Community-based social media in Russia

At the BBC Social Media Summit, community web organiser William Perrin spoke about the impact of locally run social media in communities across Britain - including King's Cross in London, Sheffield, and the tiny village of Parwich in Derbyshire.

He said the level of activity on these sites could be really impressive: the Sheffield forum has received 5 million posts and is the "dominant media source" in the city, while the site serving Parwich, a village of just 500 people, gets 400 page-views a day.

Community social media are also thriving in many towns and cities across Russia. And some have played an important role in local stories that have hit the national headlines.

In the hours following the Raspadskaya pit disaster in Mezhdurechensk in Western Siberia on 8 May last year, it was not to TV and radio but to a local blogging community that many of the town's 100,000 inhabitants turned for information about the fate of loved ones and the progress of the rescue mission.

The community had been set up on the Mail.Ru platform by user Daria Fedosova, to record events connected with the lives of the pitmen and their families.

The first thread on the 8 May disaster received over 2,800 posts. And in the next few days the community became a focus for lively discussions among mainly female local activists arranging tributes to the victims and protests about working conditions at the pit. It also became a prime source for high-profile bloggers, such as Marina Litvinovich, who were trying to report aspects of the story ignored by the mainstream media.

Local social media was again in the thick of things a few months later as the Russian authorities failed to cope with the wildfires that swept across many parts of the country in July and August. One of the worst affected areas was around the town of Vyksa in Nizhniy Novgorod Region.

At the height of the crisis, people connected to the local portal Virtualnaya Vyksa (Virtual Vyksa) played a key role in coordinating efforts to combat the fires. Writing on the site's forum shortly afterwards, user Zloy Kaktus described what they had done to help:

"Immediately after the situation in the district became acute, in order to provide some sort of assistance, internet users started to organise themselves into volunteer groups. The administrators and regular visitors to the site took on the role of coordinators and personally started travelling around the district and passing on verified reports from the front line that were more detailed than those being provided on the hotlines. On that black day for Vyksa District, 29 July, volunteers from the Vyksa forum spent the whole day extinguishing fires and helping to evacuate several people from burning villages."

An article in the regional edition of the tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda described Virtualnaya Vyksa as the "portal telling the whole truth about the fires" in the area.

Fires, though, were not the only problem the portal's administrators had to contend with. While the flames were still raging, they had to struggle to combat a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack that put the site out of action for a number of days.

Hacker attacks are an occupational hazard for internet activists in Russia.

The town of Kirovskiy in the Russian Far East is about a sixth of the size of Vyksa with a population of just 9,000. But it, too, has an independent portal providing users with a regularly updated local news service. The site also has a forum boasting 159 registered users.

Kirovskiy came to national prominence in June 2010 as the home town of three members of a gang of young men who were on the run after killing and terrorising police officers in the region.

The young men achieved a kind of folk-hero status among many internet users, who dubbed them the Primorskiye Partizany (Maritime Partisans) and expressed support for them on regional forums and the comments sections of news websites.

After their capture, the girlfriend of one of the gang members posted a message on the Kirovskiy portal in which she appealed for money to hire lawyers and asked people to rally in support of the men at the town stadium. Within three days the appeal had received over 8,500 page-views and had raised the equivalent of $800.

The appeal and other related reports have now been deleted from the Kirovskiy portal. There are, however, numerous references to them, among other places, on the sites of far-right organisations that sought to exploit the Partisans for their own political ends.

Rates of internet penetration in Russia are still quite low compared to the West. But these stories show that, even in provincial corners of the country, social media can play an important role in shaping people's lives and giving them access to information that the authorities and the often subservient mainstream media tend not to provide.

Stephen Ennis is Russian media analyst for BBC Monitoring.