The Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) and civic tech volunteer network BetterGov.PH will co-develop the official national government web portal, gov.ph, and will open its technical codebase to public collaboration.
Announced during the inaugural BetterGov.PH Summit, the initiative departs from the state’s traditional reliance on private IT contractors by opening the gov.ph software repository to public inspection and volunteer contributions. DICT Undersecretary David Almirol and BetterGov.PH convenor Jason Torres said the portal’s source code scheduled for public release in the coming weeks.
“This shows that the government is very willing to engage with the IT community,” Torres said, adding that community-driven development aims to curb public spending on costly commercial vendors.
Alongside the portal agreement, organizers launched the BetterGovPH Fellowship, a three-month incubator backed by the WeSolve Foundation, the Philippine Open Government Partnership, the Department of Budget and Management and the Mozilla Foundation.
Five government agencies, the Department of Education, Department of Public Works and Highways, Department of Health, Department of Energy and the Office of the Ombudsman, submitted administrative problem statements for fellows to solve. The pilot cohort has secured 450,000 pesos in volunteer-sourced funding alongside grant assistance from Mozilla.
The summit concluded Philippine Civic Tech Week, which included consultations with the Senate on digital budget tracking and the rollout of Scamcheck.ph with the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. BetterGov.PH formed in 2025 as an independent volunteer network evaluating public digital services.
This article is published on BitPinas: DICT, BetterGov.PH to Co-Develop Official Philippine Government Web Portal
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