MANILA, Philippines – The Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) and Rappler recenty signed a memorandum of understanding to collaborate on projects, activities, and programs that promote transparency and enable community involvement using social media and other available technologies.
The MOU ws signed on October 27 at the close of the month-long celebration of the 25th anniversary of the passage of the Local Government Code of 1991.
This partnership allows for collaboration in matters such as fighting corruption, promoting the best standards in governance, and disaster risk reduction and mitigation.
Through Rappler’s citizen engagement arm, Move.ph, technology is harnessed to help bring communities and government together. Since 2012, the DILG and Move.ph have been working closely to address the gaps in publishing and disseminating crucial information to the public when they need it the most.
That was the inspiration behind Agos, which, in the past 3 years, has developed efficient crowdsourcing and mapping technologies, as well as trained government officials and citizens to use these tools to help in disaster risk reduction and management.
Agos' objective was to map critical areas and respond to calls of relief and rescue real time, using a shared database where anyone could contribute. Through the Agos platform, DILG officials were able to check and respond to real time updates of on-ground citizen reports.
This year, the anti-corruption platform #NotOnMyWatch was launched to help in understanding how corruption works – where it happens, how it happens, and how frequently it happens – through citizen reports submitted online and for free.
Similar to the idea of Project Agos, #NotOnMyWatch hopes to develop a community of active citizens submitting good or bad reports on government service delivery.
DILG Undersecretary Austere Panadero cited the importance of citizens giving feedback to government, especially with the number of DILG programs and projects happening all over the Philippines. Monitoring these projects is very tedious and cannot be done by DILG alone, he said. To understand if these programs are indeed effective, DILG needs citizen feedback, and #NotOnMyWatch can be used to do this.
Rappler's research and content strategy head Gemma Bagayaua Mendoza said, “There are 50 million Facebook users in the Philippines alone, and we want to bring the conversation of governance to where they already are – Facebook.”
Reporting on government service can now be easily done via Facebook Messenger or through a web form on www.fightcorruption.ph. – Rappler.com