The Philippine Electricity Sector is a ‘public thing.’ Like Dave Winer when he’s talking here about RSS, I’m not sure how else to characterize it.
This whole post is a mashup of Dave’s words. But the concepts are important and applicable here.
As we work through the restructuring of the sector, we are doing nothing less than establishing fundamental protocols that ultimately impact every resident of this country.
Let’s run down the list of concepts that apply to the sector restructuring:
- People have a right to be in the loop on whatever issue is being discussed relating to the structure. All people.
- It’s important that people be able to examine the record.
- Backchannel begets more backchannel. If market participant A is working in the backchannels with the government on market structure/rule formulation, then market participant B must work in the backchannels also – otherwise market participant B is at a disadvantage and you can’t give the other guy that kind of an advantage in a competitive environment.
The whole intent of restructuring is to have private sector make big bets (investments) in the electricity sector. Since only those that are in the loop or can examine the record will do this in a competitively-priced manner, it is in the public interest to make the loops and records are widely available as possible.
Although certainly appropriate in some cases, the fact remains that whenever DOE or PSALM or ERC take their discussions or deliberations private or even limit access to them to those that happened to attend some workshop, it creates a dark spot. Minimizing the dark spots is probably a good thing for the sector as a whole.
Some ideas that employ recent and cheap technology to make the record examinable:
- Bring as much of the discussion on-line (publicly) as possible.
- Put as much of the workshops on-line as possible through audio files