PayPal Now!It’s been several weeks since I published PayPal: One Great Way to Improve the Philippine Economy. Quite a number of people have expressed support and interest. A few have provided their insights and inputs into the matter. Others even have dissenting opinions, or at least don’t think that having PayPal would be helpful enough.

Links to these other posts and news items are available here. Reader fedeback can be found on the comment thread.

Things haven’t been quite slow these past days. I guess everyone’s busy. But here are milestones, so far.

  • We’ve registered a domain, www.paypal4ph.com and even set-up an update blog at www.paypal4ph.com (thanks to my colleague J4s0n ).
  • We asked uber-cool designer Ia (who also works with us at Enthropia) to create some artwork for the site.
  • J4s0n is coding a cool sign-up sheet with an equally cool frontpage (Enthropia is the team behind iBox, which I think is really cool). We can probably ride on the existing signature campaign on petition spot launched last year, which has 812 signatures to date. However, I think it would be good to start fresh (and so everyone who would sign up actually knows what the issues are).
  • Mainstream media update: Joey Alarilla (journalist, problogger, father, and Palanca awardee) has written about the PayPal for the Philippines initiative on CNet Asia. Joey also writes for Inq7.net and I do hope we make it there, too, one of these days. His fellow Inq7.net journalist Erwin Oliva has also expressed interest in the advocacy, and I do hope we get the much needed mainstream-media mileage.

Other ideas:

  • We’re likely to move the advocacy site to a .com.ph domain to support the use.com.ph campaign (and since it’s for the Philippines, anyway!).

Open Source / Collaboration

Sad to say, running an advocacy is not that easy. Firstly, I’m quite rusty as an economist, and after all, being a jack-of-all-trades makes one a master of none. So I’m not your expert on tech and e-commerce either, but I do try to make the most out of what information I can digest from other sources. And one of the things I’ve been a big fan of is OpenSource.

The most important thing I learned from the Open Source movement is that collaboration is key to producing great ideas and great output. Hence, with this in mind, I think it’s best to move forward with the PayPal for the Philippines advocacy as a collaborative activity. We are already doing this, as various people are contributing to advancing the cause in their own ways. However, we need to come up with a more defined and focused output. We need to get our facts and figures straight. We need to be able to talk to the right people (and at the right time).

For one, we need to come up with a whitepaper, as Migs suggested on the original blog post. We need a more solid argument to support our cause, and to help convince the right people (i.e., those in government, the banking sector, and even eBay/PayPal management itself) and in this regard, I think collaborative work is the way to go.

So here’s what our next step would be. I’m hoping for inputs and suggestions on how we can go about with it. For now, we shall be setting up a Wiki on the advocacy page to get started on a draft whitepaper (link later). Any inputs and help (with the appropiate sources and citations needed, of course) would be much appreciated.

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