Castro, H. M. (2017). Enhancing policy making through information technology: Crowdsourcing of comments on women's legislative agenda (Unpublished master's thesis). Public Management Development Program, Development Academy of the Philippines.

Public Management Development Program Middle Managers Class Thesis (MMC)--Development Academy of the Philippines.

Entitled" Enhancing Policy Making Through Information Technology: Crowdsourcing of comments of Women's Legislative Agenda," the Re-Entry Project addressed the need of teh Philippine Commission on Woman (PCW) to have a regular mechanism to engage more people regarding the woman's legislative agenda thorough the crowdsourcing technology. This need stemmed from the limited citizens' engagement program of the agency as a policy making body with government agencies as main clientele. The Project inlvoved two major aspects - information technology and Public Communications. It focused on maximizing the potentials of information technology in the delivery of accurate information as well as generating feedback or practical solutions to policy issues from the citizen. The information technology aspect dealt with reformatting existing website templates to accommodate the new content and incorporate the crowdsourcing features of online poll and discussion board. The introduction of the discussion board feature necessitated the preparation of a Terms and use clause to set the guidelines, rules, and regulations for using it. These guidelines intend to create a "forum culture" that sustains a well-informed,open-minded, and constructive discussion about policy issues concerning Filipino women. It clearly established the types of comments that the PCW can moderate or delete to maintain the integrity of agency website. The Public communications aspect on the other hand, included the creation of popular version formats of policy issue discussions, including illustrations and infographics. The goal was to present the policy issue and proposal ofaddress the issue in bite-size information that the general public will easily understand and relate with. This step is needed so that the people will be able to share an informed opinion or recommendation. Five policy issues were included in the ReP: martial infidelity, anti prostitution and amendments to three separate provisions of the Family Code of the Philippines that give primacy to decisions of the husband or father in matters concerning parental consent to marriage, administration of spouses' properties, and exercise of parental authority. The project resulted in the creation of enhanced pages to replace the existing legislative agenda pages of the agency website. The enhanced website was uploaded and pre-tested using a temporary web address to gather feedback about the new format, content, and features. The results of the pre-test survey were documented by the agency's Information Technology team to serve as guide for further enhancing the site prior to launching using the official agency website address. In the context of national policy making, the ReP is intended to help PCW bring the discussions concerning women's legislative agenda (WLA) tot he attention of more Filipinos so that they can share their views and recommendations will then be considered by the agency in its policy analysis. This new method of engaging with stakeholders is not intended to replace other stakeholder engagement activities, such as policy fora, being reaching out to people who normally do not attend such face to face discussions due to factors like time, distance and cost constraints.