Weare.sg: Documenting the coolest people in Singapore

Steve Wozniak’s criticisms of Singaporeans as rigid and unimaginative sparked a heated debate last year. There were those who could totally relate to what Woz said, while others pointed out that Singapore is a fast changing society that is starting to tolerate a bit of rebellion.

Soon after the media circus was done making a hullabaloo out of this topic, Weare.sg was born. The website has the mission of documenting the coolest people in Singapore, in the realm of entrepreneurship, culture, the arts, and any other category you can think of.

Some of the people already featured include James Chan, principal of tech incubator Neoteny Labs, Kuik Shiao-Yin, co-founder of social enterprise School of Thought, as well as Ren, Ken, and Mark from The Kennel (read: This co-working space sits next to a forest), a co-working space for creative workers.

The founder, who has decided to remain anonymous, aims to collect a list of at least a hundred cool Singaporeans, and in his own words: “Once we get to a hundred, we’ll send this site to Mr. Wozniak, saying: Dear Mr. Wozniak: here they are. Kthxbye.”

But he clarified that the website was not started because of what Woz said. The debate did, however, give the founder an opportunity to explain his initiative in a relevant context. His project is inspired by a similar initiative in New York called We are NY Tech, a site which is documenting the who’s who in the city’s tech startup scene.

SGE: Could you tell our readers about yourself (without revealing too much, of course)?

Weare.sg: I grew up in Singapore, but have been living overseas for the past few years. I came back for a month long visit in December 2011, and found a Singapore that was quite very different from the one I had left years before. It was a Singapore that was bustling with new ideas, initiatives, and excitement. I’ve kept a list of “Cool Things in Singapore” since my JC days, and on this trip back the list doubled in size.

I took the opportunity to seek out a lot of the people who were behind the initiatives on the list, and found a nascent and growing group of do-ers, creatives and changemakers. Talking to them, I got a glimpse of their incredible optimism and energy. They are the positive deviants of our society, who take our status quo and push it a little further each time. They move our society forward.

SGE: Did you start this because of Woz’s comments?

Weare.sg:You know, there’s always the stereotype of a Singaporean: complain, blame, cut queue, not creative, boring. We’ve got to be the most self-hating country in the world. If I got $1 for every time I heard a Singaporean say “Singaporeans are __________ (insert negative characteristic here)”, I’d be rich.

Why define ourselves by the worst of us?

This project seeks to profile the energy and optimism of the best of us. Hopefully, it will inspire more of us to do the same. And perhaps it’ll change how we look at ourselves as a people.

The project’s genesis doesn’t have much to do with Wozniak, to be honest. It was just a quote that galvanized a lot of the community, gave this project a little bit of momentum, and helped explain the concept. If we’re only doing this because a foreigner says we suck, then that’d be a problem. We’ve got to do this for ourselves.

SGE: When I shared about Weare.sg on SGE’s facebook wall, some have pointed out that there’s really no point proving Woz wrong. In fact, in many ways he was right. What’s your response?

Weare.sg: There’s no good answer to this. What he said is pretty inconsequential, what matters is whether we’ll eventually prove those words right or wrong.

SGE: Who else can we look forward to being featured on the site?

Weare.sg: We’re going to start featuring organizations and initiatives, in addition to just featuring people. We’ve come to realize that they are an essential part of the fabric, and we can’t just profile people.

Another feature we’re looking at is communities: i.e. www.weare.sg/arts will show all the people we’ve profiled who are in doing stuff in the arts, while weare.sg/sports will show people who are doing amazing things in sports.

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