This story was taken from www.inq7.net
More than 1,600 local governments have websites: NCC
First posted 10:40pm (Mla time) Mar 15, 2006
By INQ7.net
MORE local governments are putting up their own websites, figures from National Computer Center (NCC) showed.
As of December 2005, over 1,600 local governments in key cities, provinces, and municipalities have set up a web presence, the NCC records noted.
There are now 74 provinces, 112 cities, and 1,489 municipalities that have websites. This is roughly 98 percent of the total of 1,696 local government units in the
The E-commerce Law requires that government to have some form of web presence. Eventually, the
According to Tess Camba, director of NCC Field Operation Office, the agency has began helping local governments set up websites on May 2002. The NCC has been hosting workshops for local and regional government agencies and state universities and colleges since that time.
"The workshops were made possible with the development of the government web template with online content management feature (which came to be known as the Website Content Management System or WCMS) by NCC's IT group in
In September 2002, the NCC spearheaded the eLGU project to facilitate development of local government websites.
The NCC is now following the United Nations-American Society of Public Administration (UN-ASPA) standard for putting up websites. It comes in five stages, starting with web presence as he first stage and a full-integrated and interactive portal as stage five.
"This year, our focus as far as web presence is concerned is to continue to assist the provinces, cities and first, second and third class municipalities with Internet access points in their locality to upgrade their websites to either Stage two or three. We also hope to be able to establish more citizen-centric websites with the piloting of at least one LGU website per region," Camba added.
To date, Camba said that no local government unit has reached Stage 4 or 5 of the UN-ASPA stages for e-government.
NCC is currently helping develop a more citizen-friendly websites.
"For the LGUs specifically, the target audience is the citizens both locally and abroad. This is the very reason why we came up with the citizen-centric development guide, because we want the LGU websites not just to offer information but also to bring the citizen and local government interaction on a different level. We want citizens to get more involved and to freely interact with the local government, and we want the latter to better cater and respond to the citizens' needs.
She said that the citizen-centric development guide is a result of the study of more advanced citizen-centric websites of other countries as well as the integration of common information and service needs as gathered from citizen feedback in existing Philippine government websites.
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