My Government, My Partnership

Country of focus: Global
Although the aim of the project is global it can be beneficial to the Philippines by allowing
the Filipinos to gain access of a digital government through this free mobile application as a
tool for raising public awareness and participation on good governance thus increasing the
government’s accountability.
Categories that the project aims to promote are:
• Fiscal Transparency: Innovation that supports the publication or dissemination of
essential budget documents and therefore enhances citizen engagement in budget
accountability and promotes an open budget system;
• Access to Information: Innovation that increases the public’s right to access information
and public data;
• Citizen Engagement: Innovations that support citizen participation and engagement in
policy making and governance, including basic protections for civil liberties.
The innovations behind MyGOV are the tools inside that make it a powerful for the citizen that allows them to interact with their Government concerns and actually participate in making the best solutions possible. This application serves as a hub empowered by social media and the national government as its physical counterpart in promoting good governance. Anyone can literally be Presidents in their own governments.
Another innovation lies within the incentives system. Every log in of users will merit points, and every winning solution passed by a user will gain him a huge amount of points that increases his level inside the MyGov community. Levels range from Citizen, Mayor up to the President’s level as the highest. In addition to the prestigious levels which the users can share on social media, they also get monetary rewards for winning solutions. Prestigious levels will also be recognized and promoted by the national government to honor their genius solutions.
To increase transparency, the application has 3 main homepage buttons one is called My Government, after selecting, inside are 5 sub categories namely: Education, Health, Safety, Jobs & Opportunities and Budgets. Inside each window you may browse the Local, National or Global Government content feeds. Additional Feature inside each sub category is a DOWNLOADS side panel option where all forms and documents related can be searched and downloaded. Citizens may also request for a content that they want to see posted.
The accountability increases with its built in report tool. Anyone can use it to shoot an incident or issue then post it together with the details. Citizen’s may choose to publish this locally, nationally or globally to MyGov Global feeds.
For our Government engagement strategy, we will propose a research base analytics to rate governments compliance on transparency and accountability based on their responses to the citizen’s request and more on their proactive participation in providing government related information. Then we can provide “open data” results where citizens and governments can compare performances.
This project does not put any bearing on gender as it encourages everyone to participate. Registration also allows the youth to participate because we believe that as early as possible, the young minds must be ready to produce many solutions for today’s challenges. For the rural areas, we are sure that very minimal orientation is necessary as they are already users of mobile devices and the simplicity of the interface facilitates easier navigation also to consider the grassroots. We are also hoping to enable language optimization in the future. This project will be very open to many because as long as they know or at least even seen how to navigate a mobile phone, we can be assured that they can be one of the biggest contributors of this project.
We deserve to win because our aim is simple; to create a community of “solutionaries”; to empower the citizens thru the use of simple and easily accessible innovations (mobile devices) with extremely functional and engaging capabilities. Thru this anybody can literally be a President of his own government. Just a hand with one functional finger can make a whole lot of difference in this world.