Why we need more GeekCamps in Singapore

Last Saturday on 22 August 2009, GeekCamp finally took place at the Yahoo! Asia office in Suntec City, Singapore. It drew between 80 to 100 people from 9 am to 7pm. It was organized by an enthusiastic community of geeks who develop for the web or engaged in some form of scientific research related to computing. While scrambling across topics on cloud computing, web and mobile development from Ruby, Python-Django, Android and iPhone, it has an almost full fledged view that it’s an event totally designed for technologists. Given that there are many developer communities in Singapore but with very few members (with no critical mass, maybe the PHP User Group or ASP developers), this is a good event to aggregate them together so that we all can share ideas. Here are some reasons why we need more of these GeekCamps in Singapore:

• Lack of Amateur-based Technologists to drive incremental or disruptive innovation: Everyone complains about the problem of either finding developers, technologists or even something that sounds vaguely like innovation in Singapore. If there are, they may be “collecting dust” in the universities or government owned research institutions with so much IP restrictions placed on it. Amateur based technologists can be cultivated via the process of GeekCamps with specific themes in mind, be it web development, mobile development or hardware hacking. In fact, we don’t have very good technologists, but a bunch of good IT graduates joining banks after graduation. In fact, most geeks in Singapore are usually people who self-taught themselves from O’Reilly books.
• Merging the thinking and implementation process: A lot of people are confused about the thinking and implementation process. The thinker generates the ideas, asks the engineer the feasibility and then works with the developer to implement that feasibility. In Singapore, this whole process of product development is totally missing or perhaps replicated in one way or another. In fact, very few people really played with the APIs or put something quickly up for testing. In fact, one of the talks on how to set up a Django site in 30 minutes by Kenny Shen made the point of teaching people how simple it can be to create your own site. The lighting talks were great fun as well, for example, the talk on Natural Language Processing by Francis Bond, an academic from NTU dazzled the audience with interesting algorithms and ideas.
• Think GeekCamp as a hobbyist club rather than a dealflow driver for incubators or venture capital firms: I see it as a hobbyist club rather than finding potential dealflow. During the whole event, I was busy trying to set up and speak to fellow geeks on some code implementation or bugs I encounter with my own private projects. Actually, there is something more to this. Most of the VCs or angel investors are strictly financiers with no training in technology. Perhaps, it is good to get some of them to understand the technology that they are investing.
• Why stop at software, bring in the hardware: I will love to see someone cracking the iPhone and show us what is inside, or produce some interesting software-hardware integration for the next GeekCamp. In fact, since there are all geeks in the event, finding access to the Internet ranged from wireless to tethering from iPhones becomes an interesting sight to watch. Even augmented reality might be something for people to explore using the mobile phone as a form of a communication device trigger some functions around his vicinity or someone giving a breakdown how the voice controls or recognition system in the present smart phones work.

So why talk about the need for more geekcamps in Singapore? We need to have more people trained in technology and innovation or enjoy the process of innovating like the people in Homebrew Computer Club before really thinking about commercialization. That’s how entrepreneurship begins.

Check out the twitter feed and feedback for the GeekCamp. I have to say this, “Great job on the #geekcampsg event @jasonong, @patrickhaller, @sausheong, @mhisham and all other volunteers together with speakers and audience who are involved in the event.”

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