In conjunction with their 21st anniversary, the Singapore Government’s Feedback Unit launched Reach. This included new features, most noticeably an avenue for citizens to blog about issues.
To start off, I think getting a new name (although I think the government should stop the incessant creation of acronyms) was a great move for the Feedback Unit. Having the “FU” solicit citizen feedback is irony that borders a little too close to the truth for some people.
Let’s look at the blogging functions shall we?
First stop, registration.
You get a bit of the Orwellian jitters when ethnicity, marital status, highest educational qualifications and personal income are mandatory fields. These are for the collation of demographical statistics and not identification, because your IC and telephone number is also a mandatory field. People are likely to be put off by this invasion of privacy, but for the sake of giving you this review, I’ll stick my neck in there.
The Terms and Conditions and Privacy Statement are quite plain vanilla - nothing in there about sending commandos to your house should you misspell a Minister’s name.
Usability Problems: Passwords need to be at least 8 characters long, and you’ll only be notified after you try submitting your dinky hotmail account password. Also, after registration, you’re supposed to log in with your “user name”, but you didn’t get to specify one during registration. It’s your IC number, and you’ll be hence identified by your first name.
Technical Doodilidoo
It is good to see that the blog engine has most of the standard features such as automatic trackback discovery, though I’m left wondering whether “syndicate this blog” means it’ll create an RSS feed for the blog. The creation of categories is also oddly labeled as “add child blog”.
Reach
Open to members of the public, the website has only solicited 2 blog entries prior to mine. It will not be the interface’s ease of use, or the technical features that will draw Singapore citizens to this site. I believe the people will only come if this is an avenue in which their views are heard and concerns addressed.
It will be interesting to see what happens to the inaugural “controversial” post.
Comments
I seriously wonder who in the right mind will sign up for this? Even for legitimate reasons, it seems to invite a whole host of privacy issues over signing up with say Wordpress.com or Blogger.com.
Not only are these blog systems easier to sign up with, they are also liberal in their terms and agreement on how they protect and respect the privacy of individuals.
Anyone can easily post Singapore-related issues on their own individual blog, so why waste our tax dollars reinventing the wheel?
Posted by: Kevin | October 31, 2006 10:34 AM
The blogosphere is already filled with thousands of blogs and REACH wants these bloggers to come over to their server because…..
All it takes REACH staff is to open up their web browser, go to technorati or google and start searching for blogs.
How about going to the intelligent Singaporean and other noteworthy blogs or may I dare say visit sammyboy forums?
All the feedback they want is here. Even Seah Chiang Nee uses blogs to write about current issues which get published in the mainstream media.
Another wasteful exercise of taxpayers money. Reinventing the wheel when blogger, live journal etc are already providing FREE blog hosting for the myriad Singaporean blog scene.
Posted by: rhys | October 31, 2006 12:06 PM
Kevin, I think there’s a “market” for a blogging space which the government will actively listen to. There are bloggers out there who blog about national policy hoping never to get “caught”, and then there are citizens who really want to be heard. I think Reach can be that space, provided they prove to citizens that the feedback is heard and acted upon.
Rhys, you are absolutely right in that the Singapore government needs to be a lot more information-savvy and tune in, if not participate, in online conversations. I can attest to the fact that they are moving towards getting themselves y2k certified, but it might take a while.
Posted by: Lucian | October 31, 2006 3:37 PM
* Constructive mode ON *
I think what I’m getting at is whether the govt thinks of blogs as cure all end all.
While I understand the need for a formal platform to address citizens’ concerns, the approach is still too draconian and clearly shows how the Singapore government still does not understand the way the social web works. In other words, I believe that we can’t expect anyone to come to us, we have to go to them.
Perhaps an idea would be to formalize what rhys mentioned. While we can’t expect the government to go through every blog with a “Singapore” technorati tag , perhaps what we could do is to allow bloggers to participate from where they currently are by submitting posts which they want the government to review with a formal technorati tag, e.g. “forsingapore”.
Adding an aggregator to REACH would allow the govt to see which new posts they have been invited to review and possibly reply via blog comment. While there is the potential for spam or abuse, maybe a delayed/review aggregator could be made which allows clean posts to be displayed.
What do you think?
Posted by: Kevin | November 3, 2006 5:16 AM
Kevin: why are you surprised? The gahmen wants everything done THEIR way. :)
Posted by: Elia Diodati | November 3, 2006 7:07 AM
Kevin, I do not doubt that the government is already monitoring conversations on the blogosphere.
I can’t say I totally understand the need to build a new blogging platform - I’m just hoping they didn’t spend too much of our money doing it.
The idea of Reach being an aggregator of news on the Singapore government wouldn’t really fly, largely because “clean” posts will no longer exist after rather paranoid scholars are done hallucinating over which posts could possibly stray over OB markers. Not to mention comments to posts.
Too much effort would be spent watching their own shadows.
Posted by: Lucian | November 3, 2006 11:36 PM