24 ms·

Singapore Government Tech Stack

251 points by korginator 4y ago

javajosh 4y ago
This looks impressive, and something we (America) should copy. Man, I can't help wishing that if we had to have a dictator why couldn't it be someone (mostly) reasonable like Lee Kwan Yew.
- decafninja 4y ago
  I feel dictators/autocrats come in two flavors. The first genuinely feel they know what is best for the country and how to best govern it. They might still enrich themselves and their cronies in the process of course. The second are primarily out to enrich themselves and their cronies. The country exists to support this selfish goal. Of course this is not black and white, but rather a spectrum but various historical figures seem to strongly lean to one side or the other.
  - dontreact 4y ago
    And history repeatedly shows that even if you get a dictator of the first kind, it’s an unstable equilibrium of a system that eventually leads to a dictator of the second kind.
    - AnAfrican 4y ago
      And that can happen with the same person !
    - javajosh 4y ago
      Yes, but it's not always true - see cousin comment. There are examples of actually good dictators in history - but my back of the envelope estimate is that its like 1 in 20.
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      Which Lee Kuan Yew was well aware of, and set up a constitution that makes it easy to peacefully remove a government. The only reason the PAP is still in power is because Singaporeans don't want to get rid of them.
      - sagaro 4y ago
        Gerrymandering is a popular tactics used by PAP in Singapore, to ensure they stay in power. In most democracies the Govt., Supreme Court and the Election Commission are independent of each other. Thereby elections are run fairly. But in Singapore, the election commission and supreme court is run by the govt. in power. This makes it easier for the party in power to sustain it's reign.
        AussieWog93 4y ago
        I'm not saying they don't give themselves unfair advantages in the election, but that's a very different thing to, say, Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Putin's Russia where power was simply seized and held onto with no accountability to the people. If the PAP torpedoed the entire economy because of some stupid beliefs of the leader, they would be quickly and quietly removed.
        noisy_boy 4y ago
        Gerrymandering would be somewhat curtailed (not nullified, I agree) if most of the people would have supported the opposition. They just don't. In the last General Elections, PAP's margin of victory did shrink from the past but it was still a pretty big margin[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect...
- davesque 4y ago
  I understand the sentiment, and I don't think you were probably being serious, but, for the sake of conversation, I think the issue with dictatorships is eventually with stability. The allure of that much power in a single position leads to the wrong kind of people talking it. Actually, when we frame things that way, it almost makes me feel like democracy is primarily designed to provide a certain amount of slowness in government; enough to spot corruption coming and head it off. Maybe corruption always eventually wins, just more slowly in democracies. Kinda feels that way lately.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    It's nice to get the benefit of the doubt, and I'm tempted to let it remain, but let me clarify: I'm serious. I was impressed with Lee Kwan Yew's "From Third World to First" and it seemed to me he wasn't bashful about talking about the times he made an illiberal, dictator move. Both from the outcome and his telling, he made these moves as rarely as possible and didn't relish them. And he did smart things like rewarding government officials extremely well so that they would be (relatively) immune to bribery. I'm sure there are other examples of good leadership from the seat of absolute monarchy, even if we mainly focus on the bad ones in history class. FDR's wartime leadership comes to mind (people seem to forget how illiberal American government was during the war - and it was surely effective). In all cases, the key to success with illiberal government seems to be self-restraint. When the war ends, you give up power. Or in general, when the object is achieved, you give up power. I've not followed Singapore's timeline since I read the book, so maybe they've backslid? Maybe its a psuedo monarchy run my Yew's ancestors? If so, that's a failure. Hopefully they can figure out how to pick leaders in a rational way - like an aptitude test.
- skissane 4y ago
  Just over a week ago, Singapore executed by hanging an intellectually disabled Malaysian man (of Indian descent), Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam. His crime? He was caught trying to import heroin – I think it very likely the traffickers exploited his intellectual disability in order to talk him into becoming a drug mule. In this regard, Singapore is a rather extreme outlier among developed countries – few of which retain the death penalty, and those which do largely restrict it in practice to murder. William Gibson's famous phrase, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", is as true as it ever was. So yeah, Lee Hsien Loong seems like a cool guy – wow, a Prime Minister who can write C++. But, remember Nagaenthran, and realise he's not actually cool at all, he's actually a rather terrible human being. Whatever the Prime Minister's formal role in decisions about executions, I don't think anyone doubts that he had the political influence (even if quietly, behind the scenes) to stop it going ahead, if he had wanted to.
  - javajosh 4y ago
    I am also against the death penalty. But I am for consistency. It does not sound like a clear-cut case of injustice to me, and I am quite sensitive to injustice. Any compassion the state shows is a lie to cover for discretionary enforcement, which is a pernicious type of corruption. It truly sounds like a tragic case. If Mr. Dharmalingam was unable to understand the risks he was taking, then clearly he needed more guardianship, maybe from his family, or if that wasn't available, from the state. But state-sponsored guardianship of the intellectually disabled has it's own evil air, does it not? (Not knowing the details, if he was sent from Malaysia, then I hope the Malaysian authorities find and punish the ones who used him so cruelly.)
    - AussieWog93 4y ago
      >(Not knowing the details, if he was sent from India, then I hope the Indian authorities find and punish the ones who used him so cruelly.) He was Malaysian. The cops probably know who sent him and let the guys go in exchange for a shiny watch.
    - skissane 4y ago
      > Any compassion the state shows is a lie to cover for discretionary enforcement, which is a pernicious type of corruption You actually think there is no discretionary enforcement of the law in Singapore? Like every other jurisdiction on earth, Singapore has prosecutorial discretion. [0] A handful of jurisdictions, such as Germany, traditionally reject prosecutorial jurisdiction in theory, but that theory belies the fact that even in Germany it has always been inescapable in practice–no prosecutor on this earth has the resources to prosecute every known crime in their jurisdiction, they always have to pick and choose which cases to prosecute and how much effort and resources to put into each prosecution, and there is always going to be an element of subjective judgement in that decision, which will inevitably be coloured by the prosecutors' beliefs/culture/politics/attitudes/biases. And, is prosecutorial discretion in Singapore applied in a purely impartial and non-discriminatory way? Considering Singapore's lengthy and ongoing history of politically motivated prosecutions (see for example [1]), it is rather obvious that it isn't. Most jurisdictions accept that factors like intellectual disability need to be taken into account as mitigating circumstances, frequently leading to more lenient punishment, and sentencing which focuses more on protection and rehabilitation than less on retribution and deterrence, compared to an offender with normal (or above-normal) intellectual capacity. The idea that intellectually disabled people ought to be treated with particular leniency is one supported by the United Nations, and even by the US Supreme Court (which held, in the 2002 case of Atkins v. Virginia, that executing the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional)–so extending them that leniency is hardly a "lie to cover for discretionary enforcement", nor a "pernicious type of corruption" [0] https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/prosecutorial-discretion-singapore/ https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/prosecutorial-... [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/singapore-first-convictions-under-contempt-of-court-law-confirms-fears-over-muzzling-critics-2/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/singapore-fir...
dazsnow 4y ago
Singapore's GovTech does amazing work.
- United857 4y ago
  Even their prime minister can code in C/C++: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime-minister-of-singapore-shares-his-c-code-for-sudoku-solver/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...
  - afr0ck 4y ago
    He was the Wrangler at the Univ of Cambridge (best Undergrad in Math).
    - random314 4y ago
      And it's no mean achievement. Here is the list of Senior wranglers on wikipedia. Check out his peers to see what mathematics possibly missed out on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler
      - djtango 4y ago
        I prefer to think of it as what politics and society gained. It was pretty clear that most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the pandemic. At a time where technological advance has vastly outpaced politics (Joe Biden was around 65 when the first iphone came out) I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS major heading up a (small) nation.
        2143 4y ago
        > most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the pandemic. Maybe they did and chose to ignore it. Lots of countries (including but not limited to the USA) have people with high credentials at the helm. Or they have advisors with high credentials close by. > I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS Math never gets old. > a (small) nation They may be small, but they definitely punch above their weight :)
robertlagrant 4y ago
I was really worried when I saw APEX. I thought it was that crappy Oracle app-in-plsql nonsense. Thankfully not! This all looks pretty cool!
- pjmlp 4y ago
  That nonsense powers lot of companies where dbas can quickly ramp-up applications, in the same vein as VB and macros filled Excel documents.
- brassattax 4y ago
  I thought it was going to be built on Salesforce
  - robertlagrant 4y ago
    Yes, that would be better than the Oracle option!
vira28 4y ago
Is there something similar to US Government.
- gwbrooks 4y ago
  At least for the design system, the answer is yes. The US Government Design System: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/ Don't have the URL handy, but California has an amazing design system as well.
  - justbaker 4y ago
    Something similar to what you mentioned, but for the state of Michigan https://digitalguidelines.michigan.gov/ https://digitalguidelines.michigan.gov/
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mxuribe 4y ago
  I'm sure there might be because several years ago the U.S. created the U.S. Digital Service with the premise being recruiting professionals (yeah mostly from corporate but not only) to spend time in the government and help modernize many of its aspects and offerings...for the benefit of the citizens, etc. Here's one example of their playbooks: https://playbook.cio.gov/ https://playbook.cio.gov/ ...While not exactly like the Singapore page linked in this post, alot of the intent with the USDS - as i understand it - is alos to be quite transparent with the hope of any other government agencies/orgs such as state/province level, city level, etc. benefiting from their ideas and hopefully broadening the benefit at all levels. Here is the main site, but of course (as the above playbook link denotes), there are plenty of other related sites that might help better answer your question: https://www.usds.gov/mission https://www.usds.gov/mission
butterfi 4y ago
I’ve worked on a Singapore website sponsored by the major University and a Govt. office and frankly speaking, it’s a poorly managed process dominated by IT protocol more than business/client goals. The admin responsible for running the site was inept and his colleagues were worse. The person who inherited managing the complex web stack was a secretary with no dev skills. I hope it works out for them, but I’m not optimistic.
- finolex1 4y ago
  There's several different government bodies working on tech in Singapore. GovTech is the more 'elite' group that pays better and generally rolls out decent products.
- noobermin 4y ago
  On the one hand you said it's dominated by IT people with no business goals but then complain the manager is a secretary with no dev skills...which is it?
lgvln 4y ago
Let’s not forget the whole fiasco with Singapore’s TraceTogether app for contact tracing during the pandemic. The actual implementation of it differs significantly from the white paper they open-sourced. The actual app does not anonymize the data and the government has access to everyone’s location and interaction data. Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed the data for investigation purposes. There is no constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any laws so it was mostly an “oops, too bad, we didn’t do anything ‘wrong’” moment for them. https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/TraceTogether%20and%20BlueTrace%20are%20now%20Open%20Source.aspx https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3116541/coronavirus-tracetogether-data-used-murder-case https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/31...
- quinnjh 4y ago
  Good thing the United States has a constitutional amendment that totally protects us from having our location data harvested sold and deanonymized by thousands of data brokers!
  - tdhz77 4y ago
    This practice should extend to the private sector in my opinion. Protection of location data should fall under the 14th amendment.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - xeromal 4y ago
    My favorite comment. Let's ignore any valid criticism and complain about something else instead.
    - noobermin 4y ago
unnouinceput 4y ago
TLDR; It's a wishlist, not the current tech stack Title is misleading
- hunter_n 4y ago
  Most projects listed are either live or in final stages of launch. Public facing info and docs can be found here: https://www.developer.tech.gov.sg/ https://www.developer.tech.gov.sg/
Joeri 4y ago
We have something similar to this in Antwerp, Belgium. Most of our solutions are built on top of a kubernetes-powered microservices platform, with an API-first design approach. It is called the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (https://acpaas.digipolis.be https://acpaas.digipolis.be). To ensure technological consistency we have a Digipolis Antwerp Application Stack, which is the technological foundation for new projects. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR9N3gAJoJFIlaXnpAfSpog85EN1DXJYy5bWHgZ4XKhy8KN1v6xgT4-eaoTTBTEzhIpMGqd_Q11RuKF/pubhtml https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR9N3gAJoJFI... And finally for UI consistency, we have a design system called Antwerp UI (https://antwerp-ui.digipolis.be https://antwerp-ui.digipolis.be), which includes a custom-designed font meant to evoke the city's historical architecture, used both for internally facing web apps, and for our public facing website https://www.antwerpen.be https://www.antwerpen.be
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- daqhris 4y ago
  Hey Joeri, thank you! I've previously lived in the Antwerp province. The whole time of my stay, I was in love with the city's visual identity (posters, website,..) and the effectiveness of digital services across the administration offices, public institutions and media centers. It's the one city in Belgium taking advantage, in the best way, of digital infrastructure and modern tech. Nowadays I'm living in the Ardennes (Bastogne) where I can see a huge gap (compared to Antwerp) in Internet services and tech investments. I'm grateful to the people at Digipolis and the city offices taking visionary steps in fostering the local tech scene and building beautiful interfaces/apps.
herunan 4y ago
Why reinvent the wheel? A lot of govt websites have very similar use cases. I would e.g. just get The UK Government Design System, which is really good: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system
platz 4y ago
how does it compare with Taiwan and the work that Audrey Tang has done around democratic technology?
shp0ngle 4y ago
I used to work with Singaporean government on a project (which I cannot legally share more about), and, they are actually as dysfunctional technically-wise as any other government. The dynamics that make government technically dysfunctional are present in Singapore too. They might be helped by Singapore having so many IT companies of SEA because of low taxes and good rule of law, compared to other countries in the region. (There is no risk of SG government just taking your company away. There is the risk in other SEA countries.) And just sheer power of money. But at the end of the day, it's still a government, with all the good and the bad.

251 points by korginator 4y ago

This looks impressive, and something we (America) should copy. Man, I can't help wishing that if we had to have a dictator why couldn't it be someone (mostly) reasonable like Lee Kwan Yew.

decafninja 4y ago
I feel dictators/autocrats come in two flavors. The first genuinely feel they know what is best for the country and how to best govern it. They might still enrich themselves and their cronies in the process of course. The second are primarily out to enrich themselves and their cronies. The country exists to support this selfish goal. Of course this is not black and white, but rather a spectrum but various historical figures seem to strongly lean to one side or the other.
- dontreact 4y ago
  And history repeatedly shows that even if you get a dictator of the first kind, it’s an unstable equilibrium of a system that eventually leads to a dictator of the second kind.
  - AnAfrican 4y ago
    And that can happen with the same person !
  - javajosh 4y ago
    Yes, but it's not always true - see cousin comment. There are examples of actually good dictators in history - but my back of the envelope estimate is that its like 1 in 20.
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    Which Lee Kuan Yew was well aware of, and set up a constitution that makes it easy to peacefully remove a government. The only reason the PAP is still in power is because Singaporeans don't want to get rid of them.
    - sagaro 4y ago
      Gerrymandering is a popular tactics used by PAP in Singapore, to ensure they stay in power. In most democracies the Govt., Supreme Court and the Election Commission are independent of each other. Thereby elections are run fairly. But in Singapore, the election commission and supreme court is run by the govt. in power. This makes it easier for the party in power to sustain it's reign.
      - AussieWog93 4y ago
        I'm not saying they don't give themselves unfair advantages in the election, but that's a very different thing to, say, Mugabe's Zimbabwe or Putin's Russia where power was simply seized and held onto with no accountability to the people. If the PAP torpedoed the entire economy because of some stupid beliefs of the leader, they would be quickly and quietly removed.
      - noisy_boy 4y ago
        Gerrymandering would be somewhat curtailed (not nullified, I agree) if most of the people would have supported the opposition. They just don't. In the last General Elections, PAP's margin of victory did shrink from the past but it was still a pretty big margin[0]. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_election#Results https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Singaporean_general_elect...
davesque 4y ago
I understand the sentiment, and I don't think you were probably being serious, but, for the sake of conversation, I think the issue with dictatorships is eventually with stability. The allure of that much power in a single position leads to the wrong kind of people talking it. Actually, when we frame things that way, it almost makes me feel like democracy is primarily designed to provide a certain amount of slowness in government; enough to spot corruption coming and head it off. Maybe corruption always eventually wins, just more slowly in democracies. Kinda feels that way lately.
- javajosh 4y ago
  It's nice to get the benefit of the doubt, and I'm tempted to let it remain, but let me clarify: I'm serious. I was impressed with Lee Kwan Yew's "From Third World to First" and it seemed to me he wasn't bashful about talking about the times he made an illiberal, dictator move. Both from the outcome and his telling, he made these moves as rarely as possible and didn't relish them. And he did smart things like rewarding government officials extremely well so that they would be (relatively) immune to bribery. I'm sure there are other examples of good leadership from the seat of absolute monarchy, even if we mainly focus on the bad ones in history class. FDR's wartime leadership comes to mind (people seem to forget how illiberal American government was during the war - and it was surely effective). In all cases, the key to success with illiberal government seems to be self-restraint. When the war ends, you give up power. Or in general, when the object is achieved, you give up power. I've not followed Singapore's timeline since I read the book, so maybe they've backslid? Maybe its a psuedo monarchy run my Yew's ancestors? If so, that's a failure. Hopefully they can figure out how to pick leaders in a rational way - like an aptitude test.
skissane 4y ago
Just over a week ago, Singapore executed by hanging an intellectually disabled Malaysian man (of Indian descent), Nagaenthran K. Dharmalingam. His crime? He was caught trying to import heroin – I think it very likely the traffickers exploited his intellectual disability in order to talk him into becoming a drug mule. In this regard, Singapore is a rather extreme outlier among developed countries – few of which retain the death penalty, and those which do largely restrict it in practice to murder. William Gibson's famous phrase, "Disneyland with the Death Penalty", is as true as it ever was. So yeah, Lee Hsien Loong seems like a cool guy – wow, a Prime Minister who can write C++. But, remember Nagaenthran, and realise he's not actually cool at all, he's actually a rather terrible human being. Whatever the Prime Minister's formal role in decisions about executions, I don't think anyone doubts that he had the political influence (even if quietly, behind the scenes) to stop it going ahead, if he had wanted to.
- javajosh 4y ago
  I am also against the death penalty. But I am for consistency. It does not sound like a clear-cut case of injustice to me, and I am quite sensitive to injustice. Any compassion the state shows is a lie to cover for discretionary enforcement, which is a pernicious type of corruption. It truly sounds like a tragic case. If Mr. Dharmalingam was unable to understand the risks he was taking, then clearly he needed more guardianship, maybe from his family, or if that wasn't available, from the state. But state-sponsored guardianship of the intellectually disabled has it's own evil air, does it not? (Not knowing the details, if he was sent from Malaysia, then I hope the Malaysian authorities find and punish the ones who used him so cruelly.)
  - AussieWog93 4y ago
    >(Not knowing the details, if he was sent from India, then I hope the Indian authorities find and punish the ones who used him so cruelly.) He was Malaysian. The cops probably know who sent him and let the guys go in exchange for a shiny watch.
  - skissane 4y ago
    > Any compassion the state shows is a lie to cover for discretionary enforcement, which is a pernicious type of corruption You actually think there is no discretionary enforcement of the law in Singapore? Like every other jurisdiction on earth, Singapore has prosecutorial discretion. [0] A handful of jurisdictions, such as Germany, traditionally reject prosecutorial jurisdiction in theory, but that theory belies the fact that even in Germany it has always been inescapable in practice–no prosecutor on this earth has the resources to prosecute every known crime in their jurisdiction, they always have to pick and choose which cases to prosecute and how much effort and resources to put into each prosecution, and there is always going to be an element of subjective judgement in that decision, which will inevitably be coloured by the prosecutors' beliefs/culture/politics/attitudes/biases. And, is prosecutorial discretion in Singapore applied in a purely impartial and non-discriminatory way? Considering Singapore's lengthy and ongoing history of politically motivated prosecutions (see for example [1]), it is rather obvious that it isn't. Most jurisdictions accept that factors like intellectual disability need to be taken into account as mitigating circumstances, frequently leading to more lenient punishment, and sentencing which focuses more on protection and rehabilitation than less on retribution and deterrence, compared to an offender with normal (or above-normal) intellectual capacity. The idea that intellectually disabled people ought to be treated with particular leniency is one supported by the United Nations, and even by the US Supreme Court (which held, in the 2002 case of Atkins v. Virginia, that executing the intellectually disabled is unconstitutional)–so extending them that leniency is hardly a "lie to cover for discretionary enforcement", nor a "pernicious type of corruption" [0] https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/prosecutorial-discretion-singapore/ https://singaporelegaladvice.com/law-articles/prosecutorial-... [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/singapore-first-convictions-under-contempt-of-court-law-confirms-fears-over-muzzling-critics-2/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/10/singapore-fir...

dazsnow 4y ago

Singapore's GovTech does amazing work.

United857 4y ago
Even their prime minister can code in C/C++: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime-minister-of-singapore-shares-his-c-code-for-sudoku-solver/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/prime...
- afr0ck 4y ago
  He was the Wrangler at the Univ of Cambridge (best Undergrad in Math).
  - random314 4y ago
    And it's no mean achievement. Here is the list of Senior wranglers on wikipedia. Check out his peers to see what mathematics possibly missed out on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senior_Wrangler
    - djtango 4y ago
      I prefer to think of it as what politics and society gained. It was pretty clear that most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the pandemic. At a time where technological advance has vastly outpaced politics (Joe Biden was around 65 when the first iphone came out) I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS major heading up a (small) nation.
      - 2143 4y ago
        > most politicians, let alone leaders, didn't know what "exponential" meant over the pandemic. Maybe they did and chose to ignore it. Lots of countries (including but not limited to the USA) have people with high credentials at the helm. Or they have advisors with high credentials close by. > I think it's quite remarkable to have a Maths-CS Math never gets old. > a (small) nation They may be small, but they definitely punch above their weight :)

robertlagrant 4y ago

I was really worried when I saw APEX. I thought it was that crappy Oracle app-in-plsql nonsense. Thankfully not! This all looks pretty cool!

pjmlp 4y ago
That nonsense powers lot of companies where dbas can quickly ramp-up applications, in the same vein as VB and macros filled Excel documents.
brassattax 4y ago
I thought it was going to be built on Salesforce
- robertlagrant 4y ago
  Yes, that would be better than the Oracle option!

vira28 4y ago

Is there something similar to US Government.

gwbrooks 4y ago
At least for the design system, the answer is yes. The US Government Design System: https://designsystem.digital.gov/ https://designsystem.digital.gov/ Don't have the URL handy, but California has an amazing design system as well.
- justbaker 4y ago
  Something similar to what you mentioned, but for the state of Michigan https://digitalguidelines.michigan.gov/ https://digitalguidelines.michigan.gov/
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mxuribe 4y ago
I'm sure there might be because several years ago the U.S. created the U.S. Digital Service with the premise being recruiting professionals (yeah mostly from corporate but not only) to spend time in the government and help modernize many of its aspects and offerings...for the benefit of the citizens, etc. Here's one example of their playbooks: https://playbook.cio.gov/ https://playbook.cio.gov/ ...While not exactly like the Singapore page linked in this post, alot of the intent with the USDS - as i understand it - is alos to be quite transparent with the hope of any other government agencies/orgs such as state/province level, city level, etc. benefiting from their ideas and hopefully broadening the benefit at all levels. Here is the main site, but of course (as the above playbook link denotes), there are plenty of other related sites that might help better answer your question: https://www.usds.gov/mission https://www.usds.gov/mission

butterfi 4y ago

I’ve worked on a Singapore website sponsored by the major University and a Govt. office and frankly speaking, it’s a poorly managed process dominated by IT protocol more than business/client goals. The admin responsible for running the site was inept and his colleagues were worse. The person who inherited managing the complex web stack was a secretary with no dev skills. I hope it works out for them, but I’m not optimistic.

finolex1 4y ago
There's several different government bodies working on tech in Singapore. GovTech is the more 'elite' group that pays better and generally rolls out decent products.
noobermin 4y ago
On the one hand you said it's dominated by IT people with no business goals but then complain the manager is a secretary with no dev skills...which is it?

lgvln 4y ago

Let’s not forget the whole fiasco with Singapore’s TraceTogether app for contact tracing during the pandemic. The actual implementation of it differs significantly from the white paper they open-sourced. The actual app does not anonymize the data and the government has access to everyone’s location and interaction data. Initially, their privacy policy promised the data would only be used for tracking of the spread of COVID but it was later revealed by the parliament that the police had in fact accessed the data for investigation purposes. There is no constitutional right to privacy in Singapore so they did not actually break any laws so it was mostly an “oops, too bad, we didn’t do anything ‘wrong’” moment for them. https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/TraceTogether%20and%20BlueTrace%20are%20now%20Open%20Source.aspx https://www.sgtech.org.sg/SGTECH/Web/SGTech_News_2020/May20/... https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/3116541/coronavirus-tracetogether-data-used-murder-case https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/health-environment/article/31...

quinnjh 4y ago
Good thing the United States has a constitutional amendment that totally protects us from having our location data harvested sold and deanonymized by thousands of data brokers!
- tdhz77 4y ago
  This practice should extend to the private sector in my opinion. Protection of location data should fall under the 14th amendment.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- xeromal 4y ago
  My favorite comment. Let's ignore any valid criticism and complain about something else instead.
  - noobermin 4y ago

unnouinceput 4y ago

TLDR; It's a wishlist, not the current tech stack Title is misleading

hunter_n 4y ago
Most projects listed are either live or in final stages of launch. Public facing info and docs can be found here: https://www.developer.tech.gov.sg/ https://www.developer.tech.gov.sg/

Joeri 4y ago

We have something similar to this in Antwerp, Belgium. Most of our solutions are built on top of a kubernetes-powered microservices platform, with an API-first design approach. It is called the Antwerp City Platform as a Service (https://acpaas.digipolis.be https://acpaas.digipolis.be). To ensure technological consistency we have a Digipolis Antwerp Application Stack, which is the technological foundation for new projects. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR9N3gAJoJFIlaXnpAfSpog85EN1DXJYy5bWHgZ4XKhy8KN1v6xgT4-eaoTTBTEzhIpMGqd_Q11RuKF/pubhtml https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vR9N3gAJoJFI... And finally for UI consistency, we have a design system called Antwerp UI (https://antwerp-ui.digipolis.be https://antwerp-ui.digipolis.be), which includes a custom-designed font meant to evoke the city's historical architecture, used both for internally facing web apps, and for our public facing website https://www.antwerpen.be https://www.antwerpen.be

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
daqhris 4y ago
Hey Joeri, thank you! I've previously lived in the Antwerp province. The whole time of my stay, I was in love with the city's visual identity (posters, website,..) and the effectiveness of digital services across the administration offices, public institutions and media centers. It's the one city in Belgium taking advantage, in the best way, of digital infrastructure and modern tech. Nowadays I'm living in the Ardennes (Bastogne) where I can see a huge gap (compared to Antwerp) in Internet services and tech investments. I'm grateful to the people at Digipolis and the city offices taking visionary steps in fostering the local tech scene and building beautiful interfaces/apps.

herunan 4y ago

Why reinvent the wheel? A lot of govt websites have very similar use cases. I would e.g. just get The UK Government Design System, which is really good: https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system https://github.com/alphagov/govuk-design-system

platz 4y ago

how does it compare with Taiwan and the work that Audrey Tang has done around democratic technology?

shp0ngle 4y ago

I used to work with Singaporean government on a project (which I cannot legally share more about), and, they are actually as dysfunctional technically-wise as any other government. The dynamics that make government technically dysfunctional are present in Singapore too. They might be helped by Singapore having so many IT companies of SEA because of low taxes and good rule of law, compared to other countries in the region. (There is no risk of SG government just taking your company away. There is the risk in other SEA countries.) And just sheer power of money. But at the end of the day, it's still a government, with all the good and the bad.