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Interview: Weilie Tan – schemes.sg; Making it easier to find support

schemes.sg

Navigating the different organisations in Singapore for social assistance and other support schemes is a pain for many social workers as well as the groups of people that they serve. There are hundreds of schemes by different organisations that can be difficult to discover. Volunteers and social workers found it even trickier to refer people-in-need to funds or support programs that they are eligible for.

According to Weilie, the founding of schemes.sg was an accident. He just wanted to make it a little easier for fellow volunteers to access funds and help people. In a way, schemes.sg was a practice project. He developed the first web interface to practice new coding skills that he had picked up.

Initially published as a simple Google Sheets database, the website went viral among several volunteer groups due to social media. They were also featured on the SocialService.sg podcast, which expanded their reach further

Weilie brought the prototype to the better.sg community which connected him to like-minded volunteers with complementary skills that could help him to enhance the project even further. Naturally, a single person could not possibly manage the massive engineering, design and research effort by themselves.

Currently, the team is working on improving the algorithm to help users find assistance that is better suited for their needs. They are also tapping on the community to expand the coverage of schemes on their website.

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Schemes.sg Team

Data to provide better care

schemes.sg, as an unintended outcome, also became an accidental ‘radar’ for social needs. Given its growing user base, schemes.sg can identify upcoming and potential worries in the population given the types of searches they receive.

For example, amidst the tightened measures of heightened alert, searches related to elderly isolation spiked due to increased concerns. This allowed the schemes.sg team to better understand the assistance needs of the people in Singapore.

The team hopes that they will be able to work with various stakeholders, such as the government and social impact organisations, to pre-empt these needs in society and to raise awareness of issues that may have been overlooked.

As an additional value add, the team is also able to provide useful analytical data for organisations, such as:

  • Who searches for their schemes?
  • How are their schemes related to others that exist?
  • What schemes do people need but can’t find?

Such insights are crucial to the world of social work and volunteerism and can enable both volunteers and organisations to better assist people in need. The social service landscape in Singapore is a multi-faceted and complex one. Schemes.sg just wants to make it a little easier for everyone.

The power of Tech

schemes.sg is different because it uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to analyse search enquiries. This allows users to intuitively express their needs as day-to-day speech, rather than have to point and click through the internet to look for help. Schemes are also tagged properly, allowing those that account for intertwining social needs to clearly appear in the results.

The end-product functions as more than an assistance portal – it has become a system to organise a large body of knowledge, as well as an analytical asset for organisations to do good more effectively.

For Weilie, true success would mean Schemes’ being able to engender collaboration between various stakeholders, such as government and non-government organisations in Singapore. The trek is long, but the team is willing to go the distance.

Instead of aspiring to become a central site to search for schemes, the team wants to share the schemes.sg assets as widely as possible. For instance, one long-term plan is to turn schemes.sg into an API that can be embedded onto the websites of various organisations, allowing these organisations to make small tweaks to the way they prioritise different searches. This open-source strategy allows for their knowledge base to grow faster as organisations can list themselves in the database to tap on Schemes’ algorithm and mprove their discoverability. OneMap could also eventually be integrated, allowing users to search for schemes that are specific to their local area.

With the vast amounts of tech out there today, the opportunities are delightfully endless.