Musings about Lee Kuan Yew, SG50 & SmartNations

My friend Eli (@5le) shared an interesting idea with me a couple of days ago. Singapore is a place where values of planning and preparation are embedded so deeply that through Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s funeral, we can see the unrelenting dedication that folks in the public service have towards these values, even in matters of life and death. The proof was in the age of the domain rememberingleekuanyew.sg.

According to publicly available records of internet domain registration, the government of Singapore had prepared for Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s passing as far back as October 2013. At the time, Mr Lee had just attended a National Day dinner in August at his ward of Tanjong Pagar, as he had done annually for years. Mr Lee had been in and out of hospital for many months, and though the seriousness of his condition had not been made known to the public, it seems that the inevitability of his passing had been conveyed to authorities as far as the National Library Board and the Ministry of Communications and Information at least 18 months before his death. It was in October 2013 that the domain rememberingleekuanyew.sg was purchased, and though it wouldn’t be called into service till 18 months later, we can tell that plans were already afoot. To reinforce the theme of planning further, the domain singapore50.sg was registered in September 2012.

The emphasis that the government of Singapore places on managing the digital sphere is extraordinary. Mr Lee Hsien Loong has 748,000 followers on Facebook and 164,000 on Twitter. He and his team (presumably), are active online, and have antennae finely tuned to the ears of his followers. Take for example Mr Lee’s evening on April 20th, where he was attending a reception for international tech entrepreneurs and investors at the Istana and launching the Smart Nation initiative in his address. The event was the Founders Forum, which has been called Davos for Tech. While Mr Lee did spend time mingling with his distinguished guests from abroad, his Facebook post for the evening betrays no hint of the outsized egos and glamorous schmoozing that one associates with the name Davos. He shone the spotlight for the evening on Ms Janice Wong, pastry chef for the event and author of the most delectable wall I’ve ever seen. This extends even to the content of the post, where PM Lee did the double honour of tagging the Smart Nation Singapore Facebook group and kicking off the #SmartNation hashtag, but pointedly (probably) declined Facebook’s suggestion to tag the Founders Forum. A prime example of staying on-message while avoiding the yawn-inducing effects of a major policy announcement. PM Lee would have a stellar career in social media management should he choose to retire from politics!

Here is PM Lee’s Facebook post from Founders Forum. (Sorry I can’t embed html in TiA Talk)

It would be too frivolous to only consider Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s memorial site and a single Facebook post by the Prime Minister as representative of the government’s long term approach to the digital sphere though. We ought to at least look at the work done by the agency primarily responsible for seeing the Smart Nation initiative to fruition, and that would be the IDA. The IDA has launched a dedicated website for the SmartNation launch activities, including the Founders Forum, the Smart Nation Innovations conference and a carnival called Tech Saturday. In addition, there is a landing page on their website describing the Smart Nation Vision. Amazingly, we can trace a little of the Smart Nation initiative’s roots through these starting points.

A little background is necessary before delving further into the details because the motivations behind and purpose of the Smart Nation program ought to be laid out. Since 2005, the IDA’s work has been driven by fulfilment of the (no doubt Apple-inspired) iN2015 Masterplan, which lays out several strategic goals for security, broadband, and manpower.

The Smart Nation website may be the central public-facing portal for the initiative moving forward, but for now it appears to be largely an events calendar for the Smart Nation launch. My friends at Futureworkz pointed out that it’s a WordPress site. It has an embedded video that links to the IDA’s YouTube channel. Interestingly, videos in this channel bearing “Smart Nation” in the title have been online since November 2014. Taking into account video production time, the Smart Nation launch activities must have been proposed at least a few months before in order for the budget to be approved. (Am I being too optimistic about timelines here? Anyone can comment?) Smartnation.sg was registered in August 2014, which reinforces the earlier point about the activities’ preparation start date being much earlier. If the domain was purchased as soon as the events were approved and budget allocated, then they must have been in planning for at least 8 months, and the entire Smart Nation initiative for even longer than that.

The last piece of this puzzle is in the IDA’s page for the Smart Nation initiative. On this page, there is an embedded video playlist by a YouTube user called “Smart Nation Admin“. Why would this playlist not be created by the official IDA account? Perhaps the answer lies on the same Smart Nation page. Near the bottom is a contact email: smartnation@snpo.gov.sg. There is a possibility that even though this page resides on the IDA’s website, it falls under the purview of the Smart Nation Program Office (SNPO), which is why even the YouTube videos featured here are not part of the IDA’s account. The SNPO.gov.sg domain was registered in October 2014. This hints that the establishment of this office was not planned as a part of the Smart Nation program in her original formulation. It would be somewhat odd if it was yet the domain was only registered in October, about 2 months after the Smartnation.sg domain. Also, the domain currently doesn’t feature a website at all. It seems possible that this promotion of the Smart Nation program to a ministerial concern is a belated recognition that the Smart Nation program has now become so important that it has outgrown its parent – IDA. Again, this change is hinted by the Prime Minister personally hosting the guests of Founders Forum.

The simple examples above illustrate a humbling point for me. We live our lives practically by the minute, failing fast, validating learning. It’s easy to lose sight of the fact that there are big organizations in a big world. Forward planning is not the same for a startup compared to a government. Where I can only see ripples, they see tides.