How One Project is Making Philippine Laws Actually Accessible  

Five Philippine provinces are proving that good governance starts with citizens who can actually read the rules

The Problem Nobody Talks About

Here’s a question that should trouble every legislator: If a citizen in your province wants to read a local ordinance passed three years ago, how would they do it?

For most Filipinos, the answer is depressingly complicated. They’d need to visit the provincial government during office hours, ask the right office, hope the documents are organized, and possibly wait while someone searches through filing cabinets or old computer files. That is, if the ordinance can be found at all.

This isn’t just an inconvenience. It’s a fundamental failure of democratic governance. How can citizens follow laws they cannot access? How can businesses comply with regulations they cannot read? How can visitors know what are prohibited activities in a certain area?  How can communities hold their leaders accountable for legislation that remains effectively secret?

Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific Inc. (SKAP) is working to change this reality through the Digitization of Local Laws and Ordinances Project—and the results are already transforming how five Philippine provinces operate. 

Five Provinces, One Solution

The project currently covers the Philippine provinces of Pangasinan, La Union, Tarlac, Pampanga, and Zamboanga—a geographically diverse group that represents both Luzon and Mindanao, urban and rural contexts, different languages, and varying levels of technological infrastructure. 

What these provinces share now is something revolutionary: their local laws and ordinances are being systematically collected, digitized, and made accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

“This project recognizes a simple truth,” explains the SKAP team. “Transparent governance requires transparent access to the law. If people don’t know what the rules are, how can we expect them to participate meaningfully in democracy?” 

What Digitization Actually Means

Let’s be clear about what this project entails. This isn’t just scanning documents and uploading PDFs in Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons—though that’s part of it. The Digitization of Local Laws and Ordinances Project involves:

Comprehensive Collection. SKAP teams work with each local government to locate and gather all local legislation. This means digging through decades of records, some stored digitally, some on paper, some barely organized at all.

Digital Preservation. Physical documents deteriorate. Floods, fires, and simple age can destroy irreplaceable legislative records. Digital copies ensure that these laws are preserved for future generations.

Public Accessibility. The digitized ordinances are made available online through searchable databases like Wikisource and Wikimedia Commons. A businesswoman in Dagupan can read Pangasinan’s business permit requirements at midnight. A student in Urdaneta can research local environmental laws for a school project from their phone.

Why This Matters for your Town or City

If you’re a legislator reading this, consider what digitization means for your constituents:

For Businesses. Entrepreneurs can research regulatory requirements before investing. A company considering opening a factory in Tarlac doesn’t need to send representatives to multiple government offices—they can review relevant ordinances online, understand requirements clearly, and make informed decisions. This reduces the cost of doing business and encourages investment.

For Citizens. Ordinary Filipinos can understand their rights and responsibilities. What are the rules for building a fence? What permits does a community event require? Instead of relying on hearsay or making costly trips to government offices, citizens can find answers themselves.

For Researchers and Advocates. Academics, journalists, and civil society organizations can analyze local governance trends, identify gaps in legislation, and advocate for better policies based on actual evidence rather than anecdotes.

For the Government Itself. Local government staff can quickly reference existing laws when drafting new ones, avoiding contradictions and redundancies. Legal offices can provide better advice. Planning departments can ensure proposed projects comply with all relevant ordinances. 

The Transparency Connection

Here’s where digitization connects directly to anti-corruption efforts: sunshine is the best disinfectant. 

When laws are hidden or hard to access, they can be selectively enforced. Officials might tell one business owner that certain requirements exist while telling a favored competitor something different. Citizens might be charged for services that ordinances provide for free.

But when every ordinance is publicly available and searchable, this selective enforcement becomes much harder. Everyone can verify what the law actually says. Businesses can compare notes. Journalists can investigate discrepancies.

The Technical Challenge

The project isn’t without challenges. Some ordinances exist only as handwritten records in old ledgers. Others were passed decades ago on typewriters, creating documents that are difficult to scan accurately. Languages vary not just between provinces but sometimes within them.

SKAP’s approach involves careful human review alongside technology. Optical character recognition software helps, but human researchers verify accuracy, ensure proper categorization, and add context where needed.

The goal isn’t just digitization—it’s usability. A searchable, organized, accurate database that serves real users with real needs.

What Other Communities Can Learn

For communities not yet covered, the five-province project offers several lessons:

Start Now. The longer you wait, the more records deteriorate and the more institutional knowledge is lost as longtime staff retire.

Allocate Resources Appropriately. This isn’t a one-person job. Proper digitization requires dedicated staff, appropriate technology, and sufficient time.

Think About Users. The end product should serve citizens, not just satisfy a checklist. User-friendly search functions, clear categorization, and mobile accessibility matter.

Plan for Maintenance. Digitization isn’t a one-time project. New ordinances must be added promptly. The system must be updated and maintained continuously.

Integrate with Other Initiatives. Digitization works best when connected to broader good governance reforms. Link it to government services. Connect it to transparency initiatives. Make it part of a comprehensive modernization strategy.

The Bigger Picture

The Digitization of Local Laws and Ordinances Project represents something larger than scanning documents. It reflects a fundamental shift in how Philippine governance operates—or should operate.

Traditional governance often operated on information asymmetry. Officials knew the rules; citizens hoped for fair treatment. This created opportunities for abuse and barriers to participation.

Modern governance—the kind that citizens deserve and technology enables—operates on information availability. When everyone can access the same laws, governance becomes more fair, more efficient, and more accountable. 

Government‑Sourced Information as a Strategic Priority  

The focus on government‑sourced information, particularly provincial, city, and municipal ordinances, is a strategic priority because these are the official, binding rules that shape daily life in the Philippines. Yet most ordinances remain locked in fragile paper archives, making them difficult to access, easy to lose, and often available only to insiders. This lack of access prevents citizens from fully knowing their rights and responsibilities and weakens accountability in governance.  

Digitizing and preserving these ordinances ensures legitimacy, transparency, and equity. Citizens can only follow laws that are visible and verifiable. Public access extends knowledge beyond lawyers and officials to ordinary citizens, small businesses, and marginalized groups. Digitization also safeguards institutional memory, protecting ordinances from deterioration, disaster, or administrative turnover, and enabling more coherent policymaking across overlapping jurisdictions.  

Importantly, under Republic Act No. 8293 (the Intellectual Property Code of the Philippines), government works—including laws, statutes, and ordinances—are explicitly placed in the public domain. This means there are no copyright barriers to their digitization, preservation, and open distribution. Wikimedia platforms provide the ideal infrastructure for this: scanned ordinances can be uploaded to Wikimedia Commons as open, verifiable primary sources, and then transcribed on Wikisource into searchable, reference‑ready texts. This process transforms hidden legal records into living knowledge resources that can be freely studied, cited, and reused.  

Funding this initiative through the Wikimedia Foundation’s General Support Fund directly advances Wikimedia’s mission of knowledge equity and open access. By digitizing ordinances and integrating them into Commons and Wikisource, the project ensures that the foundational texts of local governance are preserved, accessible, and part of the global knowledge commons. This initiative empowers citizens, strengthens democratic participation, and demonstrates how Wikimedia resources can be strategically deployed to make the rule of law visible, usable, and equitable.

The Bottom Line

Democracy requires informed citizens. Informed citizens require accessible information. Accessible information requires deliberate effort to make it so.

The Digitization of Local Laws and Ordinances Project, now operating in Pangasinan, La Union, Tarlac, Pampanga, and Zamboanga, proves that this effort is possible, practical, and transformative. During the first run, we were able to upload 505 laws on WikiCommons and 2705 on Wikisource covering 30 towns. 

Five provinces are showing the way. Seventy-six more should follow.

The question is simple: Will your constituents be able to read your laws five years from now? Ten years? Twenty?

If the answer isn’t a clear “yes,” it’s time to support digitization. Because laws that citizens cannot access are barely laws at all—they’re just words in filing cabinets, serving no one but those who profit from keeping them hidden.

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Shared Knowledge Asia Pacific Inc. continues to expand the Digitization of Local Laws and Ordinances Project.