupied by the website (www.petekamutner.am) of the RA State Incomes Committee (SIC).

“The site has an unclear status. There is almost no information there. The website visitor encounters addresses of two other sites here – customs service and tax service – and this in the case when there are no such official sub-departments in the Committee,” said Mesrop Harutyunyan, expert of the Committee to Protect Freedom of Expression.

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The Information and Public Relations Department of SIC told JNews that the SIC website has been created as a connecting link for provision of information between the customs and tax services, “It is difficult for an ordinary citizen to find the sites of the customs service (www.customs.am) and the tax service (www.taxservice.am), since not everyone knows English, that is why an intermediary website (www.petekamutner.am) has been created to help to easily find the desired information.”

CPFE expert Mesrop Harutyunyan insists that in this case information of the two departments could have been posted on separate pages of one and the same website to be more accessible for the visitors.

The website survey results of the province administrations showed that all of the sites have the same structure, the same disign and form, simply the information content of each site is different, this determining the survey criteria. The website of Armavir province administration is in the first place, and the website of Shirak administration in the last. The websites of Ararat and Lori province administrations did not function in September-October. In fact, they have been left out of the examination.

The survey results revealed also that some of the province administration websites are not available because they do not have the ‘Unicode’ encoding. This factor has hampered also during the survey, since the survey program has not recognized those websites which had another coding system.

“It is still impossible to completely analyze, as the survey is being realized for the first time. I cannot say that all of the official websites of Armenia provide the necessary information.  A lot of important information does not simply exist in some of them, but, in general, it is possible to receive certain news from almost all of them,” said expert Mesrop Harutyunyan.

The report can be completely accessed at the following website http://khosq.am/2011/01/1594.

Source: JNews.am