Community Based ICT

Community Based ICT

Infrastructure in Indonesia : A 12+ Years Experiences

This report is based on my personal 12+ years experience in attempting to build a financially sustainable community based information infrastructure in Indonesia. I may very much bias to my Indonesian experience. All activities are driven by a simple vision, to see a knowledge-based society in Indonesia. ICT is believed to be the tool of choice to accomplish the task.

No available funding is assumed. Thus, all activities must be self-finance & invested by the people to gain a long term sustainability. Maintain a self-finance & sustainable process under intervention of international bodies or donor agencies is the most difficult task. Most people will likely to assume that international bodies would likely to bring free funding for them. It may work for pilot projects; the process may unfortunately stop as soon as the funding source dried up.

Similarly in most government approaches, bridging a digital divide with imbedded divide policy framework (operator vs. common user) and no room for community-based infrastructure seems to be arguable. Not to mention the highly corrupt environment. Significant part of the existing regulatory framework became an obstacle against our effort intended for people’s movement, and, thus, leads to unnecessary casualties in some cases.

My experience shows that it would be much easier to initiate a self-finance sustainable process if there is no funding from any donor agency to begin with. We can easily see the committed individuals & successful approaches in a free donor / government zone. Care has to be carefully planned to inject funding in a self-finance & sustainable process. Key successes rely heavily on ability to create a tacit knowledge exchange platform enabling knowledge producing young authors follow up by education processes focused on scaling & replicating the process for high impact to the society. Open source, open document, copy left movement would be significant. All processes are self-finance. It has nothing to do with the technological superiority of the equipments. Adjustment should be made for different countries & regulatory environment.

As a result, after 12+ years of struggle, from few Internet user, no cybercafe, no school on the Internet, not much book and IT magazine in Indonesia. In 2005, today, we have 13-15 million Internet users, 2000-3000 cybercafes, 4000 schools on the Internet, 15.000+ Outdoor WiFi Installation for neighborhood network, hundred of books & magazine on ICT and hundreds of ICT authors supported by 50.000+ active mailing lists and unaccountable number of Indonesian webs & blogs that drives the ICT movement in Indonesia.

The catch would be in the ability to identify & to work with informal (most likely underground) visionary leaders / pioneers in the country / area. It would unfortunately be very difficult to find one through formal (government) channels.

Onno W. Purbo
An Ordinary Indonesian
onno@indo.net.id