Telegov

Problem

Telegram is a great platform for building applications in the form of bots, allowing developers to focus on business logic and not worry about ancillary matters, like frontend design. This makes it very useful for the rapid development of internal, non-sensitive applications for public officers. However, we do not have a way to authenticate Telegram users as public officers, which is important when controlling access to internal information and features.

Solution

Telegov provides a template codebase to build Telegram bots for internal non-sensitive use cases in government. It does this by integrating sgID to authenticate users as Singapore Government public officers. Examples of intended use cases include gating access to internal Telegram groups or resources.

The template can be found here and a Vercel-ready Telegram bot that gatekeeps Telegram groups can be found here. The codebase could be modified to control access based on other sgID profile fields, eg, using addresses for a residents-only Telegram bot.

Given that Telegov is a developer kit, we have yet to test this with potential users who may want to build their own Telegram bots for Government use. We would like to encourage those with potential use cases for Telegov to get in touch with us.

Team

Alwyn Tan
Cheri Ong
Alexander Lee
Kathleen Koh
Koh Jia Cheng