 Again, with introductions, welcome to the SOAS Southeast Asian Seminars. This is one of our midday seminars that we hold earlier in the UK time, so we can have more of a Southeast Asian audience. With me today, or with us today, is Dr. Orlando Woods, who's an Associate Professor of Geography and Lee Kong Chung Fellow at the College of Integrative Studies, Singapore Management University. He's published more than 70 journal articles, books, book chapters on topics related to religion, urban culture, smart cities, and digital transformation in South and Southeast Asia. He holds the BA and PhD in geography from University College London and the National University of Singapore respectively. And he'll be talking today about the world being and provincializing Singapore as a smart nation. We'll hold questions for the very end if you can add your questions into the Q&A box and then I will field them to the speaker again. I'd like to invite you to speak now, Dr. Woods. Thanks a lot, Mike, and thank you everyone for taking this hour out of your precious lunchtime to listen to me talk a little bit about Singapore. I'm delighted to be talking to you guys as SOAS. I don't know whether you're students or faculty or staff or whatever it may be. But as Mike mentioned, I did my undergraduate degree at UCL, so obviously right next to where you guys are based. So I've spent many a very happy evening at your student union and you know, SOAS is a very important place in my heart. Okay, let me just share my screen. Okay, you should be able to see a nice, bright, technicolor slide. Yep, okay. Right, okay, so welcome to Singapore. I'm in Singapore and it's absolutely miserable here today. What I want to talk to you about this evening, my time, midday, your time, is some research that I've been working on for about the past six or seven years or so, which is looking at the idea of the smart city. In Singapore we call it the smart nation. Over the past six years I've been working pretty much just on Singapore as a case study, but actually recently, just last year, the middle of last year, I got a decent-sized grant to extend this research and actually look at Singapore's place in the region and the development of smart cities throughout Southeast Asia. So if you want, I can talk a little bit more about that, seeing as some of you may be specialists in different Southeast Asian countries, not necessarily Singapore. I also understand that none of you, or my assumption, I should say, is that none of you here are really sort of urban studies specialists or experts, you're more sort of interested in region and maybe have specific specialisms in anthropology or politics or history or whatever it may be. And so as a result of that, I've positioned this talk, so it's kind of what I'm going to do is basically just present empirical data and then talk through some of the ramifications of the findings that way. So I'm not going to go very heavy on you, I'm going to more present the empirical case about Singapore as a smart nation and the world and provincialising relationships. Okay, I understand I've got, well, the session is like an hour of which I plan to speak for about 45 minutes, maybe about 15 minutes in Q&A. I will tell you now, I always overrun, so if I start speeding up aggressively towards the end and flying through things, this is just my style. So if they take it personally, it's just me, I apologise for that sometimes. Okay, so to get started, I want to show you this image here. Usually when I give this presentation, I ask people two questions, if I'm giving it live, I ask everyone two questions, one is who is this man and the second is what is he doing or what do you think he's doing? For those of you that know a little bit about Singapore, I'll answer those questions for you, so we don't have to take these all-call silences and stuff. I'll answer those two questions for you. So for those of you that know a little bit about Singapore, you will immediately recognise this man as Nisi N. Moon. He is the son, the eldest son of our founding Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew. He's the current incumbent Prime Minister of Singapore and so he's quite an important guy, he's our head of state, he's our prime minister. So this is him in his office, happily tapping away at his laptop and smiling for some reason. And so the second question I asked him, what is he doing? He's actually coding, he's writing C++ scripts and what he's doing is he's developing a programme which is called Sudoku Solver and so I'm sure many of you know the sort of number puzzles, Sudoku where you have the numbers in boxes and rows and lines and stuff like that. And so what he did is he actually created this computer programme where we would solve Sudoku puzzles for you. What he did is he developed this programme and then he put the source code on his Facebook page to share it with anybody who is interested in what he does. So why I'm sort of starting with this and why I'm sharing it with you is because this to me is very much symptomatic of what Singapore as a smart nation, as a smart city is all about, which is the guy at the very top of the head of government being deeply personally invested in technology and being technology literate. And that whole ethos, that mindset is cascading down from the very top to many, not most, many echelons of society as well. You can ask in the UK, Rishi Sunak, I don't know, does he know how to code with the source codes on his Facebook page? I don't know, maybe he does. But certainly, I think in most countries, most cities around the world, this is quite a unique thing. And so it sort of sets the Singapore case apart from the very house. OK, so bear that in mind. I'll show you this image again a little bit later. Let me just quickly introduce the projects that this specific presentation stems from. So this is actually from a project which is called Smart Cities in Global Comparative Perspective, World Day in Conventionalising Relationships. It's very generously funded by Shirk, which is for those of you that do collaborate with people in Canada or know anything about Canada, can we have funding landscape? This is quite a common grant. The project team is not just myself, but I've been working on this with two colleagues, one from SMU Professor Nili Khan and another colleague from NUS Professor Tim Bernal. So this is this is the most recent project that we've been working on. We did a bunch of interviews, even 31 interviews from about I think it was twenty nine until twenty, twenty one. So over a two year period, basically over the COVID period. So most of the interviews we did were in the Zoom. We interviewed 31 people from both the public and private sectors. What was maybe the unique of our sample is that we have the access to some incredibly senior people. So what arguably the interview that I'm raised out of is we actually interviewed the CEO of DBS Bank. So for those of you that know anything about banks in South East Asia, Hong Kong as well, one of the biggest banks is DBS, the Development Bank of Singapore. So we actually interviewed the CEO of DBS, which is pretty incredible kind of access and insights that he could provide. Why you might be thinking about why why why is the bank like projects about smart business and that is, you know, arguably the question could apply to any private sector in the state called why bother me to be in there? Why do you just need to be government? Well, those of you that know anything about Singapore, the public private distinction is quite blurred and we do have a lot of organizations which sort of straddled both the weird and wonderful ways. And DBS is a good example of that. I mean, it's Singapore's largest tank, but its majority shareholder is actually Temasek, which is Singapore's social and welfare. Yeah, and so in some of the examples of the organizations that we spoke to, GovTech and SMDGO, I'll explain later what these organizations are and for their integral government agencies for realizing or for implementing smart system related projects. So that's the project that this presentation is building on. As I said, since the middle of last year, I've received another grant to actually take this, extend this project out to the region. And so we're looking at my research team and I are looking at not just Singapore, but also Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam and looking at Singapore's role in the development of smart cities in these other cities throughout Southeast Asia. So as I said, I'm happy to talk a bit more about that in the Q&A. Anyone else any interest? OK, quickly, let me just this is just to sort of show that I am taking this seriously academically. What I'm going to show you today is just basically but there are also three papers so far that have come out of this project. One of them is under revision. Two of them are on the first round review. Obviously, I'm hoping that all of them will eventually get published. I'm just going to give you the title just so you have an idea of what the kind of theoretical contributions we're making through this work. So the first one is called this one's actually under revision right now in sourcing the smart city, assembling an idea technical ecosystem of skills, talents and mindfulness in Singapore. It's actually a lot of the themes in this paper I've been touching on later today. The second one is by fakers. It's the most sort of the innovative and it's looking at actually Singapore's island geography and the uniqueness of its island geography, obviously, as a geography about some of the sites mean. And so looking at actually this idea of island platforms, the island is a platform and the hyperterrestrialization of Singapore's smart system state quite a sexitiser like if you agree that papers on their review first round review right now. And then the final one is about the state led platformization of financial services, this idea of correctionist ecosystems and the expensive projects of smartness in Singapore. Again, I will write at the end. I'll give a very quick sort of case study of what I mean by this idea of the platformization of financial services, which is again, quite a thing that's quite unique to Singapore. State led platformization. OK, so those are so far those are the kind of more theoretical published outputs that are in the pipeline to come out. And a lot of the data that I'll be presenting to you, they they into each of these papers. OK, what I want to talk to you about today are three things. Firstly, the role of centralization importance of centralization in realising this nonsense in Singapore. Second, the role of insulting. And as I said, the first paper that's under the vision that's very much about this idea of insulting. And then thirdly, this idea of reimagining reimagining what smartness might mean, what a smart system might mean. And that speaks to the kind of the third paper that's under the vision. So first of all, this idea of centralization. OK, I'm going to start by by probably patronising and not to be you, which is showing you this map. So if any of you don't know, this is what Singapore looks like. This is a map of Singapore. We are an island. We are a tiny island. We measure about 50 kilometres across the east to west, about 50 kilometres north of the south, about 27 kilometres. Our landmass is about 730 kilometres squared, although it's always growing because we're always cleaning land back from the sea. But we're tiny, we're tiny, we're insignificant. But that gives us a lot of advantages when it comes to realising what it means to be a smart city. I should also say that we're located just to the south of Peninsular Malaysia. So it's just across the waterway there to the north, that's Malaysia. And then Indonesian islands surround us to the south, to the west. We're surrounded by the countries. But we are Singapore, on the island, within the Malay archipelago region. So why am I showing you this? Why am I sort of impressing upon you the importance of Singapore's island geography and its small size? Well, these are two fundamental characteristics that actually lend themselves huge advantages to realising where we're at the smart nation. And how we think about these is in terms of versical and horizontal integration. So in terms of horizontal integration, what we're talking about here is how different government departments become, it's very easy for them to become very well integrated because they're so small. Because a lot of what you do, whether it's planning road, or planning housing, or planning electricity pipelines, or water pipelines, or whatever else it may be, they're all sort of talking to each other all the time because we're so dense and everything is sort of collapsed on top of each other. But it actually creates a lot of advantages because if one ministry or agency or organisation is doing something by default, almost, they have to be doing it's in conversation with other ministries or agencies or organisations. They cannot do it in isolation of each other. Think about much bigger countries, which is arguably the case for any other country in the world, which they can do that. Although the business may have the pressure of density, the pressure of crowding, and you do not necessarily have to operate or interoperate together. We see many more cases of organisations working in silence. And so in terms of harnessing the benefits of digital technology, which is what smart cities are all about, actually, the importance is this idea of data silence, right? And so that's one of the main barriers to realisation of urban smartness in many, many systems around the world, is their data is silent and it's not shared between departments. And it's not shared within organisations and people listen to very territorial about it. Not so in Singapore because of this idea of horizontal integration, we have a very shared data landscape where actually this data that's being produced and where the value, the potential value of digital technologies is maximised massively. That's one thing, that's sort of a function of this small compact size through island job. The second characteristic that I mentioned just now is this idea of vertical integration, right? So this is, I don't know if it's more important, it's equally as important as I was into the integration, but this is speaking to the idea that in Singapore, we only have one layer of government, so we are a city state, right? So you've got the national level and then you've got the urban city level, they are one and the same thing, right? We do not have multiple layers of government. We might have a local council, a municipal urban government, you know, the city of London or whatever it may be, on top of that may be a regional government, on top of that the national government. And at each of those layers, you've got various levels in those degrees of disconnect and, you know, political infighting and people not talking to each other and decisions getting lost in translation and all this kind of stuff. There's a huge amount of complexity that comes with having a heavily stacked political view of the city. Again, this is simply a virtue of our small size, we only need one layer of government, we'll be completely in a position to have multiple subnets, but it's also a huge advantage because we have the centralization of decision making. Again, think back to that picture I showed you right in the beginning, where our head of state, Lisa and Moon, is the guy coding, is the guy sort of playing with those technologies, and that is lost very quickly permeates down to all layers of government, it does not get lost in the upper echelons of decision making. People say that. Okay, so as I said, I'm patronizing you with this map, but hopefully it provides a little bit of sort of more fundamental understanding as to why Singapore is a paradigmatic, successful case study of a smart system. So these are just some data, some quotes to support what I've just said. So on the left as you look at the screen, this is the permanent secretary of SMBG. Again, I will explain what these organizations are, I think next slide. So what he says is that when I talk to other countries where they have federal level, provincial level, county level, city level, these different levels of government, he has difficulties understanding how people navigate, we call five layers of government, how responsibilities and power are spread out, these different levels of government. So for them, smart cities are essentially municipal services, very localized, they do not have that national level vision or ideology behind them. And on the right as you look at the screen, this is the CEO of DBS saying, we're small enough so that we can bring everyone together. Other countries can't do that. If you're 200 million people, it's very hard. We're a 5 million person country, we've got a very progressive public sector, we can actually get people to work together. That idea of horizontal integration, getting different ministries, different agencies to overcome the organizational silos and barriers and to actually work together to realize projects. Okay, so what I want to argue is that actually in academic literature on the smart city, it's actually very useful. It's only in terms of academic circles, we've only really been talking about the smart city for about the past 10 years or so. This is largely a response to movements in the private sector where companies like IBM and Cisco, Siemens, Natterny, Google and Amazon Web Services and players like that, when they started to get in, they started to realize that actually the city was a huge market and smart city solutions is a huge market for them, so it's a lot of potential. So what they did is they started to develop and package all these smart city solutions and they made it a thing, right? And they sort of went in there and tried to sell these things to governance around the world. So it's only in the past 10 years that academics have caught on to this and started to address and to develop this discourse around the smart city. But what I want to argue is actually in Singapore, we have what I call the long tail of smartness. So it goes back a very, very long time, okay? If you ask me, I would actually, my sort of genealogical approach, I would actually trace it back to 1981, right? That's nearly, well, 40 years, over 40 years ago, with the formation of a national computer board, right? This is where the national level we, the government, recognize that the computer's technology is the future, the future of development. And so actually established a board to ensure that we have the computer infrastructure and everything else in place for our society, our economy to be technologically progressed. So arguably in my mind, that's when this idea of smartness in forming a smart city action started over 40 years ago. Five years after that, we had what's called the national IT master plans. This is a national plan to, again, it's all about infrastructure and development and building, putting the sort of mechanisms in place so that the whole city will be connected up and wired and you will not have things like the internet or broadband black spots, which obviously even in the UK are still a problem. We've got a whole host of countries where it can be difficult to gain internet access. So this was a problem that was sort of preempted many years ago, again, nearly 40 years ago, with the first IT master plan. Jump forward, you know, about 28 years or so, and we've actually got the official launch of the smart nation. You see, this is when 2014, this is when the government actually, you could say jumped on the smart city bandwagon and actually packaged Singapore as a smart city and called it a smart nation. So this is when the whole idea of a smart nation, which if you think about it as being a city state, as being having one day of government or that kind of stuff, it actually makes sense. So this is when the actual smart nation, not the smart city, the smart nation was launched and became a thing in the public consciousness. And then after that, we had the formation of an organization called Goptic. Next slide, I promise. I know I said next slide about two slides ago, but I think it really is the next slide that I'll explain what Goptic is. And then in 2017, we had the formation of SMUGA. These are two political units which are integral to the realization of Singapore as a smart nation. So this is the kind of organization chart to show you how the government in Singapore was structured to realize the smart nation, to realize the smart nation. So at the top there, that's some gray triangles just on top of the blue box. That's the prime minister's office, right? That's where VCN, NINSIX, that's where there's the most senior cabinet people sits. That's where all the highest level of decision-making happens up there. What is important is that immediately below that, I'm reporting into the prime minister's office are these two organizations that I've been talking about. On the left-hand side, there's a little screen. That's where we've got SMDGO that stands for the Smart Nation and Digital Governance Office. This is basically the branch of government that deals with policy, right? They do all the, they put the plans in place, they develop the policies, they basically secure the funding, all that kind of stuff. They look after the politics, the business side of politics to get what needs to be done in order for the smart city to be realized. On the other side, you've got this organization called the Government Technology Agency, or GUTEC, right? This is essentially, it's like a mini Google within government, right? So this is, it's a government body, it's a government's an agency, but it's run, it's designed, its whole purpose is to actually build technology, right? So this is start mostly by engineers, data scientists, people, you know, computer scientists, people that have very technical skills and they can actually build technology, right? And this is really important because in many other cities around the world, they do not have that internal capability. And so what do they have to do? They have to outsource these decisions, these projects to the private sector, what's the organizations that do have the capabilities, right? As in Singapore, we actually have that within the government structure itself. So either they're building the actual solutions for technologies themselves, or if they need to, you know, they don't have the capacity, they need to go out to the private sector, they actually treat the private sector as equals, right? So they co-develop solutions together. So it's not just where we'll pay you a bunch of money and you can develop this platform to do whatever you want it to do, right? It's, we will develop this platform together as a public private kind of partnership. And again, I will give you, I'll give you an example of exactly what I mean by this. This is very important. We've got these two critical agencies sitting right underneath the Prime Minister's office, reporting into the Prime Minister's office. So ensuring that the whole ideology, the whole sort of vision of the smart nation escapes down from the very top of government. It doesn't just happen that it's sort of very local level, when you've got issues, when you've got issues of, you know, policy people getting in the way, all this kind of stuff that actually block initiatives from realising their maximum potential. So altogether, this is what I mean by the centralised logic of smartness in Singapore. This idea of a horizontal and vertical integration, this government structure, this, you know, having as our head of state, you know, somebody who's very technologically savvy, all these ideas lend themselves to the notion that the smartness is very centralised in Singapore. Yeah. So again, some more quotes from our interview. So on the left-hand side here, again, we've got the permanent subpoena of SMDGO. Now we all know what SMDGO is. Thank you. As he said, our Prime Minister is very technologically savvy. He claims he's our greatest mystery shopper. He doesn't just have a vision, he actually goes down into many great details of how technology is used by people. He's always been a forefront of what it seems to use technology well. And then on the other side, on the right-hand side, we've got the founding CEO of GovTech, saying that she was the founding CEO of the lady. And she said that it actually centralises our computerisation function. So from GovTech, you have one entity that provides the CIOs, the Chief Information Officers, the 60-plus ministries and agencies. So again, we've got those ideas of centralisation coming through very strongly, where all the CIOs, they're not competing against each other within different agencies and ministries. They all come from one, and they're seconded out to different branches of the government so that they can all work together in an integrated way, potentially. And this is what GovTech looks like. Yeah, I told you that it was like a mini-Google within governments. I don't know, I've been into a few governments' offices in the UK. I've been into a few in Singapore. I've never actually been to GovTech. As I said, when we were doing this research, most of it was during Covid, so most of the interviews were actually done online. And so I've never been here, but I trust that it actually looks like this. But this is not what the standard government office looks like in Singapore, I've promised you that. Just last week, I gave a different presentation to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in their offices, and it is not like this at all. There's cubicles, it's very grey and blue, and everyone went into the white shirts and ties and black trousers, they tucked in and nicely cleaned her. Typical sort of government machinery of the state kind of looking for it. GovTech is designed to be different. It's meant to be different. It's meant to be a place, not that isn't sort of the typical state apparatus of bureaucracy, decision-making, things that can be really slowly and sort of very hierarchical and so on and so forth. GovTech is meant to be like a start-up. It's meant to be a patch-out. It's meant to be risk. It's meant to embrace risk. It's meant to be a much better hierarchy. It's meant to give people, engineers, the freedom that they need to experiment and to do their jobs well. So it goes beyond just the aesthetics of what it obviously looks like. It's actually sort of meant to integrate this ethos of the GovTech term into the state, into the government's good side. Again, I will, in the next class of this presentation, I'll ask you to give some more concrete examples of what I'm going to do. So this is the system of engineering. Quite a, quite a, it's a venturi-level guy. I think there's a fresh graduate just talking about GovTech, right? So what he says, there are lots of people that are attracted to the start-up culture of GovTech. Start-up branding the GovTech past and therefore we're able to attract the right people with the skills they're needed but also the interest to change them. If you're housed under a very bureaucratic organization, they might not be able to effectively change that they want to and they're dissatisfied. They end up leaving, right? But GovTech, by design, is meant to be different from the rest of the government. Okay, that's the first part. Let me now turn to the second part which is looking at this idea of in-source, right? And this is the idea that actually having a GovTech within the Singapore government is not just a merge of pure organically, right? It actually takes a lot of efforts and a lot of planning and a lot of sort of strategic thinking to make it what it is to actually create this idea of GovTech, of Google within the Singapore government. And the logic on which this is based is this idea of in-source, bringing in the talent we need to from the Bible center, from overseas, in the Singapore government. So I'll show you what I mean by this, this idea of in-source. Again, this why this is noble, why this is interesting is because it basically lifts on its head the whole logic or premise on which many smart systems around the world are based, which is the logic of the outsourcing, which is governments, public sector organizations are not meant to be innovative. They're not meant to be able to do tech. They're not meant to do all this stuff until they happen to the private sector. They outsource projects to the private sector. But it's interesting with your, it's the opposite, not the solution. So they've embraced this model because outsourcing is inherently a very risky model. You're looking at two entities where their motivations and the incentive structures are very much misaligned, right? I mean, for the governments, you're looking at something which is looking at civic good and the good of society and the people and those sorts of things. With private sector, if your outsourcing is the private sector, they're essentially profit-based. So you've got this sort of misaligned. So these are just two quotes of showing you the risks of outsourcing. So on the left here, the current secretary of the S&GTO, and what he's saying is that there's a risk of not, if you don't have the technological, the capacity of any organization, it's incredibly risky talking to private sector vendors. So as he says, the highlighted part is we start to invest a lot more in ICTs and start systems. We know what we're talking about. We can hold the vendors to do a good job. On the right there, even within DDS, which is a private sector organization, the CIO, actually the former CIO, what he said is that nobody's going, if you're going down this outsourcing level, nobody is going to innovate the point. If fundamentally you want to become a digital company, you need to create that DNA, the technology DNA within DDS. You need to bring people in to drive this change from the vendors. So there's a few ways in which GovTech goes about doing this, about things such as talent, right? So the sort of the images to the left of the screen, they show you various programs that they've put in place. So the middle one there, technology to CIO program, this is basically the graduate scheme for computer scientists in Singapore. What's more interesting is the ones in the bottom, in the bottom left there, which is actually a smart nation fellowship, and I'll explain a little bit more about that. For what the voice on the right says, this is from the CEO of GovTech, is that actually if you're looking for real tech people in Singapore, there's very lots of bindings. They're not going to take their business development, project management, consulting, and all that. They're not going to real tech people. Because in Singapore for many decades, if you wanted to be a tech person and you wanted to build your career and to actually advance your career, you actually needed to move out of technology and use more generic business functions. What he says is that if you want to be real tech, you're likely to end up with Google's and Facebook's sort of coming back. So as a result of that, this is what they would do. This is what the government would do. So you'll recognize the man in the white shirt here is VCN learning department minister. This is him actually in Silicon Valley talking to a bunch of Singaporeans that work there for big tech companies, telling them about what they're doing in terms of the smart nation, inviting them to come back and work with GovTech. They want to do something different, but they want to change in their world. So he's arguably leading these kind of recruitment efforts to try and get Singaporeans to actually who are working in sort of big tech in the US and in other countries around the world to actually come back to Singapore and to come and work with GovTech. So this is one of the programs that I briefly mentioned a couple of slides ago. It's this idea of the smart nation fellowship program. So this is where people that are working in the private sector or working in any other organization, start up to whatever, not in GovTech, they can actually take a fellowship and spend a few months or however long it is to work in GovTech and actually get a feel of what it's all about. So this is a quote from a, he was a former smart nation fellow. So he did this fellowship, and then he actually realized that this is something that's of interest to him and he actually joined full time and became a distinguished engineer. So what he said is that I'm interested in smart nation but also modernizing government technology. That was what interested him originally, that kind of civic tech and all those sorts of things. He wanted to contribute back. He wanted to do something that actually hasn't come back. Rather than just sort of being profit-motivated, wanting money to make money, he actually wanted to do something that gave back to society. What's interesting is that this guy, he's not Singapore, he's actually Australian. So this is an Australian guy wanting to give back. He won't do it in Australia because of the centralization factors of Singapore and Australia, you don't have that. So not to do it in Australia because you wouldn't be able to realize that vision, that motivation for it to have, but to do it in Singapore as well. So this is him again on the left-hand side. What he says is that Singapore is a little bit of an example in some ways of how a smart nation can be run. As far as back in Australia, I've never considered working through governments. I've got good friends who work in Australia in that sense and the government's named technology and this is enlightened, right? Things cannot get done. They do not have a government equivalent organization. So they cannot affect the change that they would want to in Australia. Whereas in Singapore, the way the government is set up, the way that the smart city, the smart nation is set up, they can actually do that. The quotes on the right, these are just from a bunch of relatively new sort of graduate level or very early career trainees into government saying, why I've included them here. So they kind of give you a sense of the ethos of young Singaporeans. So all of them say, never being driven for profit and interesting tech, the good in helping for the citizens. We all work for Singapore. We're trying to bring as much value as we can to Singapore's citizens. So beyond just insourcing talent, tech skills, tech talents, people need to do these jobs. What's also happening is that we're insourcing this idea of civic mindedness, people in government, developing these solutions that are designed to help their fellow citizens as best they can. Again, not something that necessarily gets will even outsource it more. Okay, third part, I'm mindful of time. I've got about seven minutes left before we hit 45. So I think I'm actually in pretty good shape in moderating myself quite well. So hopefully I won't need to speed up too much. But this is the final part of the presentation. Just looking at this idea of how we might be reimagining the idea of the smart city through an understanding of the Singapore case. So what we're seeing as a result of centralization, first thing I talked about, as a result of influencing the second thing I thought sort of started. What we're seeing is this is a case study, is a context in which the public sector is really leading innovation. There's not something that's outsourced, there's not something that comes from the private sector. There's something that's driven by the government, by the public sector. But what the CEO of GovTech is saying is that, this is when they do actually partner with industry to develop projects. It's that through that partnership there's a transfer of skills on both sides. And that helps to raise the bar in the overall technical capabilities of the workplace. And then going further, the CEO also says that GovTech allows companies to build on our infrastructure. And in fact, they extend our infrastructure. When you think about it, one of the values of the government is that we create a very trusted environment. The third part of which competitors will work with, we're working with, on their own, they probably wouldn't want to because of data sharing with some trustee over there. So we have a powerful trusted convening role to bring people together and that extends to the private sector policy. So this sort of last quote is on the right of the screen. This is what I'm getting at when I talk about this idea of state-led platformization, right? Innovation starts from the states. And because the state in Singapore plays a very large role, it creates this very large, significant trusted environment which competitors, whether they're banks, whether they're shipping companies, whether they're different healthcare providers, whatever it may be, they feel safe collaborating with each other, not just competing, but collaborating with each other if the government is there on the central, playing a sort of centralized role. So through that, because it's the government is actually getting these entities which might otherwise be competitors to actually collaborate together, the potential, the scope of what they can do, that magnifies, increases massively. So this is an example of what I mean by that. And if you remember the third paper that develops, it's looking at the idea of this idea of state-led platformization. This is a very good example of what I mean by state-led platformization. This idea of the government sort of at the center, creating this trusted ecosystem through which different private sector players can work together, who become signers, who become differences, and so forth. So this is called SGTraders. And this is, this draws on actually Singapore's island geography as well. This is in Singapore as historically being a trading hub. And that's a big chunk of the economy comes from trade, facilitation trade in Singapore. So actually making the process of trading more efficient and more convenient and faster and cheaper and all this stuff stuff actually helps to reduce the economy. So this is a quote from one of the managing directors one of the heads of business of UBS Bank talking about SGTraders. I'll just quickly run through this. So he narrates it quite well. He told us that one of the biggest hurdles in trade is that data is fragmented. The issuing bank of a letter of credit and the receiving bank of a letter of credit have different states of information. Shipping carries have different pieces of information. Of course there's a different piece of information. The customer has a different piece of information. And then the supplier's got the actual invoice, right? So it's messy, it's all over the place, it's fragmented, it's completely decentralized, it's just mess, it might work. So one of the things that Singapore trade X, SGTraders does is they built a common data infrastructure for all classes in the supply chain to submit confirmation into common data infrastructure, right? So all of these different agencies, the banks, the supplying banks, the receiving banks, the shipper, the ports, the customer, the provider of the goods, all these different passes they're coming together and putting data into one centralized data repository. They can now put information into a single database for the CDI, which is part of the SGTraders common base data structure. This is the government bringing all these things together, bringing all the players together so that they can actually do that, creating this trusted ecosystem, this trusted platform, in which otherwise competitive or suspicious or entities that would have no real motivation to share information is creating this environment for the SGTraders, okay? Another very good example, a slightly scary example is this idea of SGTindex, right? So this is more to do with personal finance. And so what SGTindex is, it's the same principle, it's a state-med platform. And what they do is they aggregate all of your financial information, different banks or all your different banks in Singapore, the different investment holdings, your CPF account, which is like a governance fund, the insurance policies, whatever it may be, whatever sort of personal finance accounts or thing you have with the agencies in Singapore, SGTindex brings them all together and it gives you this really scary, so uncompromising snapshot of your network, right? So if you add up all of your, we all have some fragmented financial lives, right? But if you sort of take a snapshot and balance all your assets over all of your liabilities, how much you actually work? But it's really, really scary to actually look at it. But again, this is a good example of the Singapore government putting itself in the center of innovation, center of the platform, and creating a condition, a situation environment through which otherwise competing organizations could work together to motivate, to provide a solution. Okay, that's it. I noticed that I'm sort of bang on tight, so it's a course of thought according to me. I feel quite shocked that I didn't bring on too much. Thank you for listening to me. I think we've now got about 10 or 15 minutes for Q&A. As I, yeah, sorry. Sorry, I was going to say, thanks for being exactly on time. If I could start off as chairing, the two aspects of this, I mean, I've learned a lot more about Singapore than I know, particularly about its position in South was a smart city. I'm just wondering in terms of two things. So when you have countries, if you have a country of a certain scale, you have different major cities that can business themselves as a global city, matching up investing in some new wave of technology. And then if you have another wave of technology, and we know this is going to keep on increasing the pace if this just change happens globally, you don't have to rely on one city keeping up all the time. Singapore has to because it's one city, one state. It seems to me that part of this is investing in always being cutting edge. That's what Singapore has to do. It has to keep up with each and every wave. It doesn't have the choice otherwise. So there's partly a material concern. The other thing I was wondering about is the political science. You can comment on that. That when you have its position as a global, you have mentioned that it has vertical integration in terms of government. And you would normally have national domestic concerns, but then you'd have interests that are more global in their aspirations. And these often don't match up. So you have things like them being upset about foreign talent, local labor worry about foreign talent, or too many mainland Chinese as opposed to straights born, this kind of thing. And then it's part of the necessity, right? That's part of the politics of this is clearly imaginary. Everybody accepts that there's problems right now, but these guys at the top are so smart, whatever they're planning to the future, that's what we go with, because it's gonna work out for everybody. And I wonder if you'd be commentable. So there are less comments than, or questions and comments. Yeah, no, no, they were great for motivation, Mike. Thank you. That first point about always being cutting edge. Yeah, I mean, it is true. There is this kind of pressure. I mean, that being said, what's interesting is that there is a, you wouldn't say humility, but Singapore does look to other cities for best practices that it can emulate or copy or adapt to the Singapore state, to the Singapore context, especially when, you know, in this formative use of golf techniques. So Estonia has, is remarkably progressive. This is one of the, maybe surprising, it's maybe a little bit surprising. Estonia is a very good reputation for having a national identity structure way before anybody else. So these, you know, the leader of golf tech and SMDGA, they would always say it, talk about Estonia in some way that they always emulate it. And actually when it comes to national digital identity, Singapore actually is sort of a few steps behind where it could. Also actually, surprisingly, I'm British, but I'm in the UK. The UK does something really well. I can't remember with my head what they are. But again, it's a sort of data infrastructure about sharing of information and things like that. And so there's always this interreferencing going on about thinking ideas, bringing them in. Singapore tries to, I mean, the language that we always use there is that sort of a hub, a hub for this, for that, for everything, see. And it tries to do that for the narratives and discourses on the smart city as well. So it tries to be a sort of hub that integrates global ideas, that brings city leaders from around the world together, the summits and who are sharing the virtuals and all that kind of stuff. And then what's interesting, and this speaks to actually the projects that I just started in the past year, is how it actually uses that and puts it out into the region, right? They're our garden, because they're our backyard, right? Southeast Asia, which is where actually Singapore sort of never say this overtly, but that is its market to go and actually sell services, to go and actually play an interventionist role in helping cities around the region in sort of managing and going through this journey towards becoming smart, however, that's defined in different contexts. So it is interesting that this translation of ideas from bringing them into Singapore and getting them to work in Singapore, but then also taking them out of Singapore and applying them to the region, the regions and markets and things like that. Let me just comment briefly on your second point, which is the political side, which again is a very accurate and students observation. I will just sort of speak to it by giving them one example of the years, which is actually what happened during the period. So one of my critiques of myself with this presentation is that I'm not critical at all. Very just, I'm drinking the Kool-Aid, I'm just giving you the good stuff. But obviously there is a very critical discourse around the role of the states and society and public life and singular unitary definition of what a smart city is and so on and so forth, so I'm really aware of it. And so the point is, there are significant social groups that are sort of marginalised by the narrative of smartness, by the smart nation. One of them is the elderly, the other one is our focus. In Singapore, we have lots of focus centres and people that sell some street food within designated areas, very cheap, very tasty, very good, with all this kind of stuff. But for a long time they resisted, the government tried to push them, but they resisted taking on e-payment services. The government wants to roll out the nationwide e-payment platform to get all porkers to stop using cash and just use e-payments. And they didn't want to do that because a lot of them are sort of traditionally Chinese educating a traditional, they like money, you know, physical money, they just didn't want to do it. There are so many barriers to that. What happened during COVID? So actually COVID gave the government perfect opportunities to just pull those through all of these kinds of things. We did in Singapore as I'm sure, as you did in the UK and everywhere else did basically in the world, we had very tight restrictions on safe distancing and safe management measures and all this kind of stuff. And it got to the point where you were not allowed to go into hawker centres or you could go and buy food, but you couldn't eat hawker centres and you couldn't do all this kind of stuff. And so that was the excuse the government needs to roll out this e-payment infrastructure throughout the hawker centres because it's cashless, so it's good because you're not transmitting the virus as you think about it. So it was very effective. And actually that's just one example. The COVID-19 really provided the conditions through which a lot of aspects of the smart nation that were kind of experienced obstacles, they managed to sort of clear the way and push through a lot of things. So I guess, you know, there is a very, very clear contentious political side to this story, which I haven't addressed really at all in this presentation, but I'm very... I've noticed myself, all the cashless payment requirements that happened today in Singapore was there. We have two comments from, or two questions from our attendees. I'll just give them both and if you could answer them in turn. If you were to put GovTech, Singapore, GDS UK, USDS, CDS, Canada on a spectrum, safer, effectiveness, efficiency, and or impact, where would you place them? The second comment is, thanks for your presentation. It's very inspiring, exclamation mark. My question is, how to distinguish specific mindedness in Singapore from a kind of nationalism under the manipulation of the centralized tax system? Thank you, Boat. Two, well, two good questions. Well, I will give you one good answer, one really rubbish answer. So the rubbish answer is for the first one because I do not know much or anything about GDS, although it is, as I mentioned, is highly regarded in Singapore. It's something that has been looked up to for the US version. The Canadian one is really interesting. As I said, this project is actually funded or the project that this presentation is from was actually funded out of Canada. And so we have a lot of collaborators in Canada, in Calgary, in Toronto, in Montreal, developing case studies of their respective cities. And actually, last year in Singapore, in the year of October, we held a workshop in Singapore, where we brought all of the project team members working on differences around the world to Singapore and talked about the particularities of our particular cases. What was working well was, what was and we tried to develop this comparative understanding of smart system development. Obviously, I gave our Singapore presentation, it was all the good news that I can interview you today. So yeah, that's how it came in. But what was interesting is that our colleagues in Canada, it was very, very, very much a different story. So many problems, a lot of them because the situation is the opposite of what I've been talking about in relation to Singapore, say decentralization, outsourcing. The fact that innovation comes from the private centre, maybe the people, maybe it's more society driven, the public centre doesn't really. So I don't know anything, I'd say Singapore was first, so it's certainly towards the front. I would say the GDS, and this is simply because when we were interviewing a lot of people in Singapore, they did mention the GDS in the UK as a sort of example of some organisation that got it right. So they're up there as well. The US, I do not know about, so I cannot comment. And then Canada from our colleagues in Canada, probably towards the end. So that's the bad answer, I hope there's a little, somehow, first and foremost. Dylan, thank you for your point. Yeah, say, how do I distinguish civil mindedness and nationalism among the manipulators? Yeah, so this is also, this is the flip side of the, you know, I was saying that there's a long tail to smartness. And this sort of technocratic way of thinking, it's so embedded throughout society. It's embedded through various infrastructures, through various institutions, which are cornerstone of Singapore. I'll give you two, which I think are sort of fundamental. One is public housing, the HDB. Singapore is unique in that we have 80 to 90% of the population here living in public housing. You know, we do have housing condominiums and we call them landed properties there, but the vast majority of people live in public housing. And that creates, there's a certain, you know, this public housing is great. It's very cheap. It's amazing if you can buy one and get access to the HDB system. But it's also very controlled. There's a lot of rules and regulations and you get these people living together and there's a lot of some inter-family surveillance and you get these kind of residents committees, there's weird sort of hierarchy within blocks. And so there are lots of mechanisms like that. But this sort of surveillance and this sort of training and sort of way of thinking and thinking it's pervasive throughout life. So that's one sort of way in which this very classic impulse is sort of embedded within the population. The other is the education system. Do you know, I don't know if you are Singaporean or not, but you know, throughout the education system there's this course of sort of emphasis on national education, national values. Again, sort of getting Singaporeans from a young age to understand the values and the advantages of the Singapore system. So I don't think it is, I think it's very difficult to distinguish this kind of nationalism with civic minded. That being said, I would also sort of sort of caveat that, you know, we spoke to a few recent graduates. So young Singaporeans instead of their 20s, mid-20s, first jobs and that kind of stuff. And for them, they have a lot of options. They can, you know, they're technically trained. They could go, they're interviewing with Google, they're interviewing with Amazon, all these kind of big tech companies. And so they have a lot of options and they can sort of do what they want. You know, the world is their oyster, but despite all these options, they choose to work with the government. And you know, that's how do you explain? How do you rationalize that choice? And if they were purely, you know, I don't know, maybe this is, maybe this is the pinnacle of that sort of confluence of civic mindedness and nationalism coming together and actually are rather worth gov-tech than I would Google. But still, it strikes me as a little bit strange. I think that there is something more genuine there. There in Singapore, there's always this narrative of existential threats and, you know, survivalist mindset. And I think, you know, there is something kind of interesting there. And then the other sort of caveat to that is the Australian guy that I mentioned. I provided some quotes from him, which is, you know, how do you explain him, again, reiterating the same kind of rhetoric? He's, I think he might be a permanent resident, but he doesn't have to, you know, say that he wants to give back to Singapore. And he wouldn't go through the whole education. He doesn't live in an HDB. He's very wealthy. He's started up and sold off many companies in his career and stuff. So how do you explain that as well? It's an interesting question. I mean, it's something that I haven't explored directly in this research, but something that I think will become more important and more sort of pressing as we continue to progress in our journey. Yeah, thank you. Hey, we're just at the end of the hour. So I think what we'll end with the very last comment that's been put up. Thank you, very informative. Oh, thank you. Thank you for sending your lunch signs to me. Thank you very much. And we will sign off now. Thank you, Dr. Woods, for your very interesting talk. And thank all of you, our attendees for attending. Thank you very much. Thanks, everyone.