Overview of Indonesian Civil Society Activities

Prepared By:
Onno W. Purbo

Supported By:
Mbah Pon’s Nasi Uduk in front of Onno’s house.
VisionNet (dedicated Internet Access)

Objectives:
Brief overview of Indonesian Civil Society Activities to be published for WSIS 2005 in Tunis.

Report Outline
Indonesia Open Source Activities
	Indonesian Linux User groups
	Mirroring activities
	Open Source Developer activities
	Indonesian Distros
	Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS)

Indonesian communities on Internet
	Mailing lists
	Indonesian Blogger Communities
	ICT Roadshows, Seminars, & Demos
	Other Techie Communities

Education Communities
	Indonesia Digital Library Network (IndonesiaDLN)
	Internet Goes To School & School Networks
	Interesting Open Content Sites

Low Cost Internet in Indonesia
	Internet Kiosk Community
	Neighborhood Network – Internet Kiosk Next Generation
	Indonesian Wireless Internet infrastructure

IT Journalist & Writer Communities

IT for the Visual Impair

Indonesia Open Source Activities

One-third of all software in use around the world last year was pirated, reports a recent study. The BSA reports that in more than half the 87 countries studied, the piracy rate exceeded 60 percent. In 24 countries, the piracy rate exceeded 75 percent.

The countries with the highest piracy rates were Vietnam with 92 percent; the Ukraine with 91 percent; China with 90 percent; Zimbabwe with 90 percent, and INDONESIA with 87 percent. Detailed can be seen at http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/it_res/print.php/3506736

Indonesian Linux User groups

There are plenty of Indonesian Open Source groups. Some of them are represented in terms of Linux sites. Some of the most interesting Indonesian Linux sites are

•	http://www.linux.or.id - seems to be awake and energize its regional acivities in various areas.
•	http://www.ilmukomputer.com - seems to be slowing down a little bit in the past few months.
•	http://www.sony-ak.com - slow but sure.
•	http://www.opensource-indonesia.com.

There are other platform that most communities hang out, such as, IRC at dalnet, efnet and allnetwork (an Indonesian server). The busiest Linux channel is #indolinux

Mailing list is also a major platform for Linux user group to hang out. The major / national mailing list is Tanya-jawab@linux.or.id. There are many smaller & regional Linux mailing lists that mostly hosted at yahoogroups.com.

Mirroring activities

Mirroring is quite active in Indonesia, as bandwidth is precious. Most mirroring activities are for open source software as well as many open documents, not much mirroring activities for other software. Some of the major mirrors in Indonesia are

Linux
	http://kambing.vLSM.org/	- Depok JUITA
	http://komo.vLSM.org/		- Jakarta IDC
	http://kuya.vLSM.org/		- Jakarta 3WSI  
	http://cacing.vLSM.org/		- Jakarta Indika.NET
	http://kebo.vLSM.org/		- Surabaya ITS
 	http://fedora.cbn.net.id
	http://de2.vlsm.org/		- Debian Depok
FreeBSD
web mirror:
	http://www.id.freebsd.org
	http://www.freebsd.or.id
ftp mirror:
	ftp://ftp.id.freebsd.org
	ftp://maxwell.itb.ac.id
cvs/cvsup mirror:
	cvsup.id.freebsd.org
	cvsup.freebsd.or.id
	cvsup2.freebsd.or.id

Open Documents / Manuals / Libraries
	http://tldp.vlsm.org/
	http://onno.vlsm.org/
	http://www.bogor.net/idkf/
	http://www.bogor.net/igts/

Open Source Developer activities

There are some Indonesian open source software development activities. Some of them finds its host in freshmeat & sourceforge. Example of these Open Source developments are,

•	VoIP Billing http://freshmeat.net/projects/voip-billing/ developed by Trabas. However, it seems not currently very actively developed.

•	PlaySMS http://playsms.sourceforge.net developed by Anton Raharja <anton@ngoprek.org> - A Linux SMS gateway.

•	IP plug and play ippnp http://sourceforge.net/projects/ippnp/ developed by Dion Sasmito <aeondion@gmail.com> to enable one to move around the network while keeping their IP address.

•	NontonVCD http://oss.mdamt.net/vcd/ Nonton VCD is a VCD player. Multiple video mode and fullscreen capable developed by Mohammad DAMT oss@mdamt.net http://mdamt.net.

•	Office Applications http://www.software-ri.or.id/kantaya

•	ID GNOME http://sourceforge.net/projects/idgnome & http://id.gnome.org/proyek/ aim to translate Gnome to Indonesian language. It is initiated by Priyadi Iman Nurcahyo (GNOME 1.x). Followed by Mohammad DAMT with Ahmad Riza H Nst help since version 2.x until today.

There are some Indonesians also active in KDE developments. There are many open source translation projects to Indonesian language that can be found on the Internet. There are at least 12 projects listed in freshmeat.net.

Indonesian Distros

There are several Indonesian made Linux distro, such as,

•	BlankON	http://kambing.vlsm.org/DLL/blankon/
		http://komo.padinet.com/blankon/
		http://kambing.vlsm.org/DLL/blankon/
		http://ilmukomputer.rad.net.id/blankon/
		http://blankonlinux.dhecyber.net.id/
		http://blankon.gsd.net.id/
		http://blankon.massaint.or.id/
		http://blankon.cbn.net.id/
•	Xnuxer Linux http://www.polarhome.com/~bastardbox/stuff/xnuxer-lnx.zip
http://kambing.vlsm.org/debian-cd/xnuxer/
•	RimbaLinux	http://www.rimbalinux.com
•	WinBI		http://www.igos.web.id
•	Debian Depok http://kambing.vlsm.org/de2/

Some note on the distros, it seems BlankON is the most active community based distro that hanging around nusalinux@yahoogroups.com mailinglist. It is driven by YPLI (Yayasan Penggerak Linux Indonesia / Indonesia Linux Mover Foundation), and sponsored by UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization).

About 20.000 CDROMs of BlankOn Linux 1.0 RC2 has been bundled with InfoLINUX Magazine, February 2005 Edition, for distributed to all of InfoLINUX subscribers in Indonesia. BlankON also submitted 500 CDs to UNESCO for archive and limited distribution. The final release of BlankOn Linux 1.0 CD will be bundled with InfoLINUX mini book of BlankOn Linux 1.0. The latest version of BlankOn Linux 1.0 CD ISO image also available for public (freely download) at the Internet.

Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS)

Indonesia Goes Open Source (IGOS) http://www.igos.web.id is an Indonesian national effort to beef-up the Indonesian national information technology through the use of Free Open Source Software (FOSS). It is very much government lead activities. We all hope it can last long.

One major draw back is in not much effort in ICT curriculum for Indonesian schools. Most of the ICT materials for Indonesian schools are very much Microsoft sales pitch.

Indonesian communities on Internet
Mailing lists
The e-community activities can be easily probed through the way they interact on various Indonesian mailing lists on the Internet. It was started in early ’90, some Indonesians started the first Indonesian mailing list at Indonesians@jamus.berkeley.edu. It gradually grows into many mailing lists. In ’96, Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB) was putting two (2) Pentium servers on-line the Indonesian Internet community. It manages to serve more than 200+ mailing list. Currently, major Indonesian mailing lists can be found at

•	http://www.yahoogroups.com also known as http://groups.yahoo.com may be the busiest mailing list server on the Internet, which serves 45.000+ Indonesian mailing lists. In this work, we will evaluate more closely the characteristics of mailing lists at http://groups.yahoo.com.
•	http://groups.plasa.com runs by TelkomNet, the Indonesian Telkom ISP. As of mid February 2002, reported by Luqman El Hakiem Syamlan (luke@telkom.co.id) they serve 2299 Indonesian mailing lists.

Based on my study in 2001, it is interesting to note that most (28.2%) of the Indonesian cyber communities are using the mailing list mainly to say hello and other social functions. Next are the communities for getting knowledge (20.1%) and business activities (17.6%). The number of mailing lists on pornographic, religious, politics, and hobby are much less.

Indonesian Blogger Communities

Although not as large as Indonesian mailing list communities, there are quite a number of Indonesian blogger on the Internet. Some of them are Blogbugs mailing list http://groups.yahoo.com/group/blogbugs/, Bandung Blog Village http://bbv.or.id/, Blogstation Bogor Depok Blogger community http://www.blogstation.org/weblog.php, Malang Blogger Communities http://blogmal.tempemenjes.com/, http://planet.terasi.net/, Jogyakarta Blogger Community http://angkringan.or.id/baru and Bloggerfamily forum http://www.bloggerfamily.com/.

In mid 2004, a survey of Indonesian blogger has been performed by Nita Yuanita http://nita.goblogmedia.com/HTML/risetblog.html <nita@goblogmedia.com>. A quick summary of the survey is as follows:

•	Popularity rating of a weblog highly depends on links by other webs.
•	Posting / content determine the rating of the Weblog.
•	A weblog audience will routinely visit 10 sites, and a maximum read of 5 sites.
•	A rough estimate, the number of weblog reader is 1.9 of those who write comments.
•	Most Indonesian use blog as diary, journal or write things that of interest in their surroundings.

Other references on Indonesian Blogger can be found at http://enda.goblogmedia.com/.

ICT Roadshows, Seminars, & Demos

There are two most presistance ICT roadshow, workshop organizers, namely,

Michael Sunggiardi (Michael@sunggiardi.com)
Heru Nugroho (hn4mail@yahoo.com)

Since 1996, Michael Sunggiardi and his team BOCOR & now CEO has been very active in organizing many demonstrations, workshops and roadshow to around 60-100 Indonesian cities per year on various practical ICT topics, such as, Internet Kiosks, WiFi, VoIP, Linux, Linux Server, Digital Live etc. Most of the topics is very much practical and with more emphasis on hands-on experiences for the audiences.

Michael Sunggiardi is one of the active members of the Association of Indonesian Computer Businesses. Being one of the board members of the Association makes Michael close to computer business communities and helps provide support for the activities.

Heru Nugroho used to be the secretary general of the Indonesian Association of Internet Service Provider http://www.apjii.or.id. He may be the most active Secretary General from the Indonesian ISP communities that really help the Internet communities through various seminars & talk shows. Although the number of cities covered by Heru Nugroho’s team is not as large as Michael Sunggiardi’s team, they have made a significant contribution to the Indonesian Internet communities.

Other Techie Communities

There are quite a number of extreme / specific communities on the Internet. Some of them are:

•	http://www.ipv6.or.id – Indonesian IPv6 communities that drive the IPv6 development in Indonesia.
•	id-gmail@googlegroups.com – Indonesian gmail users, that produce a significant amount of traffic that create headace to google.

Education Communities

Indonesia Digital Library Network (IndonesiaDLN)

Lead by Ismail Fahmi (ismail@itb.ac.id) at Knowledge Management Research Group (KMRG) kmrg@kmrg.itb.ac.id, a free software for Digital Library has been developed. A working network of the Indonesia Digital Library can be found at http://www.indonesiadln.org and http://gdlhub.indonesiadln.org. The International Development Research Center (IDRC, http://www.idrc.ca) Canada and Yayasan Litbang Telekomunikasi Informatika (YLTI, http://www.ylti.or.id) funded their initial research activities.

The Ganesha Digital Library 3.1, an open-sources/free software, can be run on a system running Unix/Linux or Windows 98/NT/2000 or Windows 95 with winsock32. Apache web server using PHP4 scripting language to interact with MySQL database may be used by dedicated or dial-up infrastructure to create the knowledge infrastructure.

It is currently able to integrate 30 digital libraries all over Indonesia as well as some Asian countries, e.g., Penang Library Network at University Science Malaysia (USM). There are 80+ institutions has been registered to use and to try being part of the library. A total in excess of 1500 download of digital library software have been performed; not counting those who receive and copy the software from available CD-ROM.

Internet Goes To School & School Networks

There are many Internet Goes to School / School Network activities in Indonesia. To name a few,

•	Internet Goes To School (IG2S) has been driven by PT. Telekomunikasi Indonesia and managed to educate thousand of students as well as teachers in all Indonesian provinces. It was performed in parallel through Telkom regional divisions. Some event involves quite technical workshops on how to setup server at schools.

•	Sekolah 2000 movement, was declared in Jakarta 1999. The movement is lead by Heru Nugroho that managed to help schools in Indonesia to get connected to the Internet. It was done through seminar, talkshow & workshops in 3-10 cities as well as through web dissemination at http://www.sekolah2000.or.id.

•	To best of my knowledge, the only government & education sector movement that managed to provide significant impact on Indonesian Internet society is the vocational school's Internet movement (dikmenjur@yahoogroups.com). Dr. Gatot H.P. (gatothp@yahoo.com / gatothp@dikmenjur.net), the director of vocational schools at ministry of education, is the one who drive the movement. Unlike other bureaucrats, Dr. Gatot H.P is very responsive to e-mails. In the year 2001, he works closely with other Indonesian Internet societies and manages to connect 4000+ Indonesian vocational schools into the Internet. They move forward and creating school city-wide network in 30+ cities and creating ICT centers in many cities to drive ICT activities in their cities. We are very proud on their accomplishments.

•	As e-government becoming a new toy in public sector, public – Education partnership has been demonstrated by friends at several Indonesian districts as part of their contributions to society. A good example is an activities at Kebumen Central Java lead by Bambang bbdw1@kebumenku.com. They have been organizing workshop for schools in their region in September 2005 & will organize such workshop every 2 months. They are also collecting 300+ PC to be used for the PC workshop in their districts. E-learning software is developed in collaboration with University of Indonesia, Jakarta. Surprisingly, no funding has even been provided by the public sector all funding seems to fairly much self-funded.

Interesting Open Content Sites

There are a couple of interesting open content sites, such as,

•	http://www.ilmukomputer.com – aim for education communities specially in Information technology. As reported by Romi Satria Wahono, the leader, It carries more than 900 tutorials / books / articles that can be freely downloaded. Hundred of thousands of IlmuKomputer.COM’s CD has been distributed to junior high schools, senior high school as well as universities all over Indonesia. It is distributed in ISO form within IlmuKomputer.COM communities. Some of these communities are high school graduate works at Internet Kiosk, some gradually migrated into a much better workplace into professional training, software development project etc.
•	http://www.materikuliah.com – lead by Budhi Kristianto, a lecturer at UKSW in Salatiga Mid Java. Dedicate his site for holding lecturer materials fairly similar to ilmukomputer.com. However, he aims for more general all faculties.

Low Cost Internet in Indonesia

Internet Kiosk Community
One of the largest Internet kiosk community and currently very much organized can be found at asosiasi-warnet@yahoogroups.com and their web http://www.awari.or.id. There are currently more then 2500+ Internet kiosk all over Indonesia and regionally organized.

As Indonesian policy makers implementing their copyright law and swept through the Internet kiosk in the past 6 months, there is not much choice for these Internet kiosks than to either buy the expensive Microsoft software or migrate to Free Open Source Software, such as, Linux. Workshops & roadshows has been organized in collaboration with IGOS team to train Internet kiosks communities on Free Open Source Software.

Surprisingly, there are a significant amount of money flows to Microsoft due to police ride to Internet kiosks. Judith MS the president of Indonesian Internet Kiosk Association estimated that there are 800+ Internet kiosks with more than 10 PC each have to buy a US$75 piece of paper called licensed that reachs US$600.000. That is a lot of money of Indonesian.

In addition, Basuki Suhardiman (basuki@itb.ac.id) commented that monthly spending of Indonesian Internet Kiosks for bandwidth is actually larger that what they spent for operating system. He estimates more than US$ 1 million / month is spent for buying Internet bandwidth in the Indonesian Internet kiosks. Thus, alternative technologies & policies to minimize the bandwidth cost would be significant to the development of Internet Kiosk in Indonesia.

Neighborhood Network – Internet Kiosk Next Generation

Neighborhood Network is a simple extension of Internet Kiosk operations which basically uses the simple Internet Kiosk technology and run / extends the UTP cable to its surrounding neighborhood. A typical setup & knowledge on such Neighborhood Network can be downloaded from http://www.bogor.net/idkf/rt-rw-net/

Having such simple extension enable the whole neighborhood to share the Internet access at low cost. Typical dedicated 64Kbps leased line to the Internet will cost about US$300-400/month, sharing the access will enable each house to share only US$15-20 / month.

Indonesian Wireless Internet infrastructure

Unlike most western & developed countries that have a luxury to access the Internet through high speed DSL services, such luxury is rare in many part of Indonesia. Thus, the best solution for Indonesian is to use wireless broadband specially WiFi based equipment that can be obtained at fairly low cost around US$50-70 per Access Point.

The facts are 64Kbps 24 hour Internet connection via Telco infrastructure would cost US$400 / month in Indonesia; WiFi band 2.4GHz is only recently (January 2005) unlicensed; government may revoked illegal use of outdoor WiFi equipment especially in 5.8GHz; government used to tax US$2200/year/node for using WiFi 2.4GHz band; in 1993, there were not many ICT books in local Indonesian language; in 1993, there were few Indonesian Internet users.

After 10+ years of struggle in deploying a movement of community based ICT infrastructure in Indonesia without much support from the government, no World Bank, nor ADB, nor IMF funding. Today, there are 15+ million Indonesian on the Internet. 4000+ schools on the Internet.

Our future objectives would focus on interconnecting 220.000+ schools all over the country in which 48+ million students are studied; and 80+ million work forces in the country.

Deploying a community-based infrastructure in an unfriendly environment is an art. It is impossible to initially run a professional and commercial based fixed wireless broadband services as known in developed countries.

We need to adopt a guerilla strategy to deploy low cost broadband infrastructure. The infrastructure must be distributed, autonomous, self-finance and not centralized. Cost, affordability and easiness would be key in deploying a self-finance community based fixed wireless broadband infrastructure.

The Community Neighborhood Network model moves away from the conventional Telecentre model, which centralizes all connectivity in a single room.  The new WiFi Community Network distributes connectivity throughout the neighborhood thereby reducing monthly costs for 24 hour Internet access.  As more houses or computers in the neighborhood become connected to the neighborhood network, the operating cost as well as the initial investment cost will decline. 

To get a better idea of the savings one can achieve by developing an outdoor WiFi neighborhood network, let us conduct a price comparison. Broadband 24-hour Internet access from the Indonesian Telco costs US$400-800/month/user.  This price allows the user to exchange limited traffic over the network with a high level QoS (Quality of Service).  In comparison, WiFi Neighborhood Network broadband 24 hour Internet access costs US$15-45/month /neighbor. This low price includes the ability for users to exchange unlimited traffic on the network with variable QoS, depending on the level of traffic at that time.

Currently, there are close to 15.000 institutions including broadband Internet cafes, schools, and residential neighborhoods are using WiFi technologies as an alternative to conventional connectivity options. 

Our approach is very much based on community empowerment. A key component for the successful deployment of WiFi technologies in the Indonesian context is the development of young students to become local knowledge producers. These knowledge producers (young authors) acquire WiFi knowledge from various sources, experiment with them, and then author their experiences into publications in the local language (Bahasa Indonesia).  To sustain young authors to continue producing knowledge materials they are compensated with US$15-25/article and US$500-700/book. The typical monthly living cost for a student is US$80-95 (including tuition, books, housing and meals).

The impact of knowledge producers is felt on many levels.  Not only do their publications educate people, but they also open people’s minds to new ideas and help reaffirm the feasibility of investing their own money in such infrastructure models.  Once people are convinced to deploy community neighborhood networks, they can utilize knowledge produced by the young authors to assist in building their capacities.  These capacities include initial set up, operation, and maintenance of the infrastructure.

This journey towards achieving low-cost connectivity was complemented with many talented and dedicated Indonesians who enjoyed sharing their knowledge, expertise and resources for the betterment of Indonesian society.

Today, the learning and development process is continued through various Indonesian mailing lists, such as, orari-news@yahoogroups.com, indowli@yahoogroups.com, and genetika@groups.or.id.

IT Journalist & Writer Communities

IT Journalist & Writer is key in the empowerment of the Indonesian. A strong society in ICT journalists has established at technomedia@yahoogroups.com lead by several ICT journalist activists, such as, Merry Magdalena, Ajeng, Wandi. There are close to 160 member of this community and very active in producing articles, news to educate the Indonesians.

ICT writer community is located at penulis-ti@yahoogroups.com with close to 800 members. Some of the publishers, such as, Andi Publishers, are keen to do seminar and roadshow to various universities to seek for new & fresh talent writer especially in ICT.

IT for the Visual Impair

Yayasan Mitra Netra http://www.mitranetra.or.id/ a non-profit organization that focus on the social security of the visual impair / blind, focus their effort to enable their visual impair communities to be similar to other communities.

One of their strategies is to provide access to information & communication technology for the visual impair / blind. Mitra Netra has produce books that accessible for the blind in the form of audio book in cassette or CD-ROM as wel as e-book. Mitra Netra has developed on line library in Braille at http://www.mitranetra.or.id/library to facilitate collaboration among Braille publishers in Indonesia.

Mitra Netra has developed an accessible Web model at http://www.mitranetra.or.id and hope to push the government to write a ministry act on accessible Web for all Indonesian Webs. Research & development for accessible technology has been performed / encouraged by Mitra Netra. Some of Mitra Netra’s results are:

•	E-dictionary for English-Indonesia Indonesia-English for the visual impair known as Mitranetra electronic dictionary (MELDICT).
•	Word processor for Braille known as Mitranetra Braille Converter (MBC) to produce Braille books.