Telescope

Summary

Do you know your MPs? What issues do they care most about? What have they been advocating for in Parliament?

Telescope enables citizens to explore past Parliamentary Questions by MPs to see what issues they advocate for, as well as search for topics that interest them. With Telescope, citizens can more easily understand how their interests are represented in Parliament.

Problem Statement

In Singapore, many important issues—like housing, healthcare, and education—are actively debated in Parliament, but most citizens remain unaware of these discussions. Although Parliamentary records (Hansard) are publicly available, they are difficult to navigate and understand, creating a barrier for the average person to engage with how policies are shaped.

This disconnect means many Singaporeans don’t know what their MPs are doing or how they represent their interests. This lack of awareness weakens civic participation, reduces accountability, and leaves people feeling powerless to influence decisions that affect their lives. Closing this gap is crucial to fostering a more informed, engaged, and empowered public.

Objectives and Product Goals

With Telescope, we want to make Singaporean politics more accessible and relatable by focusing on Parliamentary Questions (PQs), which are one of the more bite-sized and accessible parliamentary proceedings.

As Telescope is informational in nature, the main outcome we want to see is a public that is more aware of their MPs' work and better equipped to engage in civic discourse.

The hope is that when citizens can easily discover how their concerns are being voiced in Parliament, they will see that their input matters. This encourages deeper civic engagement, which in turn leads to more citizen voices being heard and represented in Parliament. Our goal is to catalyse this virtuous cycle where increased awareness leads to greater participation, which generates more civic discourse, ultimately strengthening Singapore's democratic process.

Research and Approach

To design Telescope, our research methods include desk research, polling, user interviews, and usability testing.

This research informed several key decisions in the design process:

• Natural Language Search: We implemented vector embedding search to allow users to search using natural language, making it easier for them to find relevant content.

• Simplified Search Experience: We found that users often felt unsure about what to search for upon landing on the search page. To address this, we added common search terms and a section with curated topics of interest, based on insights from a user poll.

• Identifying MPs' Areas of Interest: Our testing revealed that users struggled to grasp an MP's priorities based solely on a list of PQs. Analyzing these PQs requires substantial cognitive effort, so we found it essential to summarize the last 20 into three key areas of interest for easier and quicker comprehension.

• PQ summaries: We noticed that users often scrolled quickly through PQ transcripts without reading the full discussion. To enhance their experience, we introduced concise summaries of each discussion, highlighting the key points.

• Related PQs: Based on user feedback, we added a feature to suggest similar PQs after reading a discussion, encouraging deeper engagement and exploration

One limitation when working with Hansard data is that the raw transcript data is largely unstructured and inconsistently formatted, especially for older records. This made more fine-grained analysis and splitting of PQs by who asked and who answered unreliable. As a result, we do not make this distinction in the app, and simply denote that MPs were “involved in” PQs.

Solution

About Page

We created a landing page to introduce Telescope and offer a clear, engaging overview of Parliamentary Questions (PQs)—explaining how they work, where they come from, and why they matter to the everyday citizen.

Search

We allow users to search in natural language, making it easier to find information in a way that feels most intuitive. To help get started, we also provide common search terms and highlight trending topics.

Know Your MP

Users can search for MPs by constituency, type, or name. They can also explore each MP’s areas of interest by visiting their profile for more detailed insights.

Other Bonus Features

We've added features like 'MPs who have discussed this topic in the search results, and 'Similar Parliamentary Questions' when reading a PQ, to help users discover related content and gain deeper insights.

User Feedback

Based on our user tests, we found that Telescope was generally well received. Most said that they could see themselves using the tool casually (albeit not regularly) and many acknowledged that they had no notion of what issues their MPs were passionate about.

Policy officers expressed interest in using the tool for Ministry work, particularly for researching past PQs, even though this is not our intended use case.

Some users were skeptical about the appeal of such a tool for the average Singaporean. One sentiment that we heard semi-frequently was that it did not matter much what MPs were doing or what their individual beliefs were given that citizens vote based on the party the MP belonged to.

While we understand why some Singaporeans might hold such a view, we believe that MPs are more than just extensions of their political parties. Their individual beliefs do matter and this is reflected in the PQs they raise, the legislation they sponsor, and the causes they champion.

We do not think that every adult Singaporean will necessarily find the tool relevant to them. However, we do believe the information should be easily accessible to everyone who cares about understanding the state of discourse for societal issues and what their MPs are doing about these issues, as a matter of accessibility and transparency, which are key to a thriving democracy.

Next steps

Telescope will be publicised to the general public through social media and forums once we are done making refinements based on user feedback.

The Team