My country’s Government Technology Agency (Govtech) had been making lots of interesting and useful digital products recently, and I can’t help but notice someone inside might be referencing the Silicon Valley’s (the tech hub not the HBO comedy) startups and products to create public sector equivalents.
Definitely seeing a pattern of sincere imitation here:
FormSG = Google Forms or Formspree
- online forms for government usage, but more secure than Google Forms since government often has to collect sensitive citizen details. Already more than 10k forms deployed, with $5k-$150k saved per form!
- trusted link shortener for government. Again, selling point is about security and trust, as commercial link shorteners can lead one to dodgy sites with malware. A dedicated government one will signal that any go.gov.sg link shared on social media or chat groups by third parties can still be trusted. It’s really just copying bit.ly’s playbook! But so brilliant adaptation to the specific use cases in public sector.
- Postman is a simple mass messaging system for government. Currently it works only on Whatsapp, but soon to include sms and Telegram. Basically, a Twilio equivalent in government! This SaaS had seen great use during COVID-19, where citizens can sign up for daily Whatsapp notifications on COVID updates for Singapore.
- why would government need voucher redemption system? isn’t that a ecommerce thing? Yes, government distributes vouchers, goods and products all the time, say, for lower income folks. In the past, a public officer needed to track this on paper, or a spreadsheet. Now, it’s just a redemption tracking system, much like Vouchery, a coupon and promo management system.
- Isomer is the static website building and hosting solution for government website. In fact, it doesn’t just parallel Jekyll and Github, it uses them. All it does it it adds on its own automatic uptime monitoring, and a unique design and accessibility system for the Singapore Government, so that across all the different government agencies there’s an aesthetic continuity. An offshoot called OpenDoc creates basically the tech support documentation sites that we are used to seeing, but for government documents. Bye bye PDFs! Now these public docs are updated, searchable and responsive. With $3.4million in realised cost savings, it’s a no-brainer.
TraceTogether = ExposureNotification by Apple and Google
- in this case, the imitation might have been the other way round, though we’ll never know. TraceTogether came first as a privacy-first app for COVID-19 contact tracing, but the tech giants went on to create something else more decentralised.
To be honest, I’m super impressed by my country’s Govtech agency. Even though it might seem like ripping off ideas from Silicon Valley, but it’s a masterful adaptation of private sector innovation and ideas into the specific uses cases and constraints of government. Constraints such as internet air gap on government laptops, higher security and privacy concerns, financial prudence on taxpayers’ monies. All these restrictions ended up being the reason for being for many Govtech’s products, and emerging better and stronger!