INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATIONS FOR ALL

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 thirty 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. IKE SENERES/01-10-2024