An idea and proposal I have for Open Government Products and GovTech Singapore improving how the government can let citizens know about all important dates 📅.


Idea

A govt calendar tailored for citizens to streamline all important dates. And allows synchronizing with google calendar.


Problem

  • Think of your MOH appointment dates, IPPT dates, corporate tax dates, tax filing dates, more importantly, cdc voucher expiry and skillsfuture expiry dates etc.

  • As a citizen, how do you remind yourself of those dates? You have to dig through emails and SMS.

  • It's easy to miss out on important dates when everything is segregated, and this led to clashing of dates, no-show appointments, unused credits, and ultimately, wastage of govt resources. Personally I have to keep my toes every year on corporate filing dates. CDC won't notify you when your vouchers are expiring.

And it goes beyond just appointment dates.

Public service announcement dates, govt vouchers and credits expiry dates, can also be added.

An ordinary citizen won't be following every agency all the time, like your NEA. Hawker centers closed frequently for cleaning and citizens don't track them. So what we do is we sync the closing dates with their calendar.

Voila, a single calendar that tells you all the dates the Govt wants you to know 💡 .


Solution

  • Work with agencies and streamline the date/time via APIs.

  • Then curate a govt calendar tailored for each citizen so he/she knows the upcoming important dates and can plan accordingly.

  • If a citizen is using Google Calendar, even better, do 1-to-1 sync with that so it can streamline their busy professional lives.

Streamlining the important dates is also very useful because we can now easily notify citizens using email/sms via a single interface with CalendarSG (maybe integration with Postman) and individual agencies can delegate that notification work.

Like informing citizens when their vouchers and credits are expiring etc.

  • On top of that, having a single interface for "important dates" allows future potential workflows like syncing with the user's own notifications or alert app etc.

  • Or heck, if you want to overengineer, you can even prevent citizens from booking an IPPT date if it clashes with another appointment date.