Postcards from Seletar

Goodbye to the Intelligent Singaporean
- finally got around to reading other Singapore blogs, only to discover the rather cryptic final post

Recently certain events have prompted me to re-evaluate the role & relevance of the Intelligent Singaporean in the Singapore socio-political blogosphere. These events have forced me to reconsider whether continuing my aggregation work furthers the original cause of IS.

huh?

Online competition from Jenny and Erin

How big of a role do habits play in your daily life? Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously? What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?

Singapore encouraged to collaborate, rather than compete

How does Singapore, with several thousand new developers each year, compete with India that is churning out at least 100x as many? Our software team in India showed me some statistics that even amazed me. India is expected to have 30,000 software development companies and 2 million developers by 2011. Today, the age of the average developer in India is 25. The Singapore EDB has good cause to worry, and even better cause to start thinking seriously about open source. What I told the Singapore EDB was that they shouldn’t worry about competing with the millions of developers in India, they should worry about working with them. Developers don’t buy software, they join communities. Singapore’s EDB has done some amazing things on a small scale. They helped sponsor the Grid Discovery Zone, a mini network.com utility compute grid, where any researcher in Singapore can get free access to a 16 processor core Solaris Container running on a grid of Sun Fire x4600 servers. Singapore has a huge potential to collaborate with their nearby neighbor, India, on open source, and India has definitely adopted open source at the national level.

It was an unusual Saturday night; we witnessed the man’s colleague Christian get hitched to the lovely Charmaine at a magical ceremony under balmy skies overlooking Changi Beach. Several Mojitos into the evening, and the discussion at our dinner table meandered towards Mr Wang, Tomorrow and other Singapore blogs. So here I am checking them out on this fine Sunday.

It has been a mixed experience. The level of discussion on these threads was entertaining and thought provoking. But discovering flaws in an authority I had previously respected was disconcerting. To find that the motivation for re-developing Seletar, which we had accepted to be an airtight business proposition, may in fact be questionable. EDB’s approach has apparently been found to be less than acceptable by regulators.

According to a 26 May 2007 article in The Straits Times (via LushHomes), EDB’s operations will need to be audited more frequently. To quote:

The committee further suggests that the Auditor-General undertake ‘a more regular audit’ of the Economic Development Board, following the Auditor-General’s findings of lapses in governance structure and financial operations in its first audit of EDB.

A rather candid illustration by My Sketchbook

Mr Wang says it in his uncompromisingly direct manner:

The most shocking thing, to me, is that this is the first time the Auditor-General of Singapore has audited the EDB, in 46 years. What HAS the Auditor-General been doing?

What has any of this to do with Seletar, I hear you ponder.

Back in May 2006, when EDB announced the Seletar Aerospace Hub initiative, it promised the following.

Seletar Aerospace Park is expected to contribute S$3.3 billion annually in value-added (1% of GDP) and create 10,000 new jobs, mainly skilled ones, by 2018. With this exciting new development, we look forward to further growth in the Singapore aerospace industry, carrying us to newer and greater heights.

I wonder who will review the commercial viability of Seletar Aerospace Hub, just over a year into the original assessment? Especially in light of cost of living increases in the past 12 months. Do the original forecast assumptions still hold?

In the meantime, I’m off to take pictures of rambutans. Isabelle wants to paint a cuckoo gorging rambutans, not an uncommon sight in this neck of the woods. Got to write about both species for Postcards.

In May 2006, Singapore’s Economic Development Board announced plans to develop an aerospace hub in what is more commonly known as Seletar Camp. Since then, residents have reacted in a variety of ways. The purpose of this journal is to record developments as we progress through 2007 and 2008, and to review the history of the camp and its inhabitants.