Jakarta, 23 December 2000
Dear Dr. Frederick Bush
Director of Development
Woodrow Wilson Center

This is to follow-up on your letter dated November 2, 2000 to His Excellency Prof. Dr. Dorodjatun Kuntjoro Jati (Indonesian Ambassador in the US) regarding cross cultural IT conference jointly organize between your organization and Los Alamos National Laboratory which will be held from June 13-15, 2000 in Washington, US.

After going through chain of requests, Prof. Dr. Widiadnyana Merati (Vice Rector for Academic Affair of Institute of Technology in Bandung, Indonesia) has requested me to responds to your request. I am very pleased for possible involvement in your upcoming IT cross-cultural conference as I dedicate all of my time to help facilitate the building of knowledge based society in Indonesia as independent writer.

I received my PhD in electrical engineering in Canada (University of Waterloo). I have been involved in the development of Internet & its cyber-society in Indonesia since its early days in around 1986-1987. It is a challenging environment - with very limited resources & infrastructure as well as low level of average education of most Indonesian – it would be a real challenge to transform them into cyber-society.

After spending six (6) years, teaching in electrical engineering department at Institute of Technology in Bandung (ITB) Indonesia – I decided to resign from ITB and dedicate myself to educate & facilitate the movement of Indonesian people into knowledge based society. I am currently dedicating my life as independent writer for writing articles (hundreds of them), books (close to 15 books) as well as giving talks in various occasion – to educate Indonesian as well as to enable them to access global Internet through self-finance internet café’s. Both heavy engineering topics and most of the time easy & more social touch for easy digest are the nature of my articles & books. All of these articles are published in various magazines, newspapers & public domain for the Indonesians to download from various websites such as http://www.bogor.net/idkf/ as well as distribute for free in CD-ROMs (10.000+ of them).

I would be very pleased for the possibility to share my experience as well as some of my articles with other scholars. As independent writer who dedicate my life to educate the Indonesian society, funding would be the most burden for distance traveling. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours truly,
Onno W. Purbo

Ps. I am Cc-ing this mail to the staff of Indonesian embassy in Washington as well as the Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB).
Pps. Season’s Greetings & all the best for the upcoming 2001.