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Monday, 7 December 2020

GovTech's STACK 2020

Won a mechanical keyboard thanks to this gif featuring my AR filter

pre-Covid banner maybe?

Last week, I had the chance to join in the fun at GovTech's STACK 2020. When I first heard about the event it was supposed to be in late March and early April but I think due to COVID-19 and the Circuitbreaker, the event must have been postponed to a fully online experience. 

"STACK is GovTech’s flagship conference and the largest government-led developers event in Singapore that connects government, industry and the tech community. It is part of GovTech's tech community engagement initiative that is led by a bunch of tech enthusiasts with the passion to innovate and stay ahead, continuously levelling up to make sense of a rapidly changing world."
Interestingly, if not for COVID and the shift to an online model, I may not have had the privilege to attend the programme. The standard rates for the physical conference which was supposed to be in March/April 2020 were $350 per ticket and even public servants could only get that price reduced to $120 with a promo code. Somehow or rather, the programme was expected to be quite costly and the fees were to make up for the budget spent and as the event was supposedly outward-facing or targeted for private sector to 'show off' government capabilities,  it was not initially made complimentary at the WOG level. The priority was to improve our branding and make them work with GovTech more. 

Hence, I consider myself lucky as I managed to get free access to the virtual version of the conference by chance as I found another promo code when I was scrolling through the Workplace (by Facebook) pages in early November. It makes sense to me that for an online session, and due to networked economies of scale it is more worthwhile if more people were agiven access tot the conference as they did not take up 'space' and they can also benefit the organisers with the spillover effects that meet the intended outcome of the event. I do not know what happended nackend but it the organisers noticed that not as many people signed up and paid for the event, it must have been quite logical to just open up more complimentary passes for other public servants.


The site hosting the conference actually had this fascinating interactive way to let the participants decide on the sessions to follow or attend. They split it three ways, Cloud Track, App Track or the Tech Culture Track and I landed on the last one. 


A long list of webinars

As an Educational Technology Officer, it was natural for me to look out for the tech culture stack but some of the App and Cloud ones were relevant too as I had dabbled and learnt a bit about them in my explorations thus far. I enjoyed the keynote by Jeff Barr of Amazon and I also appreciated the session by Mark Birch. There were some I could not catch live but was glad that they were available on demand too. Having seen the importance of technology for learning when Covid-19 struck and Circuitbreaker left students to learn through Home Based Learning (HBL), I was looking out for sessions on innovation, UX/UI and also building communities so yes, I had definitely learnt a lot and would surely recommend STACK to others.



I also went to catch the GovTech Story on Data Transformation by Joseph Tan. It was pretty insightful for me as it was about the efforts to build the data literacy framework and culture gradually. He even shared all the parts neded to get the 'rocket ship' to launch. I am also glad to say that I was impacted by some of the initiatives as I picked up some data visualisation skills and some big picture perspective of the data skills required to thrive in that space even if I am not a full time data analyst, I also got to hear from Sarah Salim a data-aware designer who shared her 4Ds as seen in the slide below.









Sarah from Open Government Products










Below are some of the cute and useful pngs stickers which I downloaded from the Engagement page and they could possibly come in handy for future tech related slides. Feel free to download them for your own use and you may even be able to edit out the #GovTechSTACK easily.











Love the gift! Thanks @GovTech

For the K8 Keychron Keyboard



You can see the sample of an embedded Twitter feed through Twitter's publish site.


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1 comment:

  1. Erwin29 May 2023 at 13:37

    Hola, una empresa de govtech en Perú que recomiendo es GovLink.Pe - Espero les interese!

    ReplyDelete