Have an innovative idea that can solve pressing societal issues in Singapore, but facing tech issues? Well, that's where @better.sg comes into the picture. Helmed by volunteer-turned-CEO Lewis Liu, the #techforgood charity aims to make a difference through technology and their wide pool of volunteers made up of tech enthusiasts and professionals.
Find out how Lewis’ passion for bringing people together shaped his journey to power impactful tech solutions.
Watch more: https://www.asiaone.com/video
Find out how Lewis’ passion for bringing people together shaped his journey to power impactful tech solutions.
Watch more: https://www.asiaone.com/video
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LearningTranscript
00:00Improv is really fun.
00:04Take everything off.
00:06Everything?
00:07Including your hair.
00:08And I thought improv was a useful skill to have.
00:11Just to build my confidence.
00:13I thought that it could help me with my facilitation skills.
00:16Are you okay?
00:18It's okay, it's okay.
00:20It's just that it's a bit too tight.
00:22So, it always ends up...
00:26So in the work that I do,
00:27I have to help facilitate conversations.
00:30One of the key principles around improv
00:32is really to listen to your partner
00:34and support their ideas.
00:35Which is precisely what facilitation is about.
00:38It's to help to generate conversation.
00:43Throughout my life,
00:44I would describe myself as a curious individual.
00:47So I like to ask a lot of questions.
00:52As a society,
00:53there is still quite a long way for us to go
00:56to have a genuine conversation.
00:59So I would say that
01:01across the 10 years of my career,
01:04I've been moving across all three sectors.
01:06So half the time was spent actually working in the government.
01:09And that's where I started off.
01:11And later across the years,
01:13my role then was more about helping
01:16organisations to engage their stakeholders.
01:19Whether as citizens, private sector or NGOs.
01:23I think working in the government
01:25and actually big organisations
01:27is that the issues that you look at
01:29tend to be more complex.
01:34In Better.sg,
01:35the conversations that we have,
01:37it's a bit more at a personal level.
01:42Better.sg is a Tech for Good charity organisation.
01:46What this means is that
01:47we have about 2,000 plus volunteers
01:50who help to advance the Tech for Good agenda.
01:52We saw that there was a gap in talent and expertise
01:56in the private sector and in the social impact sector.
02:00So what we do is that then we deploy our volunteers
02:03to support their digital transformation efforts.
02:05And this could be in the form of
02:07helping them to redesign a website
02:09or to help to embed artificial intelligence, AI,
02:12into the work that they do.
02:15So I started Better.sg as a volunteer.
02:18So I helped on this project called 2BU.
02:21The idea around it is that we wanted to build
02:23a turn-based role-playing game
02:25for people to better understand
02:27the aspirations and challenges of the minorities.
02:30The idea behind the game is for you to immerse yourself
02:33and ask yourself,
02:34what would you do if you were this person?
02:37For example, you can then play as a Muslim lady in a class
02:43and then you learn about how is it like being a teacher,
02:46what are the challenges that they might face as a teacher.
02:49You get to learn about the background of the character
02:53and then you have to make certain decisions along the way.
02:57And it's really exciting because
03:00I think it's very uncommon when you see
03:03a group of volunteers coming together to build a game.
03:06And my role was to help to facilitate conversations
03:10with a group of teachers,
03:11a group of healthcare workers, for example,
03:13tease out those stories.
03:14And then we had a team of volunteers
03:16who then helped to craft the actual narrative
03:18and to build the entire game.
03:22I think like most people who start ground-up initiatives,
03:25we started because of a passion.
03:27Yeah, so GoHood is basically a movement
03:31to bring back the kampong spirit.
03:32So there are a few main features in GoHood.
03:34The first feature actually is where people can declutter stuff.
03:37The extra kicker is that
03:39people can actually give to verified beneficiaries.
03:42The other feature actually is
03:44we have a feature that allows social workers
03:47to ask for staff for their beneficiaries.
03:49But we are now doing a more advanced version of that
03:52where we're actually creating a paid-forward marketplace.
03:55It's Blanja.sg, so people can actually donate money
03:59to buy hawker meals.
04:00And it's a big step up from the pen and paper initiative
04:05that happened during COVID
04:07in that now everything is digitised.
04:10At the start, what I thought we needed was funding.
04:14But what I realised along the way is actually
04:17talent and advice is a lot more crucial.
04:21So that's why I think the role Better.sg plays
04:23in terms of bringing in skilled volunteers
04:26is very crucial to avoid a lot of the mistakes
04:29and lessons that people who start ground-up initiatives
04:32may not know.
04:33Yeah, yeah.
04:34So that's what we're trying to do in Better.sg
04:36in that we accept the full range of different types of volunteers
04:40people who are students, people who just graduated
04:44or people who have a lot of experiences.
04:46Beng Guan, I wanted to also talk to you
04:48and ask you your journey so far.
04:50You started Checkmate about two years ago, right?
04:52How has your journey been so far?
04:54The original idea came to me during COVID
04:57because during COVID, there was a lot of this vaccine-related
05:00sort of misinformation floating around WhatsApp and all that.
05:04So I was thinking, okay, why don't we just have a WhatsApp number?
05:08You can send in the messages to them
05:10instead of forwarding to your friends
05:11and then it tells you whether it can be trusted or not.
05:14I think the mission resonated with quite a lot of people.
05:18They joined in.
05:19And after that, it's really been just building the product together, the volunteers.
05:22And now we are also at a point of time where we have to think about scaling.
05:26Basically, scaling is very different from starting.
05:28It's a lot harder.
05:29And because it's so resource-intensive, it's very hard to juggle
05:32all the other kind of commitments and needs that one has when running such a project.
05:38You have a tech role to play, right?
05:40To build the actual tech product.
05:42But at the same time, like you said, there's also the HR role, right?
05:44You try to manage your team of volunteers.
05:46Yeah, correct, correct.
05:48It really resonated with me about trying to juggle different commitments.
05:51So for myself, one of the first few things that started to go off first was improv.
05:56I don't get to practice improv, but I get to apply in the work that I do.
06:01So when I speak to my volunteers
06:04or when I try to run projects and speak to other non-profits and charities,
06:09I think improv as a method of principle, as a way of life, is very useful and important.
06:15When I first started off as a volunteer,
06:18I would just contribute in whatever way I can, and that's about it.
06:22But then now as CEO, I think one of the things that's at the top of my mind
06:25is to make sure that whatever we do is also sustainable.
06:28My skill sets are more in the so-called product development,
06:31as well as the technical side, AI side, right?
06:34If I had to go and figure out all this marketing, UI, UX,
06:39I mean, it's still going to take a lot of my time, right?
06:41I'm not so efficient at doing this type of work.
06:43So by being able to tap on the volunteers
06:45and also at the same time providing them a good experience,
06:48it also helps me to, you know, let me focus my energy on where I'm most effective, I would say.
06:53There's a really pool of advisors and talent to tap on,
06:57which creates capacity for ground-up initiatives.
07:00And BetterSG has helped to attract people who are really passionate
07:04about serving and helping the community.
07:07What I really love about BetterSG is that we really bring people from all walks of life,
07:11regardless whether you're a student or a fresh graduate or a re-starter,
07:15to really come together to learn our expertise,
07:17whether you have a technical background or no technical background,
07:20to really come together to do good for Singapore.
07:27BetterSG