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Hack for Public Good
Jobs & Skills

Whine

1 February 2024

Empowering change by crowdsourcing issues and solutions from public officers

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Problem

The typical public officer fears speaking up, is siloed in an agency, and is content with the status quo. As a result, inefficient systems, duplicated solutions, and suboptimal practices proliferate. 

Modeled after community platforms like Kaggle and Stackoverflow, Whine encourages public officers to surface problems so we can crowdsource issues and solutions (tech and/ or otherwise) while also empowering admins to act on authentic concerns. 

Solution

Whine operates on the premise of problem validation ('whining' + upvoting to better identify issues that matter) and crowdsolving (admins typically have no reason whatsoever to reinvent the wheel):

  • Data and knowledge sharing: Whine loads past problem-solution pairs from OGP hackathons as well as agency-facing sprints (e.g. HealthTech Sprint, Public Service Sprint) which serve as points of reference for other hackathon organizers and participants in public service. Beyond OGP-related content, we are also working with Centre for Healthcare Innovation (CHI) as well as Institute of Public Administration & Management of Civil Service College (CSC) to import domain-specific problems/ solutions into our database.

  • Semantic search: As the number of problem statements on the platform increases, we want to minimize duplicate effort in crafting the same problems/solutions. Semantic search applies at the point of problem creation so officers can arrive at solutions faster.

  • Events: Beyond just contributing problems online, Whine encourages contributors to show up to offline events/ hackathons (e.g. Hack for Public Good) so officers take greater ownership and show-up to try to solve their problems.

  • Leaderboard: Whine actively tracks and acknowledges community contributors with a leaderboard - we are considering additional perks such as additional in-app and offline privileges to affirm constructive participation. 

Check out our prototype and see slides on Google Slides.

What is Whine? A public officer-driven approach to problem validation and solutioning
Key metric of whine: solutions paired with problems

Usage

We are working on pilots with teams in:

  • Civil Service College (CSC), specifically Institute of Public Administration and Management

  • SGHackitRx'24 - a hackathon involving healthcare professionals across all 3 healthcare clusters

Created by Kok Seng and Kahhow

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