Project Nimbus: Gov.sg 2.0 gaining momentum!

I was excited to hear about the Project Nimbus initiative at last night's SRB meetup (Jason's the great Gladwellian connector)

When I wrote my opinion piece "Could Open Government initiatives help drive innovation in Singapore?", I had in mind a key proposition that it would be really smart for Government to push open data initiatives, as any costs or concerns associated would be repaid many times over by the resulting stimulus to local innovation and economic development.

With that in mind, it's really heartening to see that some cool cookies have gone beyond just talk, and established Project Nimbus with the goals:

• To unite the voices of Singapore Innovators and identify data sets and services we as Innovators want


• To work with content owner and government entities for the appropriate release of these data sets and services to Singapore Innovators

The main engagement point is the UserVoice page they have setup to collect and filter ideas (through the voting process). This is a great way of first making sure you are dealing with ideas that have real support and interest.

Once you have qualified ideas, the next steps are where Project Nimbus could make the difference from every other idea that ever got sent up only to have its wings fold on launch: make sure you have the idea packaged in a Government/agency-friendly way, and then ensure the message gets through to the right people (who care, and have appropriate authority).

As we were discussing yesterday, good ideas without execution are .. nothing but wishful thinking really. It seems like Project Nimbus has all the right bases covered. It will be really exciting to see the first successes start to come through (they already have two ideas progressed to the stage of taking to the agency concerned).

This could be a really interesting year;-)