Making Good Work: How One Government Unit Co Creates Solutions for a Better Singapore
by Lam Kee Wei, Li Hongyi, Nitya Menon and Alwyn Tan
Last updated 20 July 2026
ETHOS Issue 28, Apr 2025
Hack for Public Good: How it all began
At GovTech's Open Government Products (OGP), we believe that no one has a monopoly on tackling problems of public concern in Singapore. We want to help identify what the actual problems are on the ground, and make sure any solutions work in the real world.
Our Hack for Public Good hackathon initiative started as an outlet to explore and experiment with ideas that might drive public impact. The idea—inspired by hackathons and other similar initiatives by tech companies—was to set aside a stretch of protected space and time to let people work on things they really want to do, in relation to serving a public need.
As public officers, we often get so caught up in our day-to-day work that we do not step back to think about doing something different. So at OGP we designate one full month in the year to dedicate ourselves to an idea we really want to look into—we get time to talk to agencies and collaborate with other people we may not normally work with, and then build something to solve problems.
When we kicked off Hack for Public Good in 2018, we decided to avoid the term 'hackathon', because the concept had become popularly associated with business plan competitions. We wanted Hack for Public Good to be rooted in working prototypes that have been tested with real users, rather than making slide decks and concept presentations.
Our idea was to show that in a limited amount of time, with modest resources, we can actually produce something concrete, useable and which solves a real problem.
In a limited amount of time, with modest resources, we can actually produce something concrete, useable and which solves a problem.
Putting Together Hack for Public Good
Every year, Hack for Public Good begins with an initial gathering of people to set the tone and context for what we want to do. This can vary by year: we have had public volunteers come in as co-hackers, for instance, or agencies that are particularly interested in a theme.
Convening the Hackers
When we first started, there were only 20 of us. We gathered in the lobby, asked everyone to share what ideas they had for half an hour, and then met at the end of every Friday in January to update each other on progress.
The process is intended to be largely organic. We try to mandate as little as possible: instead, we want to bring people together who are passionate about the same things and let the magic happen. We encourage teams to be no bigger than five people to minimise communication overheads, which can take time away from actually building a solution.
Today, with approximately 170 people in OGP, there needs to be a framework to organise the event. We put more effort into curating problems upfront. One month is not a lot of time to go from problem discovery to validation, testing, building and launching, so there needs to be some pre-work, especially around gathering problem statements.
Problem Discovery
We consolidate the problems we receive, which tend to come from the public, from other government agencies or from what the team members have identified in the course of their regular work. We then let people organically gather around a problem they want to address. On occasion, we organise field trips to better understand the issue through first-hand observation. We try to limit this problem discovery phase to about a week.
Pitching
We do pitches where people drum up excitement about what they are working on and recruit people for their teams. For Hack for Public Good, we take an all-hands-on-deck approach—so while someone may be more involved in stakeholder management in day-to-day work, during the hackathon phase they might find themselves doing more user interface research or product management. We step up to whichever roles are needed on the teams: whatever it takes to get it done.
Presenting Solutions
We have experimented with different formats to showcase the prototypes on Demo Day. We used to have stage presentations in the past, until there were too many to practically manage. We also have a strict rule that there has to be a working prototype to show, not just a high-fidelity design prototype. We want those who come to view the solutions to interact with something that really works.
We select our Demo Day attendees carefully: we want stakeholders who will feel excited about the projects, provide valuable feedback and perhaps champion or support their broader use. These primarily would be representatives from fellow public agencies.
Because Demo Day is often structured like a science fair, it is set up as fun environment where people play, interact, respond, take away something that reminds then about a product, and consider possibilities for the future.
Making It Work: Design Principles
The Hack for Public Good process has become core to OGP's success: it is how the majority of our products, including some of our most well-received ones, have emerged. It is a means to harness the collective intelligence of the growing OGP team, yielding more and better ideas and actual products than any one person could come up with.
It is not a given that a group of intelligent people will collectively come up with better outcomes than they might individually. In many organisations, planning by committee can lead to less optimal results than what a capable individual might come up with alone. To be smarter collectively than individually, we need a different process and a more flexible structure.
A number of principles keep this process effective.
1. Get the right people
The hackathon process works because we start by recruiting people who want to do good. For instance, we ask candidates we interview for OGP what they would do to solve a problem for Singapore if they were given the autonomy to do anything—this helps us determine the values and mindset of the people we bring in.
This means we do not ever need to force people to join Hack for Public Good or other projects, because it is what they already have a passion for: we are just creating space for them to do it. It is an opportunity for people to solve problems for Singapore by thinking not only as public officers, but also as fellow citizens.
Everything starts with having people with the right motivation, the right skills, who understand the problem, and who are given a chance to work on it.
2. Identify the right problem
Public officers can often have a particular view of the problems society faces that may be different from that of the average Singaporean. We are often also siloed from one another. People on the ground, even frontline public officers who encounter and collect problems faced by the public every day, may not be in a position to influence a policy designed by another department. Even those of us in GovTech can feel quite disconnected from the rest of government.
An important aspect of our process is to talk to the people who are actually facing issues—going to the public if we have to, through various channels—to clarify where the problem actually lies. For instance, there was a group working on elder tech who found they needed to go to community centres to talk to those actually engaging with older people, and to speak to the elderly themselves.
Apart from this, teams are free to pick their own projects—there is no area that is out of bounds.
3. Build a real solution
Key to the process is for our teams to be able to design, build and launch a useful, working prototype quickly. Not every idea presented in a hackathon will succeed, but they should all be intended to succeed.
To facilitate this, we have come up with a range of design systems and starter kits, both for engineering and product design, so that teams do not have to reinvent the wheel—they can take these templates and run with them if they have to.
We also conduct workshops and learning journeys on a range of different topics. These may be seasonal or be related to an area of interest popular with our teams. They could even be held before Hack for Public Good starts in January, so that by the time it begins people have an idea of what they want to work on.
We also help teams find the resources to realise projects, although most of them do not require much money. Today, there are many online platforms—from webpages to databases—that can let teams roll out digital products with little to no budget.
4. Support accountability
Every week, we have a check-in to make sure our teams are on track in spending their one month building their prototypes. We share updates, ask each other tough questions, surface blind spots and identify blocks. This is also an opportunity to seek help. The organising committee, being cross-functional, can help teams plug gaps and solve issues, whether they are about engineering or to do with stakeholder negotiation or user testing.
5. Set the right cadence and expectations
A hackathon process is effective when it does not happen too often: otherwise, the creative intensity of it is diffused, or can be too much to sustain throughout the year. You need time to accumulate residual ideas not already resolved in the course of regular work.
We have found that one month, once a year, is long enough to develop a real product, but not too long to be bogged down.
Once an idea has been proven and shown traction through the process, it also needs time to be fleshed out. Realising these prototypes as full products and live services securely and at scale can take years of further work. This was the case with initiatives such as RedeemSG, which came out of Hack for Public Good but took years to become the national system it is today. As anyone in public service knows, it takes a lot of quiet, day-to-day effort to make these innovations part of the lives of Singaporeans.
The real measure of success is not how exciting or fun the event is, but whether we are getting good, long-term work out of it: work that is not just for show. Realistically, you might have 100 ideas at the start of the hackathon, end up with 20 to 30 projects presented, out of which four to five make it to full-scale production.
“As a leader, you are not trying to design a process where you assume you have the best idea and get everyone else to execute. If there are ideas everyone believes in, and they can prove that it works, you should see it, recognise it, and support it, even if you do not understand or agree with everything personally. This is how you create an organisation that is more intelligent than you are.”
~Li Hongyi, Director, OGP
Hack for Public Good
Go.gov.sg
The Government's official link shortener was created after recognising that the public needed a way to easily remember and identify official communications and content from the Government. Go.gov.sg allowed public officers to create short links to direct content to the public, using an official gov.sg domain.
Redeem.gov.sg
This digital voucher platform was created during the 2020 edition of Hack for Public Good. It has allowed the CDC voucher campaigns to scale to national level, as well as take on other use cases like NEA's Climate Friendly Household Programme using the same infrastructure.
Scribe
Prototyped during Hack for Public Good 2024, Scribe uses a Large Language Model to help draft case notes and summaries for conversations between medical social workers (MSWs) and patients. It has since been integrated into Care360.
Visit https://www.open.gov.sg/products for more details.
Build for Good
Koel (Build for Good Environment)
A data processing and visualisation platform to allow ecologists to identify and track bird species through audio recordings from microphones placed throughout a natural habitat. This tool improves the accuracy and efficiency of EIAs (Environmental Impact Assessments), and helps reduce uninformed decision-making that may introduce a net harm to our natural environment.
RemediSG (Build for Good Environment)
A platform that facilitates distribution of expiring medications from health institutions to community clinics and non-profit organisations, reducing wastage of unused medication and ensuring that healthcare is more accessible to all in society.
NoteFlow (Build for Good 2023)
A tool that uses a Large Language Model to help school counsellors draft notes for their sessions with students.
Building for Good on a National Scale
The Build for Good2 movement extrapolates the month-long hackathon process to a national scale, so that the ideas do not just come from the OGP team but from the public. It is about rallying the public to help address the problems that they see.
The movement aims to inculcate a mindset where anyone who wants to solve public problems and work for the public good can do so, without needing to be public officers or in government. To support this, the Public Service should work as enablers, helping people make the country better rather than gatekeeping access to that effort.
In convening Build for Good, OGP helps bring together like-minded individuals with different skillsets who care about similar issues, such as the environment, so they can work together to do more than they can individually.
As a platform, Build for Good helps lower the barrier of entry for getting things done, offers insight into problems the government is looking to solve and access to public agencies, and empowers participants—through funding, mentorship, training, space and opportunity—to do the good they want to do.
By facilitating this process, OGP helps Build for Good participants navigate government regulations and working culture, and to frame solutions so they have a better chance to be realised.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
At Open Government Products (OGP), Lam Kee Wei is Senior Engineering Manager, Alwyn Tan is Head of Developer Relations, Nitya Menon is Policy and Transformation Specialist and Li Hongyi is Director.
OGP is an experimental development team that builds technology for the public good. This includes everything from building better apps for citizens to automating the internal operations of public agencies. The team's role is to accelerate the digital transformation of the Singapore Government by being a space where it can experiment with new tech practices, including new technologies, management techniques, corporate systems, and even cultural norms. The end goal is that through OGP's work, Singapore becomes a model of how governments can use technology to improve the public good.
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