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ULEY

ULEY was envisioned as a "city super-app"—a centralized hub featuring a civic engagement module (geo-tagged incident reporting), emergency alerts, local news, and public live-cam feeds. It even featured a unique gamified incentive system, allowing residents to earn reward points for civic activity that could be spent on local goods and services.

While the project earned the backing of the Foundation for Assistance to Small Innovative Enterprises , it hit a brick wall with the Ulyanovsk City Council.

During a committee hearing, the team presented ULEY’s potential to prevent tragedies—such as citizens falling into improperly secured manholes—by streamlining hazard reports. The political pushback was surreal. Deputy Dmitry Saurov went on the record claiming the ULEY team was merely "trying to sell the city future broken legs" ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, completely ignoring that the app’s primary goal was to prevent those very injuries. Another deputy, Viktoria Markelova, dismissed the idea of incentivizing residents to report issues, stating, "We’re already drowning in constituent requests", suggesting that making it easier for citizens to speak up was a bug, not a feature.

The project was officially shuttered in 2021 due to a total lack of municipal interest in digitalizing urban management.

Just one year later, the city rolled out the federal "Reshaem Vmeste" (Solving Together) feedback platform. Designed to handle the exact same tasks-geo-tagged reporting and incident routing — this system was integrated by local authorities without a single objection. Apparently, innovation is only welcome when it’s mandated from the top down.

P.S. Between 2021 and 2026, Ulyanovsk recorded at least four instances of residents falling into sewer structures. These "future broken legs" turned into a grim reality: the death of a child in 2023, a child injured in 2025, and most recently in 2026, another injured child and the tragic death of a woman.