Community OS

Community OS models local economies in the Philippines, coordinating and monitoring the supply chain and production/consumption patterns of  Philippine rural communities and the elements and players that make up their local economic ecosystems. The platform seeks to address friction of access/connectivity and data gathering to give local communities, government units, and financial institutions and entities access to the tools (Connectivity / Internet, Big Data, Smart Systems, Fintech, among others) needed to monitor and manage economically and ecologically sustainable portfolios.

The platform, in short, makes Communities Bankable.

Community OS gathers data from all households and industries from the in each Community (Congressional District) and maps out the supply chains of up to 240 industries, making open source the data in order to offer the revealed opportunities to the nationwide network of public and private entities to stimulate Integrated Area Development.

According to the Philippine Statistics Authority, 97% of registered businesses in the Philippines are SMEs or MSMEs, 70% of which accounts for the labor force of the country. The Covid-19 pandemic has shed light on the problems brought about by unsustainable trade and economically detrimental norms that have endangered the lives of many individuals who were/are living day-to-day and paycheck to paycheck. The goal of our organization has always been to eradicate poverty, and through Dr. Sixto K. Roxas' Community OS framework, we are able to do just that, one community at a time. Dr. Roxas is a revered former chief economist of the Philippines and was one of the first Asian VP's of American Express in New York.

Together with a government entity called the Development Academy of the Philippines and the Mindanao Development Authority, we are piloting our solution in the SOCCSKSARGEN region, with over 4.5 million individuals. We are producing valuable data sets for various industries available within their area, generating investment portfolios and working with public and private entities to create jobs and stimulate their local economy.

Community OS uses the Congressional District as the unit of planning and

management. The country is divided into 250 territorial Congressional
Districts, each with some 450 to 500 thousand population, some 100
thousand households enough to sustain a diversified supply chain, generate economies of scale and stimulate a viable local trade.

The implementation leads to the immediate formation and operationalization of the Community Management Centers so that the greater mass of the people can immediately participate in the process. Through their various industry and sector specific management organization, they can look after their income interest in a comprehensive way.

The establishment of the Community Management Centers means that, aside from establishing the office set-up, one community management team for each of the barangay clusters, there is the immediate facilitation of household organization into clusters, after which is the intensive training of the cluster leaders so that they can begin the ground-up planning process.

From the ground-up flow of information, particularly household resources consolidated for all households, comes the design and development of: self-help projects, livelihood systems module, joint-venture projects, trade assistance operations, and resource agency linkage projects.

“Sector-specific” projects are promoted immediately after the COMMUNITY OS installation phase.

As mentioned, we are tackling the SOCCSKSARGEN region with about 4.5 million individuals in partnership with the Mindanao region's development authority as their private sector thrust. Our organization has been in the business of community interventions by way of creating on-the-ground programs and initiatives particularly for food security and livelihood. The Philippines has largely been living the pipe dream of country-wide urbanization, which has quickly become the crux that our sustainability had relied upon for many years. With the advent of the pandemic, it was simply no longer sustainable for large developers to buy chunks of land and turn them into high-rise apartments or shopping complexes, as import bans have particularly impacted the livelihood of many farmers and marketplace sellers in this region.

Our framework then becomes the mechanism to highlight the third pillar: Community. The state and the market have long left behind the interests of the community, and people are now starting to see its negative effects. By creating participatory, inclusive and balanced programs that optimize their supply chain and brings in foreign/local investments, we can slowly start their recovery and see a significant increase in household networth and by extension their local economy.

Our outcomes:

• Establish a total sustainability assessment of the area/district to serve as baseline of the current ecological, economic and social situation

• Implementing a process for a bottom-up community-centered participatory planning to identify low hanging fruit to scale-up livelihood, potential investments in facilities and services, potential peer-to-peer communications and trading platforms

• Building community institutions, district area organization and management center for entrepreneurial and management training, technical assistance, community enterprise feasibility studies and support

• Engaging local partners to support community plans for technical assistance, access to funding, credit and loan facilities, supply chain linkages

In classical economics, the ultimate unit of analysis is the business firm and the individual person. The concept of the firm producing a homogenous product makes it possible to elaborate the whole elegant structure of production schedules, cost curves, supply curves and supply prices. The concept of the utility-maximizing individual enables us to derive the corresponding demand curves and demand prices, which together determine market prices.

The paradigm underlies development economics. Business enterprise has become the primary unit of the development process and the exemplar for all development projects. Development management has become identified with enterprise management. In the real world then, the prototype of development is the displacement of the natural community with the company town – with the logging, the mining town, or the sugar district.

These past modalities of development have not had the desired impact on reducing poverty and providing adequate livelihood for the greater proportions of the population – both in the rural areas and in the small towns and in the larger urban centers.

With no more resource frontier available to absorb the population, the deepening poverty has caused serious damage to the nation’s environment and natural resources. There is a massive pressure to emigrate or to take up arms and join the rebel forces in the mountains.

Reforms are required as much to solve these problems as to provide a domestic market base for industrial development.

Life Certificate is a universal data key which can be used to securely manage
and control your essential data to build a single source of truth about
your identity and gain access to services safely in the Philippines.

With Life Certificates, you are essentially able to:

• Store your essential information and documentation in a secure data wallet. Build your Identity Score while keeping your core data safe.

• Make registrations and logins with trusted service providers easier and safer. Authenticate your identity within mobile applications, online services or your Community itself – even without a Birth Certificate or Government-issued ID.

• Participate in official Community-centric projects like COVID-19 management applications, enabling Communities to better connect through a common identity platform.

LifeCert enables you to store and maintain your life's data in one
secure place, as your life continuously evolves. From your address,
household composition, contact information, employment, education to
other forms of identification such as ID cards and travel documents –
you decide what matters.

• By combining data with the proper context and controls, Communities can take advantage of more frictionless and contactless systems with its Community leaders and trusted service providers to measure impact and promote positive change.

• When you are in control of your data, you decide what to share, who to share it with, as well as where, when and how to share it.

The technology we are using has been adopted by Unionbank of the Philippines (https://www.benzinga.com/press...), Philhealth (https://www.philhealth.gov.ph/...), in Cambodia & Bangladesh for health care, and in Indonesia's Central Bank (https://findbiometrics.com/ele...).

They've raised over $12M in funding to date (https://techcrunch.com/2018/04...) and Life Certificates will be one of the subsidiary products using their technology, but managed by our own entity as they are only one component of our development framework.

We conducted a pilot study in San Jose Del Monte, Bulacan back in 2016 in which we mapped out a total population of 600,000 individuals, 69 unique industries and 59 barangays. An interesting finding was a large gap in the Pork sector, as they are exporting roughly Php 20,000,000 worth of raw pork per year, while they are importing processed pork goods woth Php 800,000,000 anually. This large gap gave their local government unit insight on how they could create potentially impactful programs and initiatives that can increase livelihood opportunities and generate income for their citizens, and later on, drive local and foreign investments to their area for growth. Our static data sheet can be viewed here for that project: https://drive.google.com/file/...

The next challenge is to replicate this to a much larger population that is in need of various forms of socio-economic interventions to address the problems of lack of opportunities and food security.  Our framework complements our own national government's "Balik Probinsya" (Return to the Province) program.

Our solution is set to serve the 4.5M population of the Soccskargen region in Mindanao. A letter of intent of collaboration from government entity Development Academy of the Philippines has stated that the plan is to roll this out to the 25M population of the entire Mindanao within the next 2 years once we accomplish our initial rollout.

In the next five years our grand ambition is to be able to cover at least 20-30 functional congressional districts (out of 243) in the country. The data produced will be dynamic and a combination of software and hardware (IoT) based nodes.

With our framework:

-Local government officials (governors and mayors) can design and institute province wide economic development and poverty-combating program, using powers and instruments already provided in the Local Government Code of 1991 such as the statutory authority of municipalities and provinces to confederate to undertake joint production and infrastructure projects , or at  local levels to enter into joint ventures with local cooperatives and private sector business to raise financing through loans and floating of municipal or provincial bonds.

- Implementers of the AGRI-AGRA / Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program can design compensation for landowners to take the form of substitute investment projects (as a result of Community OS planning) that are more attractive financially than land ownership; and can help farmer-beneficiaries with a complement of investments to realize the potential of intensive cultivation and translate these into family incomes that liberate them from the poverty trap.

- Planning officials and agencies (from provincial to national levels) can be guided in genuine planning of viable, effective projects from the district upwards to national projects. Shooting from the hip is a common theme in our current government setup in the Philippines, after all.

- Sectoral agencies of the National Government can plan infrastructure and services delivery systems in a systematic, coherent, and efficient manner around the Community OS generated and approved projects, improved support services for agriculture, and derive potential infrastructure investment and tertiary employment opportunities.

Our main barrier is simply comprehension of our complex framework which took Dr. Roxas about 50 years to perfect and develop, which we have been tasked to expound upon and reimagine according to today's modern context. Most local government units in the country are simply not equipped in terms of know-how, infrastructure and on-the-ground work to be able to see how this could clearly benefit their constituencies.

In terms of legal barriers, the data privacy act requires us to anonymize the publicized data, which may or may not be a hindrance.

For manpower, we are utilizing the staff of government corporation Development Academy of the Philippines, but will most likely not be enough to sustain for scale.

- Our complex framework had been simplified for explanation in the form of Life Certificates, an easy to understand application that functions as a live source of verifiable data for local government planning.  (Please see: https://cert.carrd.co/#)

- The Life Certificates are also a means for owners of the data to have full domain over what they want to share with interfacing entities, when they want to share it. (For ex: A local municipality may require one to present details using their Life Certificate in order to disburse financial aid during the covid crisis)

- We have developed a full-blown degree program/curriculum with the Development Academy of the Philippines to be rolled out in state universities and colleges in order to alleviate our manpower problem, and also spreads awareness about our economic development framework.

Our team consists of 5 full-time management staff, and the entire Development Academy of the Philippines (our company's chairman Dr. Roxas is also chairman emeritus of the academy) under our wing, about 2,000 employees nationwide.

Our team is comprised of experienced, well connected experts in various fields.

Chairman Dr. Sixto K. Roxas is a former VP of American Express in London and New York, was an undersecretary at the Department of Foreign Affairs, and was the country's Chief Economist in the 60's and 70's.

CEO Mel Songco was the former head of global distribution at Blizzard, and head of marketing at EA and Activision about 20 years ago.

COO Vinci Roxas is on the board of investments at CIMB-Bancom II, a joint venture between Bancom capital corporation and CIMB, Malaysia's largest commercial bank.

CSO Russ Malangen is a prominent entrepreneur in the Philippines with experience in running international accelerator programs for startups, Venture Capital, business advisory and strategy.

CMO Miguel Santos is currently a director for research at the Presidential Communications Operations Office (PCOO) and has experience in closing large deals for broadcast (one which includes the SEA Games)

Our combined experience in government processes and on-the-ground initiatives makes us the perfect team to cover all bases. Our understanding of the Community OS framework is thorough and we have been trained by Dr. Roxas for years.

Development Academy of the Philippines, Department of Agriculture, Department of Agrarian Reform, Mindanao Development Authority, The Roxas-Kalaw Foundation for the Eradication of Poverty , Chicago University Hong Kong, Asian Institute of Management, Good City Foundation (HK).

These are some of the key entities that we are partnered with to roll out and execute the program.

What our installation brings as its “value-added” to any project is its capability to mobilize broad community participation in any project (of community interest) being contemplated. Our community management centers can organize specific community members for a specific project in less  than a month’s time (proven in the case of the contract reforestation and credit program).

The services of the CMC can greatly reduce costly and time-consuming mistakes related to the community-based design aspect of any project.

It is from providing this “value added” service to third party institutions who have projects beneficial to the community, that the CMC is to earn at least a part of its revenue fees. Fees will be charged on a case-to-case basis but will be for two components. The first is for the  design and planning stage and the other is for actual sectoral-organization for project implementation and general supervision (if required). We say part of its revenue fees because  it should be the community that pays for services rendered through a percent of their increased income. This to stress a point that the Community Management Centers (CMCs) work only for the interests of households. This is to avoid the danger of becoming an agent of the third party, thereby defeating the whole purpose of the project. The CMCs access revenues once they are able to increase the networth of the community.

Our framework in itself is sustainable. It creates jobs, facilitates investments and reveals various industry gaps which can be capitalized on. A discussion with the Philippine Chamber of Commerce and Industry (PCCI) has solidified our stance and they have agreed to lend a hand in identifying viable projects within an area.

For the full coverage of our program, please refer to this document: https://drive.google.com/file/...

We believe that this is an avenue for us to collaborate with one of the most forward looking institutions in the world and will greatly aid our cause.

Support primarily in the form of funding would be our priority, and exposure will do wonders for the awareness of an existing solution to most of the core problems our country faces today.

The Project Management’s goal is to build the portfolio of projects through the cluster management system. Via Community OS, the management goal of the Community Management Center is to provide the best Management services to the community and the various sectors and industries within it so that before the installation period ends there are already enough sector-specific projects and management centers for households to improve their family income and networth.

The main “economic” bottom-line of the Management System (Not just during the installation period) is the optimization of households’ income and networth, in conjunction with increasing corporate bottom-lines.

Community OS therefore allows for a healthy interchange of decision-making between the people and sector institutions, and encompassing all types of projects whether it be a business project like a processing plant or a government road, they will all begin to produce results in business scaling and increasing household income and corporate bottom-lines.

The Community OS entry point is not any specific sectors program such as land distribution or health or other traditional NGO entry points. It is family income. It is difficult for any politician who commits to the same goals of pulling families out of poverty without the technical options and organizational system that go along with ECSOM. Once started the process leads to a transformation on the current systems which are now generating poverty. The transformation models are “win-win” ones. The Philippines income generation in the rural sector is only 15 % of Mainland China, 6 % of Taiwan, 3 % of Japan. With this figure, it is not too difficult to convince all players that everyone can gain from increased utilization of the rural land networks of small and medium enterprises linked to bigger industries. When whole communities agree as to the livelihood systems or spoke projects will develop, they determine that the best

institutional arrangements to service their income-generation activities. Community OS does not foist  any specific arrangement on the community. In fact, the ideal situation is partnership with consumer groups. Cooperatives are just one of the institutional vehicles to serve a large number of primary producers. The collective experience in cooperativism, as far as broad participation by the community in its affairs is concerned, still leaves plenty of room for improvement in institutional design.