I HAVE created a new messenger group in Facebook. It’s called ICT4ALLPH. It’s short for “Information and Communications Technologies for All-Philippines”.
My idea is very simple. To gather together all Filipino Information and Communications Technology (ICT) experts, specialists and practitioners who want to help in national development, and match them with the private companies and government agencies that need them.
In my 30 years of experience as an ICT specialist, I have known hundreds of Filipinos who are very talented in the information and communications technologies, all of whom would like to help in the development of our country, but do not have a way or a platform to help them do that.
The default role of the group is to provide either free advice, free services or free software to the government. Up to that point, there are no challenges because that would not require payments.
If payments are required, it would already be subject to the procurement law. If procurement is required, all members will back off as a group, but we will allow individual members to proceed on their own, to bid for the projects either as individuals or as partnerships, or as representatives of their employers.
As a default strategy, we could always want to offer free and open-source software (FOSS) so that no payments are necessary. There could also be some donations from private sources.
AN ALTERNATIVE TO NUMBER CODING
As a strategy to reduce the volume of vehicular traffic in streets and highways, the government has enforced the number-coding scheme. Meanwhile, it is obvious that the enforcement of emission standards has been very weak.
Despite the enforcement of the number-coding scheme, the volume of traffic is still not manageable. On top of that, air pollution levels also appear to be not manageable.
As an alternative, I suggest that we abolish the number-coding scheme and replace it with the strict enforcement of emission standards.
In theory, the number of non-compliant vehicles could greatly reduce the volume of traffic, more than what the number-coding scheme could do. I do not have the exact numbers now, but I would guess that more non-compliant vehicles could be taken off the roads, compared to what number coding could do.
In layman terms, it would appear that the number coding scheme is punishing everyone by limiting their access to the roads, regardless of whether their vehicles are emissions compliant or not. In comparison, I think it is more sensible to punish only those who are not compliant, and not those who are compliant.
Air pollution and slow traffic are two separate problems of course, and the government may not see these two as being interrelated. But would it not be good to solve two problems with only one solution?/PN
