Dear friends!

I am glad to welcome you on the site of association "?ED"!

Informative and communicative system "MED" is meant to unite small towns in information space of Russia.

Each town taken separately has limited resources to provide a worthy self-presentation in the information medium. This problem is of both technical and organizational character - town administrations often have no opportunity to process and represent the actual information about the town. Despite their rich historical and cultural traditions and a great potential of economic growth, small towns sometimes are switched off from information streams, which essentially complicates their development in our information epoch. The task of the site is to strengthen the position of municipalities by means of consolidating them in a corporate information structure.

? In former times Russia was named "Gardarika", which meant "the country of towns". Economic relations, culture, style of life of Russian people for many centuries formed around small towns which for a long time were centres of civilisation. Much later the leading role in formation of national consciousness passed to the capital. From imperial Russia, first tsarist and then and socialist, we inherited the tradition of firm central administration.

Today in the Russian Federation there are more than 750 small and medium-size towns. However, administrative, cultural and economic relations still develop mainly through the Centre. "Horizontal" relations are just starting to develop - there appear mass-media, joint projects of local authorities in various spheres of activity. Informative association of towns by means of the most advanced Internet - technologies is an answer to the challenge of our time.

Such way of joint upholding of interests as political lobbying is not as efficient as real economic mechanisms. And in order to make these mechanisms work, the intensive information exchange, continuous and substantial dialogue is required, which is possible via informative and communicative system "MED".

Towns - museums, towns - resorts, towns - relics, towns - factories and "science towns" - all of them have their identity, sights and resources for development. The organization of virtual cooperation opens for them real economic perspectives! The towns have what to tell about themselves!

Such dialogue gives opportunities for inter-budget relations, and corporate promotion of services, and creation of favourable image of towns which promotes attraction of investments.

We hope, that the common information medium will extremely favourably influence the well-being and prestige of each town, each factory, museum, resort and scientific research institute.

We trust in development of Association and we invite you to cooperation. We are waiting for towns - participants, we are searching reliable partners. And, of course, we expect active participation of users - both in the development of association, and in the work with informative and communicative system "MED".

Yours sincerely,

Pashentsev V.V.