Saturday, February 09, 2008 Cebu City council sessions paperless within a year
SESSIONS at the Cebu City Council will be paperless “within the year.”
Councilor Roberto Cabarrubias, head of the committee on information technology (IT), said the City Hall network server is ready and just needed to be installed.
The server forms part of the City’s Laser Fische system the City bought for the codification of all ordinances and resolutions starting from the approval of City Ordinance 1 in July 1945.
Last December, the council approved a P2.1-million donation to the University of Southern Philippines Foundation (USPF), which is undertaking the last two phases of the legislative body’s codification program.
Resolutions
Cabarrubias, a recognized IT buff even when he was still Basak Pardo barangay captain, said he is in the process of having personnel trained for his project.
Instead of reproducing hard copies of resolutions and ordinances of city councilors and communications to the body, Cabarrubias wanted the documents encoded and accessible for all councilors through their laptops.
Supplemental documents would just be scanned and hyperlinked to the electronic copies of measures as attachments.
A non-lawyer, Cabarrubias said the use of technology made his work as a legislator easier, adding for example that he could just “chat” with his consultant on matters he is not familiar with being discussed during sessions.
He said councilors have laptops, which are underused.
He also plans for those outside to have video and audio access of the goings on in the session hall through computers, necessitating the need to install speakers and television sets in the room.
Cabarrubias said his project also encourages transparency in government.
“Transparent man ang electronic communication and sayon ra ma-trace. Since we are in government, I’m after transparency,” the councilor said.
As of the moment, Cabarrubias just get electronic copies of some scanned documents from the council secretariat and upload them into some interested councilors’ laptops using his USB (universal serial bus).
The laptops are also vital once the codification program is done because the legislators could immediately access through them past measures when deliberating over proposed resolutions or ordinances.
The council is now in possession of an indexed database of digital images of all city ordinances and resolutions, which is phase 1 of the three-phase project.
Phase 2 includes classifying the ordinances and resolutions according to subject matter; review for correction of inconsistencies, grammatical as well as typographical errors; condensing and compacting the sentences by deleting unnecessary words; and weeding out obsolete or inactive provisions.
In this stage, the USPF should prepare recommendations to repeal or amend ordinances that are no longer applicable today.
Phase 3 includes incorporation of the revisions, indexing, hard copy production, uploading the codified ordinances in the City’s website and establishing the code as the “official body of city laws recognized by the court.” (RHM)
