A writer must empathize with her audience and so I must always be attuned to what my readers want to know. Many of us were born before the Internet was invented and so this piece is for those of us who are catching up with this electronic age. So, since many of my readers are into the marketing of ideas, we might as well be well versed in knowledge management through the Internet. Knowledge management ( KM) is simply a set of systems or practices that individuals or organizations use in creating and marketing of ideas, insights and experiences.
I am now linked to a national group of bloggers and political pundits who are into electronic marketing of ideas and so let me share with you some tips. For example, how do we promote our websites? This is the concern of the webmasters or content providers which could be you. The first tip is to use keywords that are search engine friendly from the title tag to the content. Google, Yahoo and Bing are examples of search engines. Savvy webmasters are skilled in website design, menus, content management, imbedding images & videos, etc. To promote a website or a blog, a content writer must use frequently searched keywords and must be in touch with what people want to know or are frequently searching. A writer who wants to be on the first page of a search engine result, among others, must understand the concept of search engine optimization ( SEO). Good SEO ( white hat ) is simply effective marketing of the website and there are yet no laws for this. For now, the guidelines are simply that what a search engine like Google or Yahoo or Bing catalogs ( or indexes) and orders in a hierarchy of search results and ultimately publishes in the search results are the exact results that Internet users want to see.
But, keywords can also be abused by webmasters such as when popular title keywords are not represented in the content of the website or in individual pieces in the blog or website. I have also come across some gray practices in the Internet. For example, what are the ethics involved when another website uses my entire web page ? A profit oriented travel website used my non profit blog entry and all I could do was ogle at the travel website page which was imbedded with a galore of advertisements. Is acknowledgement and attribution enough? I would prefer also to be sent a copy or link or thread of the usage. In fairness, the website owner retained my byline and so perhaps it can be argued that my own website was promoted, as well.
The URL is the address of a website page and I have promoted some of my work by sharing URL links to popular websites or even popular Facebook accounts. For example, if I want to share information about peace talks then I attach the URL of my published work or the link to the popular Facebook account of the chief peace negotiator.
A likeabilty feature can also be imbedded in your website. It has been determined by a group of bloggers that a blog or website entry is likeable when it is friendly, it has relevance, have empathy and the information is ready. It has empathy when it is able to feel others or when it is able to capture what people want to know.
What do people want to know? In truth, it is really different for various audiences across generations, across social classes, across gender and sexual orientation, religion and belief systems, and various persuasions. So, the challenge is to capture what most everyone and all want to know.
When one is in the business of sharing knowledge through the Internet one will experience sheer joy when one’s work lands on page one of the search results of popular search engines.
Showing posts with label knowledge management. Show all posts
Showing posts with label knowledge management. Show all posts
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Saturday, December 18, 2010
State Secrets in the Wake of Wikileaks
This is a very delicate issue and one that caught the world and the international community off guard. Julian Assange, the head of Wikileaks, a non profit website, caused the release and publication of tons of classified cables of the United States state department. The scale and scope of state secrets which are out in the open from about 250,000 documents are massive and involve various embassies from around the world.
Already, citizen journalists and the press have many monickers for Julian Assange : an internet activist, an anarchist, a high tech terrorist, or an advocate of transparency and truth. A warrant of arrest for sexual charges has been issued against Julian Assange by Sweden a day after the publication of the classified information.
The kind of data that are out in the open are the stuff of foreign policy experts and probably also by journalists who have been keen on geopolitics and international affairs. It has been reported that the classified data are raw as published by Wikileaks and without analysis and with no particular stories. Having worked with the military establishment in my younger days, I kind of understand the importance of classified data for security reasons and negotiations and national interests.
Before our privacy was invaded by the almighty electronic age, we had such a thing as confidential information. In legal parlance, we called these privileged communications and no court of law can compel us to divulge information without our consent. Examples of these are the communication between husband and wife, between lawyers and clients, between doctors and patients, between priests and confessing laity, and communications by public officials in the course of duty when the public interests are compromised.
The art of geopolitics and foreign policy have always been governed by diplomacy and state self interests. To arrive at a foreign policy or public policy, the homework and preparation of diplomats consist of intelligence gathering. It is said that the consultative processes, the diplomatic overtures and being sociable at official functions are only part of the work. A great amount of truth telling to home countries and confidentiality processes and tasks are needed to make our world secure and safe.
Anyway, as initially reported, some examples of confidential information (some of these are actually public knowledge) that have been highlighted in the publication by Wikileaks are about countries which have nuclear power and the fear of neighboring states which have enlisted help to neutralize these nuclear powers, countries funding rebels and terrorists, list of important installations in various sites around the world, etc.
Certainly, our world is drastically changed by this incident and there are many lessons learned from this mess. This incident dramatizes a gap in foreign policy. One major damage, according to a pundit, is the loss of confidentiality needed to conduct foreign affairs.
How do we handle TMI? (Too Much Information) Is there too much sharing of confidential information in unsecured communication technology? When we hold vital information, we should make sure to protect lives and our sources. Confidential information should lead to world peace instead of world war.
In the future, foreign policy experts will be very careful about what kind of information about a country or its public officials will be sent through the cables. Most of all, amendments of laws to address confidentiality and foreign policy are very much indicated. In sociology, this is cultural lag. Our material diplomatic practices and ways of doing things are not at pace with information technology and secured communication. We have as yet to build rules around geopolitics and information technology.
There is so much catching up to do in terms of laws, policies to protect the lives of those heroes in the frontlines of diplomacy who are making our world safe; and as well, there is catching up to do with penal sanctions for violations of privacy, privileged communication and state security. And all these must be interfaced and balanced with our freedom of expression and our right to information.
Already, citizen journalists and the press have many monickers for Julian Assange : an internet activist, an anarchist, a high tech terrorist, or an advocate of transparency and truth. A warrant of arrest for sexual charges has been issued against Julian Assange by Sweden a day after the publication of the classified information.
The kind of data that are out in the open are the stuff of foreign policy experts and probably also by journalists who have been keen on geopolitics and international affairs. It has been reported that the classified data are raw as published by Wikileaks and without analysis and with no particular stories. Having worked with the military establishment in my younger days, I kind of understand the importance of classified data for security reasons and negotiations and national interests.
Before our privacy was invaded by the almighty electronic age, we had such a thing as confidential information. In legal parlance, we called these privileged communications and no court of law can compel us to divulge information without our consent. Examples of these are the communication between husband and wife, between lawyers and clients, between doctors and patients, between priests and confessing laity, and communications by public officials in the course of duty when the public interests are compromised.
The art of geopolitics and foreign policy have always been governed by diplomacy and state self interests. To arrive at a foreign policy or public policy, the homework and preparation of diplomats consist of intelligence gathering. It is said that the consultative processes, the diplomatic overtures and being sociable at official functions are only part of the work. A great amount of truth telling to home countries and confidentiality processes and tasks are needed to make our world secure and safe.
Anyway, as initially reported, some examples of confidential information (some of these are actually public knowledge) that have been highlighted in the publication by Wikileaks are about countries which have nuclear power and the fear of neighboring states which have enlisted help to neutralize these nuclear powers, countries funding rebels and terrorists, list of important installations in various sites around the world, etc.
Certainly, our world is drastically changed by this incident and there are many lessons learned from this mess. This incident dramatizes a gap in foreign policy. One major damage, according to a pundit, is the loss of confidentiality needed to conduct foreign affairs.
How do we handle TMI? (Too Much Information) Is there too much sharing of confidential information in unsecured communication technology? When we hold vital information, we should make sure to protect lives and our sources. Confidential information should lead to world peace instead of world war.
In the future, foreign policy experts will be very careful about what kind of information about a country or its public officials will be sent through the cables. Most of all, amendments of laws to address confidentiality and foreign policy are very much indicated. In sociology, this is cultural lag. Our material diplomatic practices and ways of doing things are not at pace with information technology and secured communication. We have as yet to build rules around geopolitics and information technology.
There is so much catching up to do in terms of laws, policies to protect the lives of those heroes in the frontlines of diplomacy who are making our world safe; and as well, there is catching up to do with penal sanctions for violations of privacy, privileged communication and state security. And all these must be interfaced and balanced with our freedom of expression and our right to information.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps
Wall Street : Money Never Sleeps
This is the first movie I saw on the big screen this year so I might as well revisit it with you.
As a sequel of the first 1987 Wall Street movie and made relevant with a poetic treatise of the real 2008 financial crisis, this film is worth writing about.
Manhattan is postcard pretty as ever as the financial center of the universe.
The screenplay is made familiar by a show of the state of the art of the financial markets and some of our current concerns such as energy requirements of the future and progressive non profit websites that are tools to change the world for the better for our children and the next generations.
This Oliver Stone ( 1987 Wall Street JFK & Nixon fame ) film opens with Gordon Gekko ( Michael Douglas) being released after eight years in jail for financial fraud, which as the character explains later in the film, is actually a much larger crime than the insider trading crime, the initial transgression that we saw at the end of the first Wall Street film.
After seven years we find Gekko a star again as the author of a best seller book : Is Greed Good?
But, the angst of the life of Gekko is mostly about his estrangement with Winnie ( Carey Mulligan), his daughter who blogs in a non profit website, that started to get 50,000 hits or website visits per day and ultimately got 200,000 hits per day when indications for market corrections were published.
The daughter blames the absentee Gekko in jail for all the tragic events in their dysfunctional post modern family : a brother who died due to drug overdose and a mother who went mad.
The partner of Winnie is Jake Moore ( Shia LaBeouf) an energy investment expert working in Wall Street who thinks that energy fusion using water, through hydrogen fusion, is the next “bubble” that will solve our energy problems for the next generations.
The poetic screenplay ( Allan Loeb & Stephen Schiff ) is actually narrated from the point of view of Jake, a protégé of Lou ( Frank Langella of Nixon fame), who commits suicide after his financial investment bank falls. With the help of Gekko, Jake finds out how and why the company of his mentor went bankrupt.
The next scenes are about the so called “ market corrections” in the financial meltdown that is ailing Wall Street. These corrections largely use the legal and justice system structures.
This film tries to explain in scenes, not unlike the television clips we saw in the real life 2008 financial crisis, what is wrong with our financial markets :people borrowing to the hilt, all of the profits coming from financial services such as trading, leveraging, hedge funding and some of these funds are used to finance industrial military weapons of mass destruction ( WMD) and that only about almost a hundred people in the world control these transactions.
That speculation is the mother of all evil.
Gekko describes the current Ninja generation as the generation with “no income, no job and no assets.” The solutions to all these in the words of Gekko are three words “Buy My Book” as the answers can be found in his best selling book.
Gekko, while introspecting in jail felt that he was the lone sane man inside and everyone and all out of prison were crazy.
The conflict in the movie is the struggle of Jake to make the corrections in the cancerous financial market mess, not unlike the real life 2008 financial mess that as we saw was bailed out by the United States treasury in what was called the billions worth “stimulus package.”
The concept of “ moral hazard” is explained: “someone gets your money and that someone is not responsible for it.”
The villain in Bretton James ( Josh Brolin) is exposed; the wall street crook was found committing securities fraud : trading for his own account and betting against the market he was making.
One of the scenes described by A.O. Scott in the New York Times movie review, that also caught my fancy was the fundraiser soiree event where one finds the beautiful people of Manhattan dressed in designer clothes and the camera of Rodrigo Prieto, director of photography, zoomed in on the bulky & beautiful earrings of the women in gorgeous gowns.
It was such an ostentatious display of wealth for charity.
The beauty and the beast that is Manhattan & Wall Street as further described
by A.O. Scott is the intersection of “ material excess…. with genuine beauty”
and that “ what went wrong” in the financial center can be explained in two words: “ human nature.”
Monday, February 15, 2010
2010 Reflections & More
Creating life's markers at the start of the year is a good ritual. It is also good to review what we believe to be true. So, to continue this ritual, I am sharing the second installment of my life’s lessons :
Justice is an esoteric word for most of us. At the start of my human rights work, since we are into development or alternative law, we said, that oftentimes what is legal is not just. Traditionally, our laws were made by the group in power. Which is the reason, for instance, that the basic sectors through the party list system representation have been made a part of our electoral and political system. That some powerful groups have misused this system is another story. In a nutshell, our justice system has a substantive component which is the content of our written law. The structural component are the organizations which are the purveyors of justice or the pillars of the justice system : the courts, the prosecution, the police, the penal structures, the community, etc. And the cultural component of the justice system are the attitudes and behavior of our community towards the justice system. Good citizenship means making a bit of contribution to work for good social changes in our justice system structures, starting with us. Good policies designed to change behavior and create structures or institutions need to be communicated.
Knowledge management (KM) is a fast developing field because of the current information age. We believe that the one who controls knowledge controls power. And so, crucial to community development is the democratization of knowledge. With popular culture, I guess we should widen our imagination and also think outside the box and not to be drawn into the herd mentality that is anathema to positive change. Many traditional values violate human rights such as a patriarchal system that undermines the rights of women.
Love is universal. There are many kinds and they say that the highest form is agape which is about sacrificing one’s interests. Our educational system is still wanting in teaching and inculcating love of country or even love of humanity.
Money is a means of exchange. It can be a measure of one’s passion or industry. We are custodians of wealth and I believe that those who have more money must take responsibility for making this world a better place. Someone said, that one cannot have so much money without the element of violence. Most of all, we cannot bring money to heaven.
Nothing is constant but change. We have been taught that the change agents are our family, the school, our religion, etc. These change agents themselves need changes, too. The concept of family is more than the traditional nuclear or extended family. The laity is not a force to reckon with in the church as evidenced by our religious hierarchy’s supremacy in being able to determine government policies for the reproductive rights of women.
Opposition to the established order is a healthy exercise in a democracy. They say any structure has a tendency to be corrupt in time. Homeostasis and equilibrium just maintains the status quo. Marxism is a theory about conflict and is still very relevant to this day.
People power is now written in our constitution. The concept of recall, party list system, etc are all about people power. But, we must be wary about mass politics that elects the popular and the entertainer. Governance is a skill and an art. But thanks to people power, as it is a deterrent to the rise of tyrants - even if it takes time.
The Quality of life and its changing standards is an index of development. Our kind of development must be a society that can produce the likes of Rizal or a Mozart or a community that can produce a graduate from a remote village in our countryside and can have the same opportunity as anyone to, for example, be able to enter the United Nations to lobby for world peace and development.
Raison d’etre. Life is probably more inspiring or worth living if we believe that we have a reason for being ( raison d’etre). This is about finding our place or niche under the sun. One of the messages I got from the new year text brigade is about waking up and going back to sleep to dream again or to really wake up and chase those dreams. This ‘reason for being’ is also the equivalent of the mission in organizations and corporations. For the mission to be accomplished, it must be couched in specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bounded goals, objectives or outcomes.
Supreme Court. Our Supreme Court is on the spotlight now because the term of Chief Justice Reynato Puno will expire upon his retirement when he reaches the age of 70 on May 17, 2010 and the issue is whether President Macapagal-Arroyo has the right to appoint her choice because there is a ban on “midnight appointments” or presidential appointments two months before a presidential election. Right off, presidential aspirant NoyNoy Aquino was heard as saying that he would not recognize Ms. Arroyo’s appointed Chief Justice if he won the May presidential election because NoyNoy says that would be “contrary to the constitutional ban on appointments…contrary to propriety, delicadeza and precedence.” Notice, that NoyNoy’s remarks invoke both legal and moral grounds. I have always believed that indeed morality is learned from parents if not in kindergarten. Anyway, the University of the Philippines College of Law has issued a statement that a vacancy in the Supreme Court will not be a problem as an acting chief justice can be appointed from among the senior members of the Supreme Court.
Texting. The short messaging system and the information technology have certainly made profound changes in our lives. But, have you experienced disengaging from your mobile phone for a short moment and experiencing bliss from the disconnection? I read that You Tube which is just five years old in 2010, now gets 1 billion views a day; China & India have 350 million internet users; in poor countries, half of all households are mobile phone subscribers. In the coming election campaign and elections, mobile videos and cameras can be used to monitor election offenses and crimes.
United Nations. The representatives of women’s movements worldwide will meet in the United Nations New York for two weeks in March 2010 to mark 15 years after writing the women’s Platform for Action in Beijing in 1995. The meeting is not a General Assembly level but a commission level or the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting. The NGOs preparing for this big event are saying that there won’t be any negotiated document for the CSW but there will be a one page declaration that reaffirms governments’ commitments to the platform written for women 15 years ago. Each country will present progress reports on how they have implemented in programs or policies or legislated the 15 year old Platform for Action during the two weeks in March 2010 including responses to the questionnaires sent to governments by UN regional bodies. Of course, many NGOs will make alternative or shadow reports.
The United Nations needs reforms. After the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, we saw that it is now very difficult for 193 countries to agree on something. Governing the world as one is almost impossible now even if the issues are voluminous. Countries are grouping into small clusters according to issues & themes and geography. To the extent that country issues and problems are solved and countries develop to join the rich club of nations, this kind of governance is perfectly all right. Who needs a global world that is divided into very rich and very poor?
I was recently interviewed on DXDC radio and was asked about my principles and values. This is my annotation to my short answer. In academe, we were introduced to the idea that Filipinos have some negative values which have contributed to our underdevelopment : hiya, pakikisama, utang na loob, ningas cogon, bahala na, etc. Later, other Filipino sociologists have debunked the negativity of these values ( as these values can really be seen in positive terms) and other experts even suggested that the respondents interviewed in that study of the so- called negative values were lowland Christians to the exclusion of other highland tribes. Another framework in the study of values is to evaluate our values against universal values such as human rights, democracy, social justice, sustainable development, etc.
Some of the basic tenets in the discussion of values are that cultures and communities believe that their values are best ( ethnocentrism) and that we should not pass judgment on the values other cultures ( relativism ). But, I say, we have to differentiate between understanding cultures and evaluating whether cultural material practices violate universal standards of morality or human rights. This is to say that values really do change. One example is the death penalty. Our ultimate legal penal sanction now is life imprisonment as we have removed the death penalty in our laws. The basis for this change is the premium placed by our legislators on the concept of restitutive justice.
One of the modernity values being promoted now is sustainable development which is associated with the environment. Of course, in ecology ( the study of the environment), the human being is at the center of the environment. Let me focus on the brown ecology or our cities and the rise of informal settlers in our urban areas. The migration of our peoples to the cities is partly due to so much poverty in the countryside. Some economists are now saying that one of the major causes of our poverty is really our neglect of our agriculture industry. The Philippines remains poor because according to Bernardo Villegas, we used a large chunk of our resources in the manufacturing sector and so there were “ no more resources left to build farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities, seaports, and airports that were essential to making our small farmers productive. Agrarian reform failed, not because of the fragmentation of land, but because we did not provide the small farmers with the wherewithal to be both productive and cost-effective.”
This is also to show that there is a rural - urban continuum. Decongestion of our urban cities means that we should develop our countryside. If the rural people are economically productive they will also have the purchasing power to consume industrial products. In this sense, both agricultural and industrial sectors are related, too.
The other reality in our country which is sure to change our values is diaspora or the dispersion of more than six million overseas Filipinos who are working in almost two hundred countries in the world. Although, the downside to overseas migration are many, at least one positive saving grace is that our fellow Filipinos will surely bring positive values when they come home and measure our way of behaving and doing things with the best that they are experiencing in other lands.
Most of all, the one positive value that we should be working on at this juncture of our democracy is to promote the sacredness of the election ballot. When we are able to make our communities vote buying free zones, we will be able to give a chance to deserving candidates and political parties that do not have the largesse and tendencies to corrupt our fellow Filipinos.
Justice is an esoteric word for most of us. At the start of my human rights work, since we are into development or alternative law, we said, that oftentimes what is legal is not just. Traditionally, our laws were made by the group in power. Which is the reason, for instance, that the basic sectors through the party list system representation have been made a part of our electoral and political system. That some powerful groups have misused this system is another story. In a nutshell, our justice system has a substantive component which is the content of our written law. The structural component are the organizations which are the purveyors of justice or the pillars of the justice system : the courts, the prosecution, the police, the penal structures, the community, etc. And the cultural component of the justice system are the attitudes and behavior of our community towards the justice system. Good citizenship means making a bit of contribution to work for good social changes in our justice system structures, starting with us. Good policies designed to change behavior and create structures or institutions need to be communicated.
Knowledge management (KM) is a fast developing field because of the current information age. We believe that the one who controls knowledge controls power. And so, crucial to community development is the democratization of knowledge. With popular culture, I guess we should widen our imagination and also think outside the box and not to be drawn into the herd mentality that is anathema to positive change. Many traditional values violate human rights such as a patriarchal system that undermines the rights of women.
Love is universal. There are many kinds and they say that the highest form is agape which is about sacrificing one’s interests. Our educational system is still wanting in teaching and inculcating love of country or even love of humanity.
Money is a means of exchange. It can be a measure of one’s passion or industry. We are custodians of wealth and I believe that those who have more money must take responsibility for making this world a better place. Someone said, that one cannot have so much money without the element of violence. Most of all, we cannot bring money to heaven.
Nothing is constant but change. We have been taught that the change agents are our family, the school, our religion, etc. These change agents themselves need changes, too. The concept of family is more than the traditional nuclear or extended family. The laity is not a force to reckon with in the church as evidenced by our religious hierarchy’s supremacy in being able to determine government policies for the reproductive rights of women.
Opposition to the established order is a healthy exercise in a democracy. They say any structure has a tendency to be corrupt in time. Homeostasis and equilibrium just maintains the status quo. Marxism is a theory about conflict and is still very relevant to this day.
People power is now written in our constitution. The concept of recall, party list system, etc are all about people power. But, we must be wary about mass politics that elects the popular and the entertainer. Governance is a skill and an art. But thanks to people power, as it is a deterrent to the rise of tyrants - even if it takes time.
The Quality of life and its changing standards is an index of development. Our kind of development must be a society that can produce the likes of Rizal or a Mozart or a community that can produce a graduate from a remote village in our countryside and can have the same opportunity as anyone to, for example, be able to enter the United Nations to lobby for world peace and development.
Raison d’etre. Life is probably more inspiring or worth living if we believe that we have a reason for being ( raison d’etre). This is about finding our place or niche under the sun. One of the messages I got from the new year text brigade is about waking up and going back to sleep to dream again or to really wake up and chase those dreams. This ‘reason for being’ is also the equivalent of the mission in organizations and corporations. For the mission to be accomplished, it must be couched in specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bounded goals, objectives or outcomes.
Supreme Court. Our Supreme Court is on the spotlight now because the term of Chief Justice Reynato Puno will expire upon his retirement when he reaches the age of 70 on May 17, 2010 and the issue is whether President Macapagal-Arroyo has the right to appoint her choice because there is a ban on “midnight appointments” or presidential appointments two months before a presidential election. Right off, presidential aspirant NoyNoy Aquino was heard as saying that he would not recognize Ms. Arroyo’s appointed Chief Justice if he won the May presidential election because NoyNoy says that would be “contrary to the constitutional ban on appointments…contrary to propriety, delicadeza and precedence.” Notice, that NoyNoy’s remarks invoke both legal and moral grounds. I have always believed that indeed morality is learned from parents if not in kindergarten. Anyway, the University of the Philippines College of Law has issued a statement that a vacancy in the Supreme Court will not be a problem as an acting chief justice can be appointed from among the senior members of the Supreme Court.
Texting. The short messaging system and the information technology have certainly made profound changes in our lives. But, have you experienced disengaging from your mobile phone for a short moment and experiencing bliss from the disconnection? I read that You Tube which is just five years old in 2010, now gets 1 billion views a day; China & India have 350 million internet users; in poor countries, half of all households are mobile phone subscribers. In the coming election campaign and elections, mobile videos and cameras can be used to monitor election offenses and crimes.
United Nations. The representatives of women’s movements worldwide will meet in the United Nations New York for two weeks in March 2010 to mark 15 years after writing the women’s Platform for Action in Beijing in 1995. The meeting is not a General Assembly level but a commission level or the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) meeting. The NGOs preparing for this big event are saying that there won’t be any negotiated document for the CSW but there will be a one page declaration that reaffirms governments’ commitments to the platform written for women 15 years ago. Each country will present progress reports on how they have implemented in programs or policies or legislated the 15 year old Platform for Action during the two weeks in March 2010 including responses to the questionnaires sent to governments by UN regional bodies. Of course, many NGOs will make alternative or shadow reports.
The United Nations needs reforms. After the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, we saw that it is now very difficult for 193 countries to agree on something. Governing the world as one is almost impossible now even if the issues are voluminous. Countries are grouping into small clusters according to issues & themes and geography. To the extent that country issues and problems are solved and countries develop to join the rich club of nations, this kind of governance is perfectly all right. Who needs a global world that is divided into very rich and very poor?
I was recently interviewed on DXDC radio and was asked about my principles and values. This is my annotation to my short answer. In academe, we were introduced to the idea that Filipinos have some negative values which have contributed to our underdevelopment : hiya, pakikisama, utang na loob, ningas cogon, bahala na, etc. Later, other Filipino sociologists have debunked the negativity of these values ( as these values can really be seen in positive terms) and other experts even suggested that the respondents interviewed in that study of the so- called negative values were lowland Christians to the exclusion of other highland tribes. Another framework in the study of values is to evaluate our values against universal values such as human rights, democracy, social justice, sustainable development, etc.
Some of the basic tenets in the discussion of values are that cultures and communities believe that their values are best ( ethnocentrism) and that we should not pass judgment on the values other cultures ( relativism ). But, I say, we have to differentiate between understanding cultures and evaluating whether cultural material practices violate universal standards of morality or human rights. This is to say that values really do change. One example is the death penalty. Our ultimate legal penal sanction now is life imprisonment as we have removed the death penalty in our laws. The basis for this change is the premium placed by our legislators on the concept of restitutive justice.
One of the modernity values being promoted now is sustainable development which is associated with the environment. Of course, in ecology ( the study of the environment), the human being is at the center of the environment. Let me focus on the brown ecology or our cities and the rise of informal settlers in our urban areas. The migration of our peoples to the cities is partly due to so much poverty in the countryside. Some economists are now saying that one of the major causes of our poverty is really our neglect of our agriculture industry. The Philippines remains poor because according to Bernardo Villegas, we used a large chunk of our resources in the manufacturing sector and so there were “ no more resources left to build farm-to-market roads, irrigation systems, post-harvest facilities, seaports, and airports that were essential to making our small farmers productive. Agrarian reform failed, not because of the fragmentation of land, but because we did not provide the small farmers with the wherewithal to be both productive and cost-effective.”
This is also to show that there is a rural - urban continuum. Decongestion of our urban cities means that we should develop our countryside. If the rural people are economically productive they will also have the purchasing power to consume industrial products. In this sense, both agricultural and industrial sectors are related, too.
The other reality in our country which is sure to change our values is diaspora or the dispersion of more than six million overseas Filipinos who are working in almost two hundred countries in the world. Although, the downside to overseas migration are many, at least one positive saving grace is that our fellow Filipinos will surely bring positive values when they come home and measure our way of behaving and doing things with the best that they are experiencing in other lands.
Most of all, the one positive value that we should be working on at this juncture of our democracy is to promote the sacredness of the election ballot. When we are able to make our communities vote buying free zones, we will be able to give a chance to deserving candidates and political parties that do not have the largesse and tendencies to corrupt our fellow Filipinos.
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