Social & Community
Wah!
10 February 2025
Building communities, one discovery at a time.
A Tale of Two Events
Imagine looking for something to do this weekend.
With an urge to do something cultural,
You check the National Museum website, only to find Sebastiao Salgado's Amazonia photo exhibition—not quite what you're in the mood for.
So you search on Google for "things to do this weekend in Singapore". The top result lead you to commercial events platforms, like TimeOut Singapore. You settle for one of their suggestions instead, that's happening near you in Clementi.
But what if the first result was a single platform showcasing every government-organised event in Singapore? Wah!
You click through and apply a simple filter for Arts and Culture and discover a Heritage Guided Walk at the Rail Corridor by NParks—an event that combines outdoor activity, fitness, and Singapore's rich history.
During the walk, you meet fellow history enthusiasts and nature lovers. Two hours later, you've not only satisfied your cultural interests but also learned fascinating details about Singapore's railway heritage and made connections with like-minded residents.
Here's the truth: that Rail Corridor walk was always there. The event existed, but remained hidden on a subsection of the NParks website, invisible to most Singapore residents. The barrier wasn't the event's quality—it was its discoverability.
This is where Wah! comes in. By bringing every government event onto a single, easily searchable platform, we're not just listing events—we're building communities, one discovery at a time.
What is the problem we see today?
Loneliness is a problem in our society and attending community events, or simply events without a commercial agenda, is an effective way of solving them. However, it's hard to discover such events.
Tech-savvy Singaporeans aged 21 - 34 feel isolated, left out and lacking companionship (IPS 2023 Poll)
Graphic reproduced from The Mothership: https://mothership.sg/2024/01/ips-poll-young-singaporeans-lo
A lack of connectedness to their community and neighbourhood is likely to be exacerbating this phenomenon.
Community events and activities are important touch points for social bonding, making connections and finding like-minded companions.
Today, there are significant hurdles to discovering events in the neighbourhood or community, due to:
Over-reliance on physical methods of advertisement e.g. banners, posters
Multiple digital platforms to navigate, often with incomplete or outdated information
Perception that community events are targetted at the “boomer” generation
Based on our initial user research we have validated that many people do not know how to easily find and register for events of interest occurring in their neighbourhoods.
While many government agencies have their own distinct Event websites, these are not comprehensive and often do not include hyper-localised or one-off events.
Results from initial landscape survey
Our Team surveyed 32 Singapore Citizens and Residents (PR and Work Pass holders) to assess their sense of community involvement and interest in attending community events in their neighbourhood.
The findings from the survey were that people are interested in attending events (especially ones in their neighbourhood), but have problems discovering them.
80% of respondents indicated they do not feel a sense of community and belonging.
The majority do not currently attend community events.
However, almost all of them (more than 80%) would like to attend more events and be involved in the community.
Our Solution
Wah! (Whole-of-government Activities Hub) is a simple, searchable event discovery platform with two distinct components:
A public-facing front-end, where they can search for and filter out events based on category, date, key-word search, location etc.
Seamlessly discover events around you
An admin-portal for registered event organisers to create and update their events for advertisement on the platform.
Admin interface for event organisers to create and edit their events
Objectives and Product Goals
We believe the problem of ineffective discovery for Government-organised events is worth solving.
First, effective event discovery can increase participation in Government-organised/supported events. This ensures public expenditure for such events is fully maximized.
Second, greater participation contributes to the larger public good of increasing social bonding/cohesion. This builds stronger community-ties and a sense of connectedness to Singapore as home.
Third a centralised platform can enable government agencies to deconflict major events and collect useful participant data on attendees, enabling data-driven curation of relevant events for the Community and demographic.
Our solution “Wah!” seeks to solve the first-order issue regarding event discovery by consolidating all publicly-advertised government-linked/organised events/activities in a single digital platform.
Our hypothesis is that if event discovery is easier, attendance will increase and people will get to know others in their neighbourhood. This creates a virtuous cycle: attend events > build communities and sense of belonging > attend more events.
Next Steps and Future Vision
We envision becoming the one-stop shop for all government-organised/supported events, with user-tested features to improve User-Experience. These include for consumers of events:
Recommendations
Reviews (of similar or ongoing events)
Navigation and distance calculator
For those events created organically on our platform by government ministries and agencies, we intend to offer data analytics, direct-registration with attendance tracking, payment options, and/or a unique feature to share collections of events using go.gov.sg QR codes. We also plan to support the listing of approved grassroots and volunteer-organised events.
Research
We utilised multiple research techniques to validate the problem, and test the solution:
Desktop and in-situ research: Our team trawled through various event and government websites, as well as existing applications, to understand the current landscape. We also walked various neighbourhoods in Singapore to test out for ourselves how difficult it was to find out what is happening in the community and register for these events.
Guerilla interviews with MOPs: We spent half a day in Toa Payoh and interviewed six individuals that were both resident in the area and/or collecting keys from HDB Hub to get quick feedback on early design concepts, and understand user behaviour.
UX Research with Event Organisers: We engaged key agencies that organise events in Singapore to understand their existing workflows, considerations and pain points.
Prototype UTs with MOPs: We tested our hi-fi design prototype with five MOPs in detailed interviews to get their quick feedback on the UI, features and framing.
(Aforementioned) MOP landscape research: We surveyed 32 Singapore Citizens and Residents across 18 neighbourhoods with different demographics (i.e. young parents, single adults, couples, EP holders that had recently moved etc.) to get a quick sense of the scale and details of the problem.
Learning how events in the community are currently discovered
Looking for events at the local library
Team Members
Keith Chee
Scott Heng
Aiko Klostermann
Nitya Menon
Sufyan Selamet
Work with us!
Give us product feedback .
If you are a government agency who would like to onboard Wah! and use it to manage or advertise your events, express your interest using this form or write to us at wah@open.gov.sg
We are keen to co-create the solution with you and onboard our first pilots!