A Better Face for Singapore Government

Yesterday (Monday), I went for a Focus Group Discussion, organised by Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore for MICA; help at the IDA office at Suntec Tower 3.

The discussion is "On The Design for Singapore Government Website".
More specifically, www.gov.sg.

If you do visit this website before (me on blue moon occasions), will find it rather useless. LOL!

I mean, how many dudes out there in Singapore really cares about everything the government is doing. I mean, other than the usual suspects: ERP, COE, HDB Price, handouts, GST hikes, and every single other stupid hikes, Singaporeans mainly are ignorant, or simply cant be bother about politics.

Face of Singapore they said...

So for its function, said to be "The Face of the Singapore Government", looks pretty dull, plain, and downright "Organised". Not to mentioned my lack of understanding on why is it so "blue". Just to push a bit further, the website simply lack of purpose, and totally uninteresting.

But at least someone did find a use, when he once needed to get to a certain contact to a certain department to get to do certain things. So when he gave up on the stupid phone calling operation, he decided to look for it on the internet, and he found it on this site.

So practically, SINGOV (the what-I-call nickname) is useless and serves no purpose (or even failed its purpose) up till now.

But halfway through the discussion, we were shown the new mockup (not a working one yet though), and its redder and looks more appealing. Information is repackaged into 5 main portions and with the "Events/Calendar" proving to be a hit with all of us; breathing so purpose to the site.

So in a way, Gov.sg (its new name) will in the future, serve much better purpose in promoting and putting awareness as regards to any major events that will happen in Singapore; albeit being government related-corporate stuff or simply government sanctioned stuff like Chingay and the F1 Singapore GP.

Major improvement that are expected are consolidation of all the news and press releases into a single entity. RSS feeds will be provided for all information. Featured events will be shown prominently on the main page, as well as a seem-to-be more efficient way of looking for the point of contact.

By their active engagement in the public for feedbacks and studying suggestions made by us, I am impressed and found myself liking our government sector that little bit more.

I believe they should have a good team behind, toiling behind the scene at IDA to make this website a "Good Face" for our Government.

Lets hope to see this new site soon.

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Some of you must be wondering why I went for such stuff? Or even post like as if I became an agent for PAP. Nah~

I am politically neutral for a start. I simply got interested to be part of a web development process for the government's website, hoping that I could help make it a more user-friendly and helpful website for everyone (but I then realise what I wanted to help improve is ecitizen.sg).

Another reason is that I am curious about how the Government conducts their feedback and consultation sessions.

In a way, I find it - again - efficient, organised and that bit less SAF-like. I kindda almost brain-washed by how SAF conducts their stuff, especially by MCMD's courses... So felt kindda happy that at least I taste something different from another Government agency.

Just one interesting thing to note - I realised some do take the opportunity to make this a networking session....OMG... I got 3 namecards. I gave none. Because I didnt bring mine (an outdated one).