One of the reasons of civic disengagement is the lack of publicly-available manuals educating citizens about how to get involved in civic activities and how to make participation in community life and politics most effective.

Non-partisan, non-profit initiative KOMMUTATOR seeks to compensate for these informational deficiencies by providing civic education and assisting to political participation and civic initiatives in Russia. In particular, the informational resource collects and presents to the attention of net-users a variety of practical instructions, manuals and recommendations educating Russian citizens about various forms of civic engagement.

Manuals, presented by KOMMUTATOR, address the following types of civic and political activism:

• voting (manuals for electors)
• electoral observation
• participation in political parties activities
• political communication (how to find out who is my deputy; where to find information about his/her activities; where to find most updated legal information; etc.)
• collective associations (nonprofits, trade-unions, and other voluntary groups: how to organize and maintain them)
• interaction with law machinery, including police and courts
• protest actions / mass demonstrations
• women in politics

Some manuals presented by KOMMUTATOR are derived from various Russian- and international web-sources (in that case, necessary references are made). Other are developed by the leader and editor of the project, Iulia Shevchenko and other volunteers. The main reason for selection of materials for KOMMUTATOR is comprehensiveness, objectivity, topicality, and political neutrality.

KOMMUTATOR seeks to involve all interested citizens, irrespective of their party affiliation or ideological preferences, in the project. To that end, I invite those who have relevant information to send it for placing on the web-pages. Furthermore, those who are interested in receiving most updated information about new materials placed on KOMMUTATOR pages, can subscribe to news posting, which can be made on any page of the resource (for instance, this). Archive of news postings can be found here.

The language of KOMMUTATOR is Russian.

You can contact me via e-mail or by leaving a note in the Guest Book.