Open Government Project Tracker
2025 September
With the recent developments of the investigations on the Corruption of Flood Control Projects in the Philippines, the Department of Budget and Management (DBM) informed the Senate through the Development Budget Coordination Committee (DBCC) that DBM has a digital budget management roadmap called Project TINA (Technical Innovations in the National Expenditure Program Application). It replaces the current NEP generation tool. The initiative received positive feedback and legislators from the Senate desires for it “to go all the way” hinting at a possiblity to unify and automate the budget process extending up to the implementation of proposed projects. Read more about it here on the Press Release September 2, 2025 Lacson Backs DBM Budget Transparency Efforts, Pushes Stronger Digital Tracking.
The call for a more unified and automated business processes is a testament that the public demands more accountability and transparency. Personally, I would support such initiatives and would even suggest for these projects available to the public for easier monitoring and to be kept informed.
2019 February
Six years ago (as of writing) I was a new hire at a company that works with humanitarian NGOs for social protection programs. My previous experience working as a Software Developer for full-stack development involves maintaining and developing libraries, modules, and apps in Django.
The development tooling at that time was very different from what is available today - Vibe Coders of today may not relate - and the focus is mainly on improving Developer Experience related to packaging, with projects such as pipenv, code formatting with black, human-friendly HTTP requests handling with requests, choosing the right frontend library or frameworks (Vue vs React vs Angular) and to wire it with the backend, mobile app development (React Native vs Kotlin vs Swift), and the rise of the popularity of containerization and DevOps.
Admittedly, it is a bit overwhelming for me to learn everything at the shortest possible of time. So I started doing personal projects that would help me learn and hopefully close the knowledge gaps.
Just the right learning experience for me to be effective at work and on my own projects.
NEDA Website
The Department of Economy, Planning, and Development (DEPD), formerly National Economic and Development Authority (NEDA), publishes on their website projects that were approved by the NEDA board.
This is how the projects are presented on the DEPD website. Visit the page here.
These screenshots were taken from today but the structure of how they presented it is still the same. The viewer is given a listing of ICC/NEDA Board Approved Projects, Locally-Funded Projects, and PPP Projects.
The list of projects are then enumerated as PDF that the public can view and download. Here’s one sample of the NEDA Board Approved Projects of 2019.
In the PDF is a table containing the title of the project, description, the proponent government agency, the total project cost, funding source information, the regions/provinces, and a summary of a project status.
As a citizen, it would be more beneficial to me if I can interact and inspect more of this data.
Open Government Project Tracker
“Open Government Project Tracker” is a web portal that aims to publicize government projects that the NEDA board have approved.
The basic features:
- Create and list projects
- Associate a project to an implementing agency
- Search and filter projects
- Import projects
- Export to CSV/XLSX and JSON
It uses Django and Python. Back in 2019, this was Django 2.2 and Python 3.7. Now I upgraded it to Django 5.2 and Python 3.13. Time flies!
At this time, my goal was to gain deeper knowledge on Django Tables and Django Rest Framework. I’ve used these in the past but I wanted to tinker a little bit deeper.
In particular, I was working on an extension to add export functionality to the tables using DRF serializers. This way I can use the same serializers for the REST API in the tables for when the user chooses to download JSON or CSV/XLSX.
My first commit (e95e662) was made and pushed to Github on February 23, 2019. Then I continued implementing the basic features mentioned.
On my post-graduate study at UPOU, this project has evolved.
What started as a personal project, I ended up proposing to continue and collaborate with my groupmates for a Software Engineering class.
From here, we added more features.
Track progress Staff members can add progress reports.
Staff creates and submits a progress report.
Then the progress report is verified.
And the progress report is approved and made public.
Add media Staff members can add supporting images related to the project.
Edit project details Staff members can update the project details from the frontend.
We submitted this as a proof-of-concept and as the basis for our final write-up.
Moving Forward
A little bit older, and wiser, I intend to revive the project with more features. Here are some of the features in no particular order.
- Data pipeline to fetch from other government websites and other citizen initiatives
- Publish an OpenAPI
- Improve audit trail
- Portals for user submission
- Data visualization
- AI/ML integration
If you are interested to see the project, visit the Github project page of the Open Government Project Tracker.
