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BY IKE SEÑERES
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Thursday, January 26, 2017
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I LAMENT the fact that I have built so many databases in the span of my government service, but all of them are gone now, having been the victims of changing priorities and changing administrations.
Well, I just said that I built those databases but that does mean that I did it all by myself, because database building is always a team effort. The question here is not so much on who really built those databases, but whether or not these were sustained. Since the answer is no, it goes without saying that we owe it to ourselves to find out why that is so, and how we could prevent that from happening again.
Not to be irresponsibly critical, but it seems that the government is inherently incapable of sustaining databases for posterity, because of its intrinsic limitations. This is not to blame anyone in government or anybody for that matter because the criticism here is institutional, and not personal.
For one thing, government agencies have to go through many difficult rules and regulations before they could go into projects that would require multi-year appropriations. And even if government agencies could do that within a six-year presidential term, it would be difficult for them to go into projects that would cut across several terms.
Going straight to the point, the problem in this case is not technical and instead, it is political. The bottom line of this is the lack of long term political wills that could last generations, hopefully forever.
In fairness, we could say that there could be some political will that would emerge every now and then here and there, but this would only last until the end of the term of a party or a coalition in power. This is actually the root of the problem, because many databases would die every time the political climate would change, and thus the budgetary priorities would also change. The remedy therefore is to establish databases that are immune from political changes, following the legal fiction that our country has long term needs that should not be politicized.
Just to cite a few examples, I was already able to build a national crime information system, a national finfish database, a database to monitor pollution in bays and coastal areas, and a database of outbound Filipino Overseas Workers (OFWs).
I would rather not mention the government agencies that were supposed to maintain and sustain these databases, because any more finger pointing and blame throwing would do us any good. Instead, we should just learn from our past mistakes and move on, albeit with some care that we would no longer repeat our past mistakes.
There was a time in the past when only the government could afford to put up large-scale databases, because at that time, it would require too much money to build it. To cut a long story short, that was during the time when the only way to build a database was to put up a large data center complete with big servers with huge storage capacities.
That is no longer the case now, because there is now an alternative to host these databases instead in the internet cloud where there the unlimited number of servers that could be used, with an equally unlimited number of storage spaces. Because of the low costs of cloud computing, it is also possible now to have an unlimited number of backup sites and disaster recovery sites.
Fast forward to today, it is now possible for any private company or non-government organization (NGO) to put up large-scale databases, either for profit or for non-profit purposes. In the case of for profit purposes, the private companies would need to raise revenues to keep their business going.
In the case of non-profit purposes however, NGOs could always rely on donations just in case they could not raise enough revenues to keep their operations going. I mentioned these options because I now believe that the only solution to the problem of sustaining databases for prosperity could be solved by enabling NGOs to own and operate these, instead of the government doing it.
For my part, I would be willing to lead the initiatives to put up privately owned databases that could survive generations, for purposes of posterity and national patrimony. Among these could be a database of the Filipino genome.
As of now, we do not have a database of Filipino DNA and because of that; we really do not know where our genetic stock has come from. Other than that, it is also difficult to establish citizenship, considering that we are determining citizenship by blood and not by place of birth.
DNA fingerprinting is not the only use of a DNA database. It also has numerous medical applications. For instance, we would already know what diseases we are prone to have, based on our DNA and those of our ancestors.
We would also know what preparations we need to have for our children and grandchildren, in order to protect them from probable sicknesses. And by the way, DNA is not only for people, because we also need a DNA database of our native flora and fauna for purposes of food security and environmental protection, among other purposes. This might be gargantuan tasks, but we have to do it./PN
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