More familiarly known as the E-Commerce Act, it, among others, directs all agencies of government, including LGUs, to use electronic means in government transactions within two years from the effectivity of the Act signed into law last June 14, 2000.

With this mandate, the National Computer Center, with help from the Department of Science and Technology, moved to bring LGUs into the vortex of an effort to upgrade their capabilities for ICT.

Jumpstarting Electronic Governance in Local Government is the project that will get things moving. A pathfinder, it will blaze new trails in getting ICT into the bloodstream of LGUs and enable better and faster delivery of government service to citizens at lesser cost, at the same time generating higher revenues for LGUs themselves.

Going under the acronym eLGU, NCC’s front-liner is a key component of DOST’s Support Program for Electronic Governance (SUPRE-GOV), in itself one of the Strategic Programs for Technology Transfer for 2002-2004.

Cognizant of LGU resource constraints as a key factor hindering the acquisition and application of computerized operations, it is an aggressive advocate of open source technology, thus eliminating the high cost of third-party governance solutions which only the highly-urbanized and comparatively prosperous LGUs were able to avail of as early as the 90s.