Catalysing Public-Private Innovation & Co-creation Through an Open and Accessible Government

Public-private collaboration encourages new ideas and more innovative government offerings. To facilitate knowledge sharing and exchanges, governments and private companies can share open-source technologies to generate awareness and drive adoption of products and services domestically and internationally.

Open channels of engagement are also important sources of citizen and industry feedback that governments can use to garner insights and improve solutions. GovTech has an active “Tech Kaki” (‘kaki’ means ‘friend’ in Malay) community of more than 7,000 users. We also organise tech events covering a wide range of topics from cybersecurity to product management. These are well-received by the tech community, who in turn have shared that they gained a deeper understanding of government products and services as a result. To date, these events have extended GovTech’s outreach to over 6,500 participants and provided interesting pointers for our developers to work on.

Open-source Tech

Singapore government agencies’ open-source technologies, such as those relating to our National Digital Identity, Infrastructure-as-code and OpenAttestation framework, are accessible to all developers on GitHub and product websites, as well as on the Singapore Government Developer Portal.

For instance, Canada has adopted OpenCerts, a platform/product built by GovTech using blockchain technology. OpenCerts allows Singapore’s digital education and training institutions to issue digital certificates to students upon the completion of their course of study. GovTech also helped to develop TradeTrust, an open-sourced technology that is being used in cross border digital trade. TradeTrust allows secure exchange of electronic trade documents across digital platforms through blockchain technology and can be used for global trade between governments and businesses by enabling interoperability across different trade platforms and formats.

STACK Community

The STACK community comprises of the STACK, STACK-X and Capture-the-Flag community groups. STACK is the largest Government-led, biennial developer conference in Singapore, connecting the government, industry, and the tech community. The first STACK conference was conducted in 2018. Thereafter, GovTech has kickstarted smaller-scale STACK-X Conferences and STACK-X Meetup sessions aimed at building stronger community bonds and peer learning across a wide range of tech topics. The STACK brand was also expanded to include a Capture-the-Flag competition for our Cybersecurity Group.

Tech Kaki

Tech Kaki is a user insights community set up by GovTech to encourage citizen engagement and co-creation. Community tech enthusiasts get first-hand information on new tech products before launch, and are invited to participate in surveys and highlight areas for improvement.

Find out more about our public-private innovation and co-creation opportunities here:

• Open-source Tech
• STACK Community
• Tech Kaki