Building innovative digital tools to address societal issues 1 - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation
PRE-LAUNCH Building innovative digital tools to address societal issues 1 PRE-LAUNCH what if... tech could disrupt social problems the same way it disrupted industry, for the better? tech could make social work more effective, as well
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Building innovative digital tools to address societal issues
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… tech could disrupt social problems the same way it disrupted industry, for the better? … tech could make social work more effective, as well as more efficient? … tech could nudge society towards better behaviour in real life?
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Singapore is generally doing well, but new fault lines are emerging and old ones are widening. Social problems like racism, sexism, classism, injustice, immobility, and inequality continue to be issues. Disadvantaged and underprivileged communities are finding it harder to catch up or even cope. Social media and other technologies have worsened the scale, speed, and scope of these problems. Traditional volunteer welfare groups continue to work hard, but their methods are increasingly inefficient or ineffective against these trends.
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… because we can be better.
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Technology has made old industries more efficient and effective. We can help welfare groups rejuvenate by modernising their methods, by adapting existing online tools in innovative ways to meet their needs. Technology has disrupted industries and social patterns for the worse. We can build and deploy innovative tools that disrupt the negative trends to make a positive difference.
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… but it’s not a silver bullet
Social services Healthcare Sustainability Civil discourse Ageing issues Financial adequacy Polarisation Discrimination Apathy Mental well-being Awareness
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… by creating a process that allows busy talents to contribute pockets of time and expertise in productive ways towards the development of digital tools. … by brainstorming and building innovative solutions for welfare groups or daring solutions on our own. … by creating a collective that reduces the barriers to entry for individual talents so that they can focus on helping where they are best at, while leaving the rest to us. … by finding, enabling, empowering, recognising, resourcing, and growing the civic tech ecosystem.
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… and inspire collective action supply gap demand gap civic tech gap
Solving social problems is unprofitable and doesn’t pay, so good firms / talents are scarce. Good talents are busy, even if they want to help. Welfare groups may not be tech-savvy and hence unaware of the potential for tech to help. Cross-domain or emerging issues are unowned. The risk appetite for testing innovative solutions is low in this sector. Current initiatives have huge barriers to entry (awareness of social issues, tech ability, time, money, networks and influence, etc). No agency supports or recognises these initiatives.
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administrative hassles
solutions nation-wide
lean / agile / kanban mindset and focus on testing many ideas with MVPs rather than perfecting the first product.
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We will be the community for tech-savvy talents who want to contribute towards solving societal issues through the bold and innovative development and use of digital tools. “ M
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” “Bol, fa, ber” “ B e t
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e ”
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PROBLEM GATHERING
What are the societal issues? Who are the communities affected, and what are their views? How much impact could solving this have on society?
[Ethnography, Social Studies]
COLLABORATIVE BRAINSTORMING
How can tech help solve the problem? What are current welfare groups doing? Can we make them more efficient or effective? Is there a bold way to disrupt the problem?
[Theory of Change, Design Thinking]
AGILE MVP DEVELOPMENT
What skills do we need on the team to sprint to develop simple MVPs? Which part of the sprint can each talent add value to? What micro-tasks need to be done by when?
[Agile / Lean Development, Kanban]
USER TESTING IN THE WILD
How can we deploy and test the MVP with the right live users and rapidly iterate? What ideas work? Who can we handover successful tools to for long-term ownership?
[User research, Community Networking]
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Focus on building a few high-impact MVPs and testing
process and gather internal feedback. Focus our official “launch” event to increase publicity, recruit more talent, secure additional funding sources, external partnerships.. Focus on refining our processes (e.g. devops, agile flow, community outreach, testing processes, tech contribution modality, etc) so that we can deliver incredible value to people across a range of societal issues. Focus on setting up the society, assembling the launch team, and acquiring the right dev / management tools with bootstrap funds. Identify problem statements and areas with potential for tech solutions. Identify potential welfare group, tech agency partnerships, institutional tie-ups.
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… we are open to other options as well
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funding talent
We want to support the civic tech ecosystem as a non-profit and keep our code open-source so that anybody can use it to help society. We need funding support or resources in kind (e.g. access to dev tools, hosting, etc) for that. We need users and long-term owners for our
disadvantaged communities or those facing societal issues who can test MVPs and give us feedback, contact us. If you are a social welfare group that would like to co-develop solutions or take over successful MVPs, contact us. We need talents to build bold solutions. If your
spirit (“CSR” or “individual project time”) but finds it difficult to motivate staff to overcome the barriers to running an entire project, we welcome your talents to just plug in to our process.
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… join us and be part of a growing ( , ), daring, new tech initiative
10 BG Gaurav Keerthi President Chan Chi Ling Vice-President Dominic Soon CFO [Pending] CTO
JON CHUA SANJAY SURESH VISHAL HARNAL BEN GOH CHOY YONG CONG JASON BEY LUCIUS LEE NICOLETTE TAN TAN ENG TECK KAREN TAY KWOK JIA CHUAN NIKHIL CHOWDHARY Dr JON KWONG HANS AVINDER SHAO WEI SANTOSH KUMAR LOUISA TAN GAILLE TEO KENNETH BOK KENNETH GOH LEWIS LIU RACHAEL
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Get in touch with us today. gaurav@dialectic.sg
[@better.sg emails pending] 11