The Mike Abundo Effect

When I see the Philippine government attempt such boneheaded IT projects as the National Broadband Network, I am convinced the Philippine government needs a chief information officer to steer their IT projects in the right direction. As it stands, decision-making for government IT projects is just one big mess: witness the insane number of functionally unrelated government executives (and even one executive’s spouse!) embroiled in the NBN controversy.

As much as I disagree with Senator Loren Legarda’s misguided attempt to censor the Internet, I must agree with her push to create a Department of Information and Communications Technology. The secretary of that department would effectively become the government’s CIO. With one person in charge of IT projects, the government wouldn’t have so many extraneous individuals with extraneous interests meddling in IT decisions.

After speaking before the Philippine Internet Commerce Society, Philippine Senator Loren Legarda speaks to The Philippine Daily Inquirer’s Erwin Oliva about her bill to create the Department of Information and Communications Technology. That’s me in the background chatting with Googlers Aileen Apolo and Franklin Naval.

Thanks to everyone who came to the induction of the new Philippine Internet Commerce Society directors at the Peninsula Manila Hotel last night. Senator Loren Legarda, who swore us in, is pretty and feisty as ever. Noemi Dado posts more pretty pictures. Please tag your videos, photos, and articles about the event pics07 so we can all find them.

This is PICS’ tenth year, and my third term as vice-president. A lot of what we called emerging information technologies two years ago are standard online services today. I’m glad to see geekery mainstreamed so quickly; that just lets us geek over more new stuff. Yes, Jayvee, Hell is freezing over and over and over again — and it’s cool.