It has been a crazy few weeks, which is sort of weird as we (in the Asia region) are approaching the Lunar New Year (for the interested, it starts on 8th Feb in 2016 and goes on for 15 days) and usually, everything (and I mean everything) slows down, similar to how it is when we come close to Christmas (Christmas back in 2015 was an unusually busy period for me too, I’m guessing the ‘weirdness’ continued from there).
Anyway, I thought I’ll post a quick update (before I head off to another meeting later) on ITechLaw Asia Pacific 2016.
For starters, I was not the only non-lawyer at the conference (although there were not many of us) and it was the first time I got ‘surrounded’ by so many lawyers. One truthful comment I must make – these folks are (in general) pretty nice people who can carry out really intelligent conversations (of which I received an “ah ha moment” as to why I meet so many lawyers at Mensa Singapore’s gathering – it seems that a good cohort of us gets into law school!).
With reference to the event’s content, from the sessions I attended (I did not attend day 2 of the conference) it was really robust (well, at least to me – a non-lawyer) and because there are sessions pertaining to disruption in different industry segments (hence the reason why I was invited to speak), I obtained some useful insights on other industries like FinTech, the Sharing Economy etc.) in addition to technology law, which was fantastic in my humble opinion.
One recurring (and in my opinion – amusing) theme that keep popping up from attendees was they trying to reconfirm that I was not a lawyer – because my “job title” is Chief Advocacy Officer and the word Advocate seems to suggest that I am practicing law. If you folks remember, my job title (about 10 years ago) used to be “Chief Advocate” and I changed it to “Chief Advocacy Officer” because people keep thinking I am a lawyer!
The context to which I am applying advocacy in my work is one taken from Public Health. For those unfamiliar to the discipline of Public Health (and for the record, I am formally trained in Public Health), advocacy is a big part of it. In fact, the UK Faculty of Public Health‘s twitter account description is “UK Faculty of Public Health aims to improve the public’s health through advocacy and campaign work, education, and standard-setting” – now isn’t this what BinaryHealthCare does for the Health Informatics discipline? Hence the reason why I am the Chief Advocacy Officer of BinaryHealthCare! 🙂
BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 