suggestions

Tonight I had some inspiration to share some quick and some longer drawn out thoughts. I want to iterate on them eventually, so I write tonight to pin up today’s churn to return to, another day.

First is a look behind the shoulder to BFG finale. It has been a crushing time, I have wanted to say so much, and yet I have to recognise the time out that everyone deserves- a break well earned and deserved.

Watching the 2.5 hours of playback on livestream, I noticed that we (the teams) had been paid in gold, whether or not we have walked away as “winners” or “losers”. I think the true winners are a better tomorrow, and the real losers are if we give up a great opportunity to make things better than they are today.

1. Scanshield received comments from Mr Shafudin and Ms Yumin, business aspect and tech related queries. The angle that Scanshield has, I believe, is in the business side of links on the internet. I thought the last interjection to answer Ms Yumin’s question of how the team might spend more time developing the product- about focusing on Businesses and their integration to a trusted platform of link identification and risk management. There’s both business and public good value involved, quite an interesting space to occupy. Mr Shafudin’s question about the team’s toughest challenge was answered with the limitations of time in the month long hackathon.
2. Safespace received a question from the crowd - about the safety around youths and topics surrounding suicide and other things that leads to spiraling. NGOs and counseling services cited here, providing an area for expert bodies to move in for scale. Minister Low asked about the potentials of the product, and markers of success. The answers provided by Sean and Tyler surrounded data surveying and user adoption. I may have missed the point of how the product can indicate levels of improvement in users, and also how much interaction is needed before they can exit with a better state of mind- than with more problems. This was a tough and long question, its fair that not all of it was answered in the allotted 2 minutes for Qs. The main theme here is platform safety and direction that its users will be led to.
3. Sustainabite received Mr Randy’s feedback on the narrative of the product facing young people then questioning how the scale of food waste can be addressed by a focus on young adults. Sandy responded with insights from user interviews and their motivations which led to the product’s direction of including an audience both interested and uninterested solely on sustainability in food produce. One area the users may be interested in is supporting local produce makers and another is the space of exploring recipes in readily prepared ingredients. Mr Hongyi then asked about operations and payments, which Benjy took- explaining how the orders are taken, processed and brought to the end process. The payments were an interesting take, I think the team could have answered it with more time on the clock- this was a big stake to pass up!
4. InteractSG had Max on stage to answer a question fielded from the audience. He responded with the platform’s safety notice, and community policing to keep underage users out. Policy was one part of the answer. The latter half of his answer included the hailing of a public space- a shared space. Much of the risk was considered as limited, but I believe the main obstacle standing in interactSG’s way is about protecting its users and the lengths the community elders must uphold in order to signal for the rest of its users to first understand the severity of safe spaces and consequences behind its breaches, then secondly to promote healthy boundaries in interactions between users. To have high confidence is not to cite low risks, but to address not any, but all possible avenues of bad players. Still, Max handled the answering well without wavering and I think that confidence stands up, at least for the time on stage.
5. Next is Mediclear, but I’ll comment tomorrow.

Also wanted to end with a fancy idea I had to make visualisations of books read, reviewed, and the dates on all of those data points. Maybe include a review after three passes- with an initial introduction to a book after the first read.

Would be cool.

Ok- signing off,