Geoawesomeness team is delighted to announce Ng Siau Yong, Director of GeoSpatial and Data Division & Chief Data Officer at the Singapore Land Authority (SLA) joins us as an expert on the panel for the 2022 Top 100 Geospatial Companies.
Ng Siau Yong is the Director of GeoSpatial and Data Division & Chief Data Officer at the Singapore Land Authority (SLA). He is responsible for driving and establishing a collaborative geospatial environment in Singapore. He oversees the formulation, design and management of the policy and programme for geospatial information governance, infrastructure and technology development, capacity building, and the use of geospatial systems in data analytics.
Under his stewardship, various important geospatial initiatives have been implemented. Among them, OneMap (www.onemap.sg), the Singapore Government’s geospatial information and services portal, has won many international accolades. GeoWorks, an industry centre has been set up to promote geospatial business growth, drive geo-innovation, and foster a well-connected geospatial community. Siau Yong initiated the setting up of the Singapore GeoSpatial Scholarship to strengthen the building of geospatial workforce. He has been actively involved in the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UNGGIM) and chaired the National Institutional Arrangement Work Group until recently.
Trained as an urban planner, Siau Yong started his career with the Singapore Urban Redevelopment Authority. He later served the Ministry of National Development and the Ministry of Law in various capacities. Upon joining SLA, he first assumed the position of Director, Strategic Planning and Policy and later Director, Land Asset Management Services, prior to taking on the current portfolio.
Apart from his professional work, Siau Yong had been actively involved in tertiary education for more than 17 years. He taught Urban Development, Urban Planning and Urban Policy in undergraduate and postgraduate programmes as Adjunct Associate Professor with the Department of Real Estate of the School of Design & Environment, National University of Singapore (NUS).
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A couple of months back, Rohini Swaminathan, a fellow member of the Women in Geospatial+ steering committee, introduced me to Anusuya Datta. We were talking about the WiG+ internal Newsletter and how to get more women into professional writing and an idea to organise a webinar and a writing competition was born. The goal was simple; we wanted to give women+ the tools and a starting point to begin writing articles, which could help them establish a professional presence in the geospatial community. I have never organised an event like this before, but I was excited to enable our members (and other women+ in the geospatial industry) to find their own voice and encourage them to take up writing, be it in form of blogging, articles or technical writing.
Webinar
On September 8th 2021, Women in Geospatial+ held a webinar on Geospatial Writing. This was part of our ongoing webinar series on career development. We had three writers on the panel – Jasmine Fleming, Rhian French and Gavin Schrock. We talked about various topics revolving around writing in general, as well as writing for the geospatial industry specifically. Here’s the webinar recording if you’re interested!
Competition
During the webinar, we also announced the start of the Women in Geospatial+ writing competition, which we have organised together with GoGeomatics and Geoawesomeness. Participants could choose one of two topics to write an article about: “Geospatial for good” or a case study.
The winner was chosen at the end of October by the judges – five professional writers – Anusuya Datta, Jasmine Fleming, Rhian French, Gaving Schrock of GoGeomatics and Muthukumar Kumar of Geoawesomeness. In the end, since all the entries were of such high standard, we have decided to publish all of the contest entries and not just the winning one. The aim is to give the new writers a space to shine and the opportunity to get their work to the wider audience.
These are the articles that were submitted as part of the competition:
- Aashi Popli – Geo climate risk solution (GCRS) startup
- Eniola Babatunde – Geoinformation as an innovative decision support tool in fighting COVID-19 using wastewater data
- Katyayini Sood – Importance of satellite-based image classification and spatial analysis for decision-makers in the social science domain
- Njambi L. Kimani – Geospatial in agriculture
- Sarah Taigel – Slow Ways – a fast adopter of geospatial technology
- Tanya Knowles – GIS helping with significant emissions reductions at the Oil and Gas authority
The Winner
- Helen Mazalon – Using geospatial analysis to identify where people are and understand who is being left behind
The winning piece of the Women in Geospatial+ writing competition has been written by Helen Mazalon. Here’s what one of the judges, Rhian French, said about the winning entry:
First person narrative worked well – I liked that she expressed her own views, particularly in the last paragraph, and wrote in a personable, easy-to-understand style. First hand experiences were described well and helped reader visualise the situations. Helen took a current international news topic and related it to wider global issues on sustainability. References were well-used and placed. I felt the article was the beginning of something you might read in National Geographic!
Women in Geospatial+
This was my first time organising an event like this and I have enjoyed every minute of it. I got to meet interesting people from the geospatial industry and we got to talk about a really interesting topic. At the same time, we have also provided the others with useful pointers to kick off their writing careers. It would have been hard to come by an opportunity like this had I not been a member of the Women in Geospatial+ network.
If you’re interested in learning more about Women in Geospatial+, have a look at our website www.womeningeospatial.org. Don’t forget to sign up if you’d like to be part of our community too!
