TraceTogether At One
To mark one year of community-driven contact tracing, here is the first of a series of musings by Team TraceTogether. Check back for links to other posts at the end of this story.
The journey begins
Uh, I think we’re going to have to go back to office…
It was 6pm on Friday, 20 March 2020. TraceTogether, the world’s first national contact tracing app had just had its “Hello World” moment. And we were going to take a break from 8 weeks of round-the-clock scrambling to celebrate. 🎉 Or so we thought…
Within the first half-hour, our dashboard showed 30,000 sign-ups. And the support tickets were coming in fast and furious. Celebratory dinner aborted, we cabbed back to our office at Sandcrawler to find that, somewhere along the AYE highway, we picked up yet another 30,000 users. 😂
Over the next week, helpdesk hell descended as our user base grew to 1 million. Thankfully, we were aided by dozens of Government Digital Services (GDS) volunteers. In the first 2 days, we received more than 2,000 tickets, including more than a handful from foreign governments, companies, and individuals. It really brought home the shared humanity that COVID-19 had thrust on us, and inspired the BlueTrace manifesto.
Roller-coaster product evolution
TraceTogether’s launch day was the climactic culmination of weeks of hustle to bring an idea from concept to reality. With the benefit of hindsight, 20 March 2020 was also the start of an unpredictable roller-coaster journey for Team TraceTogether. We had merely aimed to seed in the public consciousness the possibilities of using Bluetooth in a novel manner to aid contact tracing, but demands from stakeholders quickly stretched our goals well beyond our own modest ambitions.
What has changed, what have we learnt, and how have we grown – one year on?
I won’t try to answer this entirely by myself. Instead, I’ve invited several of my team members to take a break from manipulating code and pixels, and contribute their own individual thoughts and reflections on the TraceTogether journey at the one-year mark. I hope it will provide a behind-the-scenes look at the twists and turns along the way. (If you have reflections to offer, do send them our way too!)
To whet your appetite, here are just some of the milestones along our journey:
- Rebuilding various components of the app in order to better integrate with the myriad systems supporting contact tracing operations
- Building up a device farm of hundreds of devices to perform calibration tests, getting to work in an electronics test chamber, and testing on board a cruise ship and at Changi airport
- Complementing the app solution with a hardware device, so as to allow the digitally excluded to participate
- Publishing OpenTrace to help others adapt TraceTogether to their own communities, and consulting with tech companies working on their own solutions
- Speaking at various platforms to share the TraceTogether journey and ethical principles that guided the app’s design, including being featured in a business school case study
- Sparking a national debate around the trade-offs between public health and privacy, and between health and safety, leading to new laws being passed
- Winning domestic and international awards for innovation
- Attaining nearly 90% programme coverage, and shortening the time taken to trace contacts of patients by more than half.
The people of TraceTogether
TraceTogether is not a project. It’s people.
Events aside, the most critical ingredient of TraceTogether’s success is the passion of the people behind it. GDS is organised as a collective of autonomously-run teams, and this means that everyone in Team TraceTogether opted-in — some juggling other projects — to contribute towards making community-driven contact tracing a reality. They include:
- Product managers, who take a systems-level view of the product’s evolution and reconcile the demands of our many stakeholders with our limited resources
- Designers, who imagine ahead of reality, carry the persona of the product, and advocate for our users
- Engineers, who ultimately bring our team’s dreams to life through code, whether through mobile app coding, security and functional quality testing, or backend development and operations
- Customer support officers, who have collectively triaged nearly 100,000 tickets in the past year
- Translation volunteers, who have helped make TraceTogether available in 8 different languages — English, Mandarin, Melayu, Tamil, Bengali, Burmese, Hindi, and Thai
We also owe our thanks to:
- Our friends at the Ministry of Health (MOH) who took a chance on us
- Our coworkers at Smart Nation and Digital Government Office (SNDGO), and GovTech, who supported us
- Our agency and industry partners from the Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Infocomm & Media Development Authority (IMDA), Nanyang Polytechnic (NYP), Republic of Singapore Air Force (RSAF), and Rohde & Schwarz
- You, our users, who – above all – make community-driven contact tracing a reality 💙; special shout-out to the Friends of TraceTogether group and beta testing communities, whose views and suggestions have been invaluable as we evolve TraceTogether
Hear from Team TraceTogether
We’ll be adding more posts in the coming weeks to take you behind the curtains. ☺️
- Location-based check-ins – yay or nay? Joycelyn, our design lead, peels back the curtain to share some of the difficult choices that Team TraceTogether had to make in relation to GPS location.
In the meantime, we’re looking for more beta testers for the app, as well as kindred spirits looking to join us in making #techforpublicgood a reality. Also, remember to keep your app updated to the latest version!
If you’re not already on board, please consider getting the app or token. It will help us all protect ourselves, protect our family and loved ones, and protect our community.
TraceTogether, safer together. 🇸🇬
Jason Bay is Senior Director (Government Digital Services) at the Government Technology Agency, Singapore. He is also the product lead for TraceTogether, the world’s first nationwide Bluetooth contact tracing system. The views, thoughts, and opinions expressed in this article belong solely to the author, and do not necessarily reflect those of the Government Technology Agency, or any other group or individual.
