“Our task is to build a civil society in the digital space, because today there is no other”

2023-11-21 14:39:23

What are the benefits of the platform, what can we expect from it in the election year and how can it be used safely in Belarus? One of the developers of the platform told Pozirk about this Pavel Lieber. He became known to the general public in 2020, when he presented before the presidential election “Voice” platform. That became one of the main evidences of falsification of official voting results.

We offer the main points of Pavlo Lieber’s interview with the publication «A glance».

– “New Belarus” is, in fact, an entire ecosystem of products, which we have been developing since 2020. It all started with the “Voice”, which proved fraud in the elections; then platforms for medicine and legal consultations were created. Then we helped to create a business hub and as a result came to the idea that, in principle, we are creating such a digital space in which Belarusians and Belarusians, wherever they are, in the country or abroad, gather together and or use some services , or get some other benefit from it. Then we started to create this whole ecosystem of “New Belarus” so that people not only gather for some pleasure, but also in the future could create a full-fledged digital society capable of understanding their problems and solving them together.

And, actually, the essence of the platform, if we try to reduce it to some short phrase, is to create a digital space where groups of disparate people or communities can become, let’s call it, a digital nation.

“Different organizations can come to the platform, create their conditional branches”

— What products have been created since the launch of the platform?

– Several of them appeared at once. Almost at the end of last year, we launched a mobile program – a cultural and social hub, where posters, information about cultural events, mitapes, concerts are posted. Belarusian services, YouTube channels and other sources of information were gathered there.

This year, we conducted a “pilot” tax project: in Lithuania and Poland, we asked 250 people to allocate part of their annual tax to our partners (in these countries, there is a concept of charity tax, that is, a small percentage that is given to charitable purposes). On our platform, we initiated the generation of ideas, a public discussion, and the selection of finalist ideas. That is, we did not take the collected money in the amount of about 20,000 euros.

Two projects won. In Lithuania – Belarusian physical library, with the possibility of online booking of books. In Poland – English-language portal on the history of Belarus for foreign historians and journalists. Now both of these projects are being implemented, and one of them will definitely start by the end of the year.

Another big project, the implementation of which we started this year, — community. That is, if before that we, in fact, simply provided some information from ourselves, now various organizations can come to the platform, create their conditional branches on it: cultural, diasporic, business communities and others. Thus, we begin to supplement the content not only with our own information, but also with the information generated by these organizations.

A large amount of work that we are doing now to launch this by the end of the year is about supplementing our platform with political communities, when any political pro-democracy organization will have the opportunity to create a branch in the same way, get a set of tools through which they can more conveniently interact with by its users.

“We do not collect personal data at all”

— How is the issue of security for the users of the platform resolved, given its recognition as “extremist” less than a month after its launch?

– First of all, you can use all the services of our platform absolutely anonymous. You can talk anonymously with doctors, get legal advice. You can chat anonymously in the application: we ask when registering email address only, and it is not mandatory, but is needed only if the user wants to communicate in chats or participate in votes. By default, today we do not collect personal data at all, so it is very difficult to steal them from us. User names on the platform are generated randomly from an adjective and the name of one of the settlements in Belarus, of which there are currently 24,000. That’s why there are various High Honorable Skarynichi and others.

— Can you, for example, help conduct elections to the same Coordination Council?

– We can hold elections in any configuration, including the Coordination Council, which is now, as far as we know, looking for optimal ways of organizing them. Accordingly, if they decide that technological support is needed, we will be happy to help.