The Volunteer-Built BetterGov.PH Is Becoming the Official Gov.PH Portal, and Its Code Will Be Open

The Philippine government's main website is about to be rebuilt by the people who spent the past year complaining about it. At the BetterGov.PH Summit 2026 in Eastwood City, Quezon City, the Department of Information and Communications Technology (DICT) said the new Gov.PH national portal will be co-developed by its eGov team and BetterGov.PH, the volunteer civic tech network that has been running its own alternative portal at bettergov.ph, according to NewsBytes.PH and BitPinas.

The part developers will notice most is that the code is meant to be public. DICT Undersecretary David Almirol Jr. announced that the GitHub repository for Gov.PH would be opened, NewsBytes.PH reported, and BitPinas said the portal's source code is scheduled for public release "in the coming weeks." That is a real break from how government sites are usually built, through private contractors and closed procurement. "The idea is to let the IT community participate in building better government systems and platforms," Almirol said, as quoted by NewsBytes.PH.

Almirol also said version 2 of the eGov platform is scheduled for release on November 9, and pointed developers to the existing eGov APIs as a base for building their own applications. He added that an IT community group chat would be launched soon.

From side project to official partner

BetterGov.PH started as founder Jason Torres's attempt to build a better national website. Its main repository says the current www.gov.ph is "outdated and has not been updated for a long time" and "full of broken links and difficult navigation paths." The project grew after the 2025 corruption scandals into what NewsBytes.PH describes as a movement of more than 5,000 volunteers, including developers, designers, data scientists and policy researchers.

Its work is already public. The bettergovph GitHub organization hosts the portal itself (TypeScript, released under the CC0 public domain dedication), a transparency dashboard for government records, a flood-control project map, an emergency hotlines directory and Kapwa, a design system for the portal. Torres used the summit to outline a unified national design system for all government digital properties, crowdsourced translations into regional languages and agentic AI workflows, with a commitment to keep the codebase open source, according to NewsBytes.PH.

The summit also launched the BetterGovPH Fellowship, which BitPinas describes as a three-month incubator backed by the WeSolve Foundation, the Philippine Open Government Partnership, the Department of Budget and Management and the Mozilla Foundation. Five agencies, DepEd, DPWH, DOH, DOE and the Office of the Ombudsman, submitted problem statements for fellows to work on.

What is confirmed and what is still a promise

As of October 19, the announcement rests on statements made at the summit, as reported by NewsBytes.PH and BitPinas, and the govph organization on GitHub still showed zero public repositories. Neither report gives a launch date for the new portal itself, a license for the government code or details on how contributions will be reviewed and deployed. November 9 is the date given for eGov version 2, not for a new Gov.PH.

Those details will decide how open this really is. A public repository that accepts issues and pull requests, with a clear license and a visible review process, is a very different thing from a code dump. The good news is that BetterGov.PH has been working in the open for over a year, so the community side of the partnership already knows how to run a public project.

How to get involved now

• Read and run the current community portal from bettergovph/bettergov. Its README shows a standard setup: npm install, then npm run dev, served on http://localhost:5173.
• Browse the project overview at docs.bettergov.ph and the other repositories in the bettergovph organization for smaller places to start.
• Watch the govph GitHub organization and BetterGov.PH channels for the official Gov.PH repository when it opens.
• If you build on government data, keep November 9 in mind for eGov version 2 and check for API changes then.

For a country whose government websites are a running joke among Filipino developers, this is a hopeful turn. The real test comes when the repository goes live and the first community pull request lands in production.