By SGN | 2 July 2020
When the coronavirus pandemic struck earlier this year, an extraordinary volunteering movement started. From 10,000 miles away, SGN’s community in the US stepped up in many ways to help Singapore battle the COVID-19 crisis. For Part 1 of this two-part series, we shine our spotlight on how the tech community leveraged innovation, creativity, user experience, and teamwork to address COVID-19.
In May, Singapore’s GovTech organised a Covid-19 Idea Sprint to crowdsource tech solutions globally to battle the pandemic. The campaign received 73 submissions from more than 300 participants, including SGN members in the U.S. with tech and engineering expertise. We had the privilege of speaking with a few GovTech project volunteers, Frank Chen, Foo Ji-Haw and James Yong about their motivations, challenges, and insights from giving back.

Frank volunteered with GovTech’s FormSG team. He worked on features to allow submission of large attachments with end-to-end encryption. He also worked on allowing drafts to be saved so that users do not need to fill in long forms in one sitting.
Frank Chen, Senior Software Engineer, Google
(Based in Mountain View, CA)
What motivated you to volunteer for this project?
What was the most challenging part?
What was your key insight from the project?

Ji-Haw teamed up with James Yong, and Singapore-based Jin Wen to create Project Grey, an initiative to help home-bound elderlies with limited mobility get easy access to healthcare and virtual social interaction amid COVID-19. One of the 12 winning teams for GovTech’s Covid-19 Idea Sprint, the trio presented the project to Minister Vivian Balakrishnan, SMS Janil Puthucheary, and other government officials.
Foo Ji-Haw, Former Senior Technical Product Manager, StubHub
(Based in Dallas, TX)
What motivated you to volunteer for this project?
What was the most challenging part?
What was your key insight from the project?

James volunteered in the same team with Ji-Haw for Project Grey.
James Yong, Senior Backend Engineer, Roblox (Based in San Mateo, CA)