Clikme

Onno W. Purbo

A Common Indonesian

onno@indo.net.id

Overall Perspective

This report is based on
my personal 10+ years experience in trying to build a financially
sustainable community based information infrastructure in Indonesia.
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.

Starting the early 1990's
until around 1999, I tried to use a mix approach, i.e., trying to
persuade the government as well as educating the Indonesian people in
building the needed infrastructure. Starting around end 1999 I
finally resigned as Indonesian civil servant and also refused a lot
of job offers, focusing all my energy as a jobless ICT individual
trying to educate the Indonesian people to empower them to build
their own Infrastructure.

It seems that the later
approach would likely to guarantee a financially sustainable
community based information infrastructure, at least in Indonesia. It
is not an easy job, significant part of the existing regulatory
framework became an obstacle against our effort intended for people's
movement, and, thus, lead to unnecessary sacrifices in some cases.

Key success would rely
heavily on quality, culture and attitude of the human resources, the
people as well as the civil servant / government officials. It has
nothing to do with the technological superiority of the equipments.

A good reference is the
book on Digital Review Asia Pacific a sponsored publication by IDRC.
More detailed technical discussions can be downloaded from
http://www.apjii.or.id/onno/
& http://onno.vlsm.org