Closing Remarks by Minister of State Jasmin Lau at the Sparks x Build for Good Community Hackathon Finale

Good afternoon, everybody. Congratulations, first of all, to the winning teams of the Community Hackathon, and also to all the teams that have successfully completed the month-long hackathon!

Now, when technology meets heart, amazing things can happen! Today, we're celebrating exactly that – the incredible achievements of every team in this Community Hackathon. Whether you're standing here as a winner or a participant, you have contributed to something special.

This is exactly what we had hoped to achieve, when we decided to put the Community Hackathon together between Open Government Products (OGP) and the People’s Association (PA). 

OGP has been running Build for Good, an initiative that empowers citizens to build technology solutions to make Singapore and citizens’ lives better. At the same time, PA launched their Sparks initiative to foster community innovation. So now we have brought the two together, (resulting in) a marriage of design, technology, and community spirit, which has brought us so much more good for society.

OGP’s previous “Build for Good” hackathons started back in 2023. They empower citizens like many of you here, to find problems to tackle, and build the tech solutions directly. The magic lies in allowing citizens to pick and identify the problems they care most about. From all your products here today, we can see the amount of heart and passion that you have put in. This was not homework that someone gave you – this was homework that you found for yourselves, and wanted to do it yourselves.

Most hackathons out there last for 24 hours, sometimes 48 (hours), but this is for a month. This gives you a lot of time to understand your problem better, and to solve, build, test, and then to re-test the prototype, and then do it all over again. This is why we believe the process works, because it is not a flash in the pan. It is not an idea that you feel good about for awhile. But it is something that you work hard on for a longer period of time.

I asked some of you when I visited your booths, “How did you meet?” My next question was, “How did you discover your problems?” I’m actually very happy to hear that most of you didn’t know each other before the Hackathon. It took courage to step up and want to do this. You came together, found like-minded people like yourselves, and then formed your own teams to do this. I find that particularly remarkable, because as an introvert myself, it’s very difficult to do this kind of work. Kudos to all of you who have stepped out of your comfort zones to build your products together.

Over the last 3 runs of Build for Good and now with Community Hackathon, we saw over 2,000 signups, 350 builders, 74 working prototypes, and more than 10 solutions actively developed and used by citizens today. There were solutions from past runs, such as – as SMS Low Yen Ling mentioned – RedeemSG, which all of us here currently use. We are very grateful to all of you for participating and continuing to develop your products.

I noticed that quite a few teams decided to work on supporting and caring for the vulnerable communities, such as the elderly and their caregivers, lower income families and people with disabilities and the homeless. We also have a team of passionate animal lovers who are tackling the issue of monitoring and caring for community cats within the neighbourhood. Many of these teams have worked closely with PA’s Community Innovation Taskforces to interview residents and test solutions with real users in the community. This is what we want to see – where technology doesn’t divide or further isolate us; but bring people together, and make our lives better.

Some people may say that hackathons are only for the geeks, tech professionals, or students from computer science. I’m very happy to see that some of you here are not from those sectors only. I met some of you who are social workers, and some from healthcare. Again, that’s really remarkable because some of you may have come into this not knowing the technology as well as others.

I hope that all of you here managed to learn more about technology along the way – learnt more about AI, user testing, etc. When you go back to the sector that you came from, please drive digital transformation wherever you are, and help your organisations adopt some of these new products and new technologies.

This is the closing address, but things do not end here. For the top 5 winning teams, we are taking them to the next phase with OGP's Build for Good Accelerator programme, where they will receive funding support, further mentorship, and access to partnership networks. For the 1 or 2 teams that I will work with personally, I look forward to working closely with you. I do have a lot of energy to bring these products and ideas into the community, and I look forward to working with more of you.

Over the next eight weeks, the winning teams will refine their solutions, run pilots, and launch solutions to better serve the communities (they identified).

Whether you are coming in here as a citizen builder, mentor, volunteer or user-tester, I thank you all for being on this journey for good together with us, and in driving the change that we believe in. I encourage you to continue developing your ideas and finding ways to serve our community. This is truly just the beginning of your journey in creating positive change.

Have a good weekend ahead, everybody! Thank you very much.