House Blues
Rodolfo Vicerra was one of the few speakers at an international conference on ICT held in Makati without a Powerpoint presentation. The director-general of the Congressional Planning and Budget Office at the Philippines' House of Representatives was unapologetic. It was, he said, a good way of illustrating the state of legislative services in the Philippines ICT-wise: little progress.
Sure, the country's 200-plus congressmen and their staff have their computers, but only a handful of these are linked to the chamber's ICT Services, Vicerra said. There is no decent local area network to speak of at the House, he added.
And to think it would require only P1 to P2 million to network all of the hundreds of computer units at this institution, which wields power over the government purse and whose members bring home to their respective congressional districts every year P65 million in pork barrel funds.
Sadly, the interest of majority of the congressmen whose offices are now wired to the ICT Services is primarily to gain access to the Internet rather than to "Legis," the Legislative Information Services, the chamber's attempt at e-legislation.
Not that Legis has much to offer at the moment. Because information is still manually fed, only priority bills find their way to Legis. As for the thousands of bills, mostly local, that are filed by congressmen, these still require manual tracking.
The result? "Very few bills are tracked," Vicerra said. That also explains the sparse information about legislation that the public gets from the House of Representatives website.
Vicerra can only rue the irony of the situation: A knowledge-intensive institution that has not bothered to invest in the infrastructure to access and disseminate knowledge and information. In the process, the public it serves is likewise deprived of access to knowledge. And, he said, "limited access to knowledge is tantamount to concentration of power in a few."
For this year, getting money to improve the House of Representatives' ICT Services, particularly Legis, tops Vicerra's wish list. He's hopeful the chamber can tap into the e-government fund in the annual national budget.
The CPBO has other ambitious project as well, including the creation of discussion boards for each House committee on the chamber's website, plus communication linkages with the public through SMS, among other means.
Sure, the country's 200-plus congressmen and their staff have their computers, but only a handful of these are linked to the chamber's ICT Services, Vicerra said. There is no decent local area network to speak of at the House, he added.
And to think it would require only P1 to P2 million to network all of the hundreds of computer units at this institution, which wields power over the government purse and whose members bring home to their respective congressional districts every year P65 million in pork barrel funds.
Sadly, the interest of majority of the congressmen whose offices are now wired to the ICT Services is primarily to gain access to the Internet rather than to "Legis," the Legislative Information Services, the chamber's attempt at e-legislation.
Not that Legis has much to offer at the moment. Because information is still manually fed, only priority bills find their way to Legis. As for the thousands of bills, mostly local, that are filed by congressmen, these still require manual tracking.
The result? "Very few bills are tracked," Vicerra said. That also explains the sparse information about legislation that the public gets from the House of Representatives website.
Vicerra can only rue the irony of the situation: A knowledge-intensive institution that has not bothered to invest in the infrastructure to access and disseminate knowledge and information. In the process, the public it serves is likewise deprived of access to knowledge. And, he said, "limited access to knowledge is tantamount to concentration of power in a few."
For this year, getting money to improve the House of Representatives' ICT Services, particularly Legis, tops Vicerra's wish list. He's hopeful the chamber can tap into the e-government fund in the annual national budget.
The CPBO has other ambitious project as well, including the creation of discussion boards for each House committee on the chamber's website, plus communication linkages with the public through SMS, among other means.
posted by Pei Fang | 11:25 AM
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