Isabela: How Does IT Fare?

Isabela: How Does IT Fare?

(a blog entry and an idea for the paper)

If the state can’t and the market can’t, who will take care of our interests? It is obvious that we must, the question is how. We need imagination. We have the facts, figures and analysis, but we need mechanisms for adequate governance .-- Michael Gorbachev, quoted in Jessica Zafra’s Galunggong Index and Other Number

Isabela, my province, is all over the papers these days. Isabela Governor Grace Padaca recently received the Ramon Magsaysay Award. Hence I am toying with the idea of doing a paper on the policies she has implemented paving towards the modernization of the province. She has a lot of commendable projects cited and enumerated by the newspapers and it is a good chance, albeit a seemingly impossible task to secure an interview with her, to get to know how the province fares in relation to information technology.

There are a lot of factors to contend with. The B word has to be overcome. My father is a councilor in our small town. When asked if Mayor has projects dealing with communications and information technology, he immediately answered, “Alang budget.”

Although I have the resounding answer to my query, I would be pursuing how the small town if not the remote province fares in the field of technology and how the mechanisms of adequate governance, quoting Gorbachev, work. Hence it is a case study of Isabela in relation to information technology.