Research for change, advocacy for democracy, analyses for action, education for empowerment. Going beyond the slogans is the Institute for Popular Democracy (IPD), a Philippines-based two-decade-old group that has just joined the APC as a member.
A fairly large organisation by non-profit standards, that is, IPD has a website – http://www.ipd.ph/ – that takes an overtly political stance over challenges facing the country it’s operating in.
IPD’s goal is to do political and economic research serving social movements, non-profit organisations and progressive local government officials.
They provide advocacy training at local, sub-regional and regional levels and popularise their work through a diverse publication and dissemination strategy.
IPD began working with ICTs (information and communication technologies) in 1998 through their political mapping (POLMAP) work.
After assessing its impact, IPD decided to incorporate ICTs more strategically. They managed this through the Applied Technologies and Information Solutions (ATIS) team. ATIS is the ICT project and advocacy centre of the institute.
ATIS has developed a three-year programme outlining various ICT activities.
This included ongoing POLMAP work, statistical work combined with POLMAP to generate poverty data below the provincial level (i.e. local), effective campaign advocacy and mapping tools, as well as activities aimed towards developing a sustainable approach to uptake and use FOSS (free/libre and open source software) by social movements.
Through this work, the IPD got to know APC – in particular its members like WomensHub, the FMA, c2o. But its informal relationships go back to work with the prominent Filipino ICT campaigner and social critic, Roberto Verzola, in the mid-1990s.
IPD is registered in the Philippines, with a full-time staff of 34, nine of whom work in the ATIS team.
IPD’s Bobby Soriano, someone with strong technical skills, is also an old APC partner and has recently worked with the APC two secure online communication workshops -one in Africa and one for South East Asia.
