An Indonesian public sector professional's reflections on Singapore’s Hack for Public Good

Hack for Public Good is an annual event organised by Open Government Products (OGP), part of GovTech Singapore, which aims to solve pressing pain points for citizens.

Its 2025 edition was the first time OGP has invited participants from outside Singapore, including Indonesia, Cambodia, and Vietnam. 

Throughout the course of January, the month-long hackathon was attended by approximately 200 experts from OGP, several representatives of Singapore government agencies and delegates from ASEAN countries.  

INA Digital Edu’s Chief of Staff and Head of Department, Daniel Edward Humala, who was one of the first-time participant from Indonesia invited to the event, praised the intent behind Hack for Public in convincing stakeholders in government about how experimental models can generate solutions to tackle citizen problems.

According to Daniel, usually the government tends to provide top-down directions on digital government products - from product development to launch.

"Hack for Public Good offers the opposite approach. We start with a problem and test the product to see if it solves real-world user problems," he says.

Developing tech solutions 

Daniel was part of a team with Singapore's Ministry of Communications and Digital Development (MDDI)'s Assistant Director of Communications/Products, Azhar Shukor; OGP’s Product Operations Specialist, Neha Mistry; and Cambodia's Digital Government Committee (DGC)'s Business Analyst, Win Sengly, to work on the My Legacy Link/My Legacy Vault 2.0 project.  

Daniel said that for one month, the team explored the problem they wanted to solve, created a prototype, and then presented it at a demo day attended by representatives of different government agencies. 

If the agencies found the product useful for them, they had the option to partner with the product teams for further development.

My Legacy Link/My Legacy Vault 2.0 was a digital solution to help manage the assets of deceased family members, including bank account information, insurance, documents, and other legacy information.  

The product has various features, including accessibility through SingPass, integration with SGFinDex to manage bank account information, a digital vault to store and manage inheritance information, information sharing with family members, and easy notification to financial institutions on the loss of family members. 

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Insights and learnings 

Hack for Public Good 2025 connected participants to learn from each other and share inspiration on how technology teams in Singapore and other countries work.

Daniel shared that OGP conducted a process of evaluation and joint reflection every week on the products developed to ensure the team's progress is on track.  

Every performance was monitored, from how the team solveed problems, conducted research or user interviews, initial prototyping, initial user testing, to demo day. 

Every weekend, OGP organised a Hack Closer to share lessons learnt from the past week's development. Everyone is free to consult about specific problems they are facing. 

Then there was a Hack Office Hour which took place every Friday for two hours, which presented three or four Subject Matter Experts from various fields, including software architects, UI/UX designers, and product and policy experts who are ready to help participants.

"OGP prepared facilities to ensure that every hackathon participant, regardless of which team he/she was from or what topic they were trying to solve, has equal access to make improvements to the product to be developed," says Daniel. 

OGP was also very open to allowing teams to define problems that are not in their problem bank, as long as the team has a rough idea that can be tested through a prototyping process with users, he added.  

For Daniel, what was also interesting was that not all participants from government employees had careers in technology. There were those who work in communications, business analysts, and even immigration officers.

"Their involvement in this event is an added value because it makes it easier for the team to find solutions to the daily problems they face," he adds.

Exploring areas of collaboration  

According to Daniel, INA Digital as the Indonesian government technology team could explore OGP's methods as a working model or benchmark that could be applied to find solutions to problems faced by the Indonesian people. 

INA Digital was already experienced in developing services in education and health and aimed to continue to increase the impact on the development of public services in Indonesia. 

Going forward, INA Digital Edu will further explore collaboration in various areas to bring positive impact to public services in Indonesia, he added.  

INA Digital Edu, part of INA Digital, operates as a technology development partner for the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education of the Republic of Indonesia, committed to developing high-quality and user-centric educational technologies.