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This is my last week at the Ministry of Education. It’s been a little over four years, and I find myself in a very different place from where I envisioned four years ago. My time in the government has been a most serendipitous and amazing journey, and I am indelibly changed because of it.

I used to participate rather actively in the great Singaporean pastime of government-bashing. I despised the way the government worked - it was easy to find points of agreement with the cab driver: Singapore is fraught with hidden taxes that makes living very expensive; the politicians earn way too much; the government is full of bureaucracy and doesn’t care for citizens.

All the points are valid of course. But the greatest lesson I took home with me is this: the government isn’t a faceless machine. She is made up of fellow citizens. True, some are self-serving. Some are in it for the money. But no more and no less than in any other large organisation, private or public. As citizens we should not waste our time here; we should be looking to nurture a culture of selflessness and empower noble intent. Rather than be mired in a never-ending spiral of self-despair and finger-pointing, we should engage in a constructive relationship with the government.

Web 2.0 ushers in Gov 2.0, and Gov 2.0 cannot exist without Citizen 2.0.

A friend from another country once asked me why Singaporeans complained so much but did so little. It really hit home. We could attribute it to fear, but to be perfectly honest, we complain because it is the easiest path to take.

I joined the government 4 years ago with the intention of changing the way Singapore government agencies create websites. To my surprise the people at the ministry welcomed my ideas and were willing to let Selwyn and I build the corporate website from the ground up. It was then I realised that the ministry was made up of real people, many of whom genuinely want to improve the lives of people living in Singapore.

The line between the government and her people is an imaginary line, and contrary to popular movie wisdom, neither has need to fear the other. Citizens who want to change Singapore for the better should not hesitate to join the government and effect change from within.

The Road Ahead

I have grappled with this decision for about a year now. It has become clear that it is time for me to move on. The entrepreneurial dream is something that burns within me and many of my friends.

But it has dawned on me that entrepreneurship is not so much a working arrangement as it is a state of mind. The entrepreneurial spirit is one that doesn’t tolerate the status quo simply because, but constantly questions and endlessly strive through continual iteration to improve processes, products and people.

I have decided to continue being an intrapreneur. Come April I will be joining the folks at Temasek Polytechnic. I was totally blown away by how much the organisation valued me as an individual rather than a unit of resource, and the hiring process was thoroughly outstanding. I am excited at the possibilities there, and thankful that God has provided for me and led me down a path filled with peace.

It’s the end of the year, and as 2010 approaches, it is the time for change.

I’ve done the unwise - leaving my job at the Ministry of Education without first securing another, but somewhere in my heart I know that it is the right thing to do. It is both the fleeing from the inevitable apathy that comes with dogmatically sticking to a set routine, and the embracing of possibilities.

And all I have at hand are a set of vague plans.

As with any plan, there is a need to pray, and ultimately the surrender of our plans and submission to God’s. Guess I’ll come clean and say that I don’t know what He has in store for me either.

“Anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around — nobody big, I mean — except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff — I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. I know it’s crazy.”

J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

This resonates so, so much, and so deeply.

“Don’t make work your life”, I’m often told. The alternative offered is to view work as a means to an end — that work is somehow mutually exclusive from the activities one would associate as “having a life”.

I find it impossible to separate work from the rest of my life not because I live to work, but because we shouldn’t be spending so many hours in the office working to death.

Our work should enrich the lives of the people we serve.

There’s a dichotomy when it comes to what we expect of our public servants. We expect them to be:

1. Competent

   I mean, no one wants stupid public servants. On an operation level, we’d like our public servants to serve us with an acceptable level of efficiency and get the job done. On a strategic level, we’d like the bigwigs to be smarter than most of us and make decisions that will help us all. So our economy will stay healthy, our children will have a bright future, we’ll all find great paying jobs that we love, we can stay out without fear of being mugged and our reservist stints don’t include real war.

2. An average Joe

   Our public servants should be one of us. They shouldn’t be sitting on an ivory tower, aloof and cold. They shouldn’t be seen driving expensive sports cars. Most of all, they should be making a decent living at best - no over the top salaries that’ll alienate them from the struggles the rest of us face on a day to day. God forbid those that make it to the top of the public sector be paid a salary similar to those at the top of the private sector.

I’ll be honest here. If I have the chops to make it to the top of the public sector, I’ll probably want to buy a sports car. A Tesla Roadster. Wouldn’t you? If a public servant ought to emphatise with the common man, isn’t he allowed to fulfill the common dreams?

It’s 4am.

“What’s wrong, can’t sleep?”, Faith asks.

“For the first time in a long time, I’m lying here, wide awake, thinking about work”, I reply.

“Wow, that’s great”. She heads back to slumberland.

I am so blessed to have a wife who understands exactly what I mean, what I feel and loves me knowing exactly the person I am.

It has been a long time. Since the redesign of the MOE Corporate website half a year ago, we’ve shifted into the necessary maintenance mode, quashing small bugs and ironing out processes to keep the website stocked with up-to-date information.

The initial days of the redesign were an amazing high for us. We had a ton of feedback, both external and internal, from colleagues in other departments who had problems finding information that sat on an entirely new information architecture framework to journalists who couldn’t navigate the new site. It was an amazing experience to be able to address all their feedback in real time as we morphed the homepage, tweaked navigation and made important information more accessible within minutes of receiving emails. The response time in which we were able to react turned many frowns upside down (hate the cliché) and shocked many users who weren’t expecting immediate response from government web team.

It was also a high because we received numerous emails thanking us for bringing a Singapore government site into the 21st century. The geekier ones (some of them are you guys reading my blog) loved the underlying code and gave us suggestions with which we used to improve the online experience.

We were designing something collaboratively with our audience and it was amazing.

That was then.

Maintenance mode is an iterative process that goes on perpetually. As we comb the website for possible improvements, our audience had also gotten used to our design and adapted to our flaws. Innovation was exercised in the publishing of new content, like the insertion of flickr photographs and online video into speeches and press releases.

There were ideas I could offer, but for the most part the audience seemed happy with the information they were getting. There was very little impetus for change, and it would was hard to expect colleagues to put in extra work to cut information a dozen new ways simply because I thought it would serve our audience better.

We missed you.

I missed you.

Editor’s note: This post pertains to the day job, and is probably boring as hell. It is also posted on the MOE Web Development blog.

The dream job of any designer is one that gives the flexibility to design a product exactly the way the designer wants it. The best-case scenario is where the designer’s vision matches what the users want. Users may not want pretty user interfaces and this is where designers need to learn to tame the designer ego.

Designers, on the whole, deal with a whole lot of constraints other than just ego. Even beautiful products such as the Macbook is constrained by cost and availability of materials.

While walking down Orchard Road yesterday morning with Faith and Anne in tow, we encountered wave upon wave of Secondary school kids carrying tins, asking for donations to St. John’s Ambulance in return for some stickers.

They come in all shapes and sizes, but a few stereotypes stand out:

• The can’t-be-bothereds. Often in groups, these schoolkids are the ones you’d immediately describe as “recalcitrant”. They walk about with their headphones on, and the stark emptiness of their tins don’t bother them - they’re just passing time.
• The frazzled. Walking around like a bee on steroids, they wear the frown of a stockbroker after a market collapse. They buzz around, inspecting everyone to see if they’ve pasted the stickers. When faced with a potential “victim” who doesn’t sport the sticker, the frown intensifies, they step towards their target, then chicken out at the last minute.
• The shy. They’ll be seen at the corner, considerately staying out of your way but constantly hoping you’ll come over and do your good deed for the month. They occasionally gang up to take out people at the fringe of the crowd.
• The enthused. I’ve never seen this type until yesterday. This girl popped up from behind us and chirped, “please donate”, and flashed a big smile. When we told her we already had donated, she smiled, thanked us and went to the next person. Her cheerfulness was very contagious.

I’ve come to realise that I care for these kids a great deal - all of them. It could be the day job at the Ministry of Education. It’s getting to me.

Heather, Michael, Jennifer, Ryan and Geoff. I’m glad we didn’t rotate around different tables like we were supposed to. That’s the toss-up at most workshops and conferences, isn’t it? Network more broadly or more deeply? I think we chose well.

Over the duration of the 4 day event, we got to work on fictitious websites, designed imaginary devices and cracked countless jokes. It was liberating to shed my Asian shell and get in there guns ablazing - after all, I only had 4 days.

On the first day, the most important thing I learned came not from the speaker but from Michael who sat beside me. He said managing working relationships was the same as crafting a user experience. What do your bosses need, what are their motivations, and how do you make it easy for them to close the “transaction”? How do you align what they need as a person with what the project needs? While the topic of managing bosses isn’t new to me, the juxtaposition of that and user experience was highly interesting.

Another interesting tidbit we had from the casual chat at the table was the differences between relationships with Americans, Europeans and Asians. Michael mentioned how Americans are quick to bond, but devote only the relevant slice of themselves - you may get to know them fast, but just the work part of their being, or the parent if you happen to be the teacher of their child. You don’t get the full person. His observations were that Asians were the other extreme. It took forever to get through the outer shell, but when you get past that, you get the whole person.

I suppose that is accurate to a certain degree. We tend to think of people as whole persons rather than functions. My mother has always drilled it in me to understand that people are more than their jobs. They are parents to their children, children to their parents, and that creates a fuller way of looking at people. Maybe not as efficient, but certainly more organic and less mechanical.

The workshops proper were grueling. I learned a lot from the design strategy, design research and interaction design workshops. The information architecture workshop was a little too rudimentary, but it probably helped those who didn’t do IA for a living.

There’s a chill you get when the air-conditioning’s too cold. It’s an unnatural chill. When it’s cold out, the cold feels liberating; everything is crisp and fresh. Not so with the cold that comes with refrigeration. It chills to the core, as if the inside of your bones were ice-cold.

It lasted for hours even after I left the office. It’s been like this for a while, and it drains me. Tracing back, I think it comes from exhaustion - I had an extremely tight deadline moved back 4 months. While the extra time was welcome, it felt like having a sprint turned into a marathon just before the finish line. There’s little left in the tank but a whole long way to go.

The ball game’s different when things are for the long haul. Where the other cogs I needed to get in place were once responsive, the time extension has put everything in a freeze. The sense of urgency is gone. The adrenaline rush has worn out. The river turns into a glacier.

Cold. I feel cold.

It’s the time of the year when everything you do feels like a slow trudge uphill. Significant inroads have been made on the upcoming redesign of the Ministry of Education’s website. It’s due for launch 1Q 2008, but has to undergo some IE-proofing. Thank you, Microsoft, for making web design a lot more tedious than it has to be.

Anne has been acting up lately, waking up in the middle of the night and taking a really long time getting back to sleep. She’d demand that we scratch her “itchiness” (she made that word up for wherever itched), or pat her back ad perpetua.

My prayers have become so mundane, and I’m learning what it means to pray for one’s daily bread. It always seems more “right” to pray for things like knowing God better, or growing in His likeness or submitting to His will - the higher, nobler things, but I find myself praying for bread and butter issues like “please help Anne sleep through this night, Faith really needs the sleep”. It seems so primitive and base of me, and I wonder if it’s a sign my faith has waned, or if God’s breaking me down to the bare essentials.