Technology for society (10)

Ike Señeres .

Conclusion

THIS being the last of a series of 10 articles, you would have figured out by now that in using the term “technology”, I do not just mean information and communications technology (ICT), but “science and technology” (S&T) in general. I really do not know who it was that lumped “information” and “communications” together as if it is one technology, but for sure I can tell you that as it actually happened, practically everything that is in the realm of S&T is now affected by, or is benefited by ICT. That is absolutely true and nobody can argue with that, but somewhat related to that is the saying that nowadays, if you are not doing electronic commerce, you are not doing commerce at all. That however may be too broad of a statement, because what was projected to become a “paperless” society ultimately became a society with “less paper”.

In theory, it could be said that practically all cabinet level departments have the opportunity to promote one form of technology or another, either as ICT or S&T. In particular however, it could be said that the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) and the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) have more opportunities to promote technologies than the rest of the others. Rather than make this topic sound more technical than ever, I would rather ask what good things the society needs and after that, we could just ask what technologies would be needed in order to provide for these good things. If we will do it this way, I am very sure that we could do many good things for society, and it does not even matter what technologies are needed in order to make it happen.

Regardless of whatever cabinet level department is involved however, what is very basic is that their starting point is policy, and by that I mean the policy basis to promote or deploy one form of technology or another. Once the policy basis is established, it would be very easy to derive programs, plans and projects that could go under it. By the way, as an aside, it could be said that any government project that has no policy basis is most likely corrupt, because for sure it would not have the benefit of having prior studies and evaluations. In vulgar language, we could even say that these projects were either invented or inserted. Going back to our main topic however, we should go direct to the point and say that all of these departments should really identify what policies they could formulate in order to promote or deploy whatever technologies are available to them.

Also in theory, it could also be said that ICT is merely a derivative of S&T and it could even be said that as offspring, ICT will never ever be completely weaned from its mother. To put it another way, there will never be an end to the many ways and means that S&T could improve and upgrade ICT, in more ways than one. From another perspective, it could be said that all these departments could strategize on their own as to how they could have their own initiatives in support of both S&T and ICT. For practical reasons however, it would be more relevant to say that whatever these departments are planning to do however, it should always be S&T and ICT driven, otherwise it would not have a rhyme or reason, and that would be like saying that it might have a body, but it would have no soul. Perhaps that would be akin to saying that whichever department implements a project without a policy basis, then the head of that department would have no soul.

What should we do if the potential use of both S&T and ICT would require the actions or the participation of more than one department? That question seems to be relevant when it comes to the objective of building or developing “smart cities”. When it comes to this objective, the obvious question is which departments should be involved in it? And which should be the lead agency? To answer that question, the obvious answer is the Department of Interior and Local Government (DILG), since the cities are supposed to be under the DILG. That answer is not sufficient however, because other agencies are needed in order to bring “smart solutions” to the problems of energy, connectivity, water and recyclability, among others. That is just an initial list, because there are many more solutions that could make a city “smart”.

Aside from understanding what “smart cities” are, the officials of Local Government Units (LGUs) should know how to differentiate between words that are usually confused with each other, for example poverty reduction vs. poverty alleviation, landfill vs. dumpsite and drainage vs. sewerage. Not understanding one or more of these differentiations could result in poor planning, even with the use of both S&T and ICT. That is probably what happened in Boracay, as the LGU officials there seemingly did not know the difference between drainage and sewerage, and that is why there was no local implementation of laws pertaining to Sewerage Treatment Plants (STPs). We now know that Boracay does not have STPs, but do we know whether they have a landfill or a dumpsite? And after many years of having a tourism boom, was poverty reduced, or was it just alleviated?

E-mail: iseneres@yahoo.com