Tags: Elections
By Alexander Villafania
MAKATI CITY, METRO MANILA – Election season candidates tap into tens of thousands, if not millions, of volunteers to run their campaign – the higher the candidate’s position, the bigger the volunteer network.
This also entails a lot of logistical nightmare. Thousands of people need to be managed, their assignments evaluated to assess their daily results. In these times, campaigns are results-oriented and candidates want their money’s worth.
The campaign headquarters of Liberal Party candidates Benigno Aquino III and Mar Roxas III had a secret weapon.
The backbone of their campaign operations is an online management system capable of handling thousands of transactions from organizing regional meetings, centralize mobile and email communication among the different partners, manage the assignments of field officers and evaluate their outputs, conduct online training volunteers.
But it does not stop there: the system uses a geographic information system (GIS) mapping tool that gives the campaign managers of the “NoyMar” a visual overview of the situation per region. The map itself has relevant data in the regions from population, economic background, and incumbent administrators.
Everything is online, which allows regional campaign officers to report and update their headquarters almost in real-time and virtually from anywhere.
In the last days of the election fever, the developers of the system finally revealed what it called the “NoyMar Electron Campaign Management System (or NoyMar Electron for short). Developed and implemented by Stratbase Inc., the NoyMar Electron utilized Microsoft ‘s Sharepoint management application and Internet Explorer 8 browser, enabling campaign officers to access the system online.
The implementation of the system was not easy, according to Orlando Oxales, one of the lead of the NoyMar IT Group Electron Team. When Aquino announced his intention to run for president in September, there was only four months left to plan how the campaign management system would work.
However, Stratbase already had existing regional data, with additional inputs from the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB) and the Commission on Elections. What was needed to do was to organize the elements in the data to make the interface user-friendly.
Oxales also said that while the system has been used in industries that need corporate management systems, the NoyMar Electron is the first of its kind in the Philippines. “This is the biggest implementation of this system in this country’s election history,” Oxales said.
Normally, an implementation like this would run in the millions but Sam Jacoba, one of the project’s leaders, said that the NoyMar Electron was sponsored by media mogul Antonio “Tony Boy” Cojuangco, a cousin of Aquino, and Ambassador Albert del Rosario.
Stratbase also linked up with several partners for the implementation, which included Netopia and E-scribir.
Jacoba, a former executive of Microsoft Philippines, said that with the election over, it does not necessarily mean that the system would be shelved. The data collected from the election could remain relevant even during the term of the president-apparent Aquino.
In particular, the President can manage his activities using the system, creating an economic mapping system that tracks the growth of each region and evaluate what the needs are for each region.
In addition, the system can become the direct line of the president with local government officers. “I think the president will be more in tune with implementing an IT system for governance now especially since it worked for him during the elections,” Jacoba said.
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