Open Data in Philippines: from access to awareness

Abstract

As a democratic country, the Philippines values citizen participation in ensuring that people's voices are heard and that they are part of important decision-making processes. ICT-mediated and enabled participation plays a particularly significant role in the Philippines, which is considered a leader in mobile telephony. However, despite high usage of ICTs, the country still lags behind its neighbours in terms of broadband infrastructure and Internet access, thus precluding the full realisation of ICT-mediated citizen engagement. This Brief makes a series of recommendations on the role and use of Open Data in the Philippines. It argues that Open Data initiatives cannot succeed without a greater framework and culture of openness, which includes interoperability of systems in government. Another aspect of developing such culture of openness is changing the attitudes of both government and public towards open data, as well as developing their technical capacity in information management. This brief is part of a series from IT for Change produced from its Voice or Chatter research project, which examines the relationship between ICT-mediated citizen engagement and democratic governance.