An independent civic guide

Independent, and not the municipality

BetterCalatagan is an independent civic project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or operated by the Municipality of Calatagan or any government agency.

It does not use the municipal seal, coat of arms or any government branding, and nothing on it should be read as an official statement. For official business, go to the municipal hall. Where a figure here and the government document it cites differ, the document is authoritative.

It is part of the BetterGov.ph Better LGU community of volunteer-built civic sites.

How it works

Most civic portals publish a number. This one publishes a number and the evidence behind it. Every record carries its sources, the period the data describes, the date a person last checked it, how strong the evidence is, and whether it is fit to publish.

• Official sources come first. The Philippine Statistics Authority, the Bureau of Local Government Finance and the DILG Full Disclosure Policy Portal are read directly. Encyclopaedias, news and social posts can point to a source; they are never the source.
• The rules are tested. A record with no source, or verified on a future date, or resting only on a weak source, fails the build and cannot be published.
• Gaps are shown. When something cannot be verified — who holds office today, the land area — the site says so and explains why, on the Sources page.
• History is held to the same standard. Each sentence on the History page cites its sources; claims we could not verify are listed separately rather than retold.

The site is static: no accounts, no tracking, no analytics, no database. The data is available as open JSON, with the same provenance.

How the assistant works

Press Enter in any “Ask” box and an AI assistant writes an answer, in English, Filipino or Taglish. It is held to the site’s own standard:

• It knows only what this site publishes. Every time the site is rebuilt, its pages are split into passages and indexed. The assistant is given the passages that match your question and is told to answer from them alone, citing each one; each citation links to the page it came from.
• Its answers are checked before you see them. Every figure in an answer must match a figure in the passages it was given. An answer that states a number the site does not, names an official whose incumbency is unverified, or gives a phone number or e-mail address is withdrawn and replaced, not shown with a warning.
• Some questions are never sent to it. Who holds office today is answered with the reason the site does not say, and emergencies with the national 911 hotline.

It can still be wrong, as any summary can: the cited page is the authority, not the answer. Search works as before, in your browser, and is listed beneath the “Ask” option.

Privacy

There is nothing to sign in to and nothing to track you with: no accounts, no cookies, no analytics, no advertising and no third-party scripts. Pages are static files; search runs in your browser against a file this site publishes, so what you type into search is never sent anywhere.

A question you ask the assistant is different: it is sent to the assistant’s service on Cloudflare and to the AI model provider that writes the answer (NYO, with Cloudflare Workers AI as a fallback). Those providers process it outside the Philippines, under their own terms. BetterCalatagan does not save your questions or its answers in any database, and keeps no record of who asked. To limit abuse, it counts requests against a code derived from your IP address that changes daily and is deleted when the count expires. The conversation is kept in your browser tab until you close it.

One page loads outside services: the map on the Barangays page. When you scroll to it, your browser fetches map tiles from OpenFreeMap and elevation tiles from Amazon Web Services, which see your IP address like any website you visit. Nothing else on the site does, and the page shows a plain outline map without them.

Like any web service, the site’s host (Vercel) and Cloudflare keep short-lived technical logs of requests, such as IP addresses, for security and operations. If you use voice input, your browser’s own speech service (in Chrome, Google’s) turns your speech into text; the site receives only the text. Questions about your data, or a request to correct or remove something that concerns you, can be sent through the corrections form below.

The only thing the site remembers is your light or dark theme, if you choose one, stored in your own browser’s local storage. Clearing your browser data removes it.

Licensing

Three different things, three different answers:

Code

MIT licence.

This project’s own compilation

Its schemas, annotations, provenance records and written text — including the history narrative — are licensed CC BY 4.0.

Government documents and data

Not licensed by this project. They remain the works of their issuing agencies under Philippine law. We link to them and describe them; we do not relicense them.

Full terms are in the repository. The typefaces are Source Serif 4 and Public Sans, both under the SIL Open Font License.

Credits

The site’s design draws on public references: the BetterGov.ph family of Better LGU portals, whose emblem style ours follows, and America.gov’s editorial, answer-first layout. No code, text or images were copied, and the project has no affiliation with any of them.

Typefaces: Source Serif 4 and Public Sans, both under the SIL Open Font License. Documents are read in place with PDF.js.

Corrections and contributions

Corrections are welcome, especially from people in Calatagan. The one firm rule: every civic fact needs a source. An unsourced correction will be declined even if it is right, because the project cannot tell the difference.

A request to remove personal information about you is different: it needs no source, and the item comes down first while the request is looked at.

Report a correction View the source code