November 23, 2012. Russian Vice Premier Arkady Dvorkovitch and Governor of Sverdlovsk Region Evgeny Kuivashev paid a visit to Yekaterinburg’s stand dedicated to the application for hosting the World Universal Exhibition EXPO in 2020 today; the stand is currently located in Paris, EXPO 2020 Application Committee Autonomous Non-Profit Organization’s press service reports.

Head of EXPO 2020 application committee, Senator Arkady Chernetsky, Mayor of Yekaterinburg Alexander Yakov, Head of EXPO 2020 Application Committee Autonomous Non-Profit Organization Eric Bugulov, and representatives of the federal authorities and of the region’s business community are also taking part in the BIE assembly proceedings.

The stand features an interactive screen that allows any visitor to get acquainted with Yekaterinburg; a young professor from the Ural State Law Academy Vadim Kharasov and Ural State University of Economics post-graduate student Tamara Ovsyannikova presented the gist of the project:

‘We visited four countries: Panama, Namibia, Mongolia, and Indonesia. We tried to select the locations that were not easily accessible in terms of technologies. For example, this was a rainforest village in Panama, and it was only possible to get there via a three-hour trip down a river. For obvious reasons, there are no technologies there whatsoever, no Internet, no mobile networks. We selected such locations and installed satellite terminals there. The idea was to involve many countries into one dialogue and overcome barriers,’ Kharasov says.