Onno W. Purbo

Onno W. Purbo is pioneering low cost, appropriate internet technology and providing Indonesians with the skills of how to use it.  He is aiming at widespread impact in his goal to transform Indonesia into a knowledge-based society.

New Idea

Onno W. Purbo is obsessed with his vision and is devoting his life to helping Indonesian society gain the access to information and knowledge as well as the means to disseminate it through forms of modern communication technology.  He offers practical solutions to technological problems which have limited people’s access to internet. 

He is working to connect communities and schools through by-passing the expensive methods of internet connection controlled by the telephone company.  He has developed and shared innovative appropriate technology such as using an antennae in a can as a means to link up homes, school and community warnets (internet cafes) with wireless connections to radio frequencies.

The goals Onno has set for himself involve quantity: large scale increases in the number of computer literate internet users throughout the country.  Onno believes in free and open access to information and writes hundreds of articles and books which he shares through the copy-left movement.   He leads workshops and seminars several times a week throughout the country.  While Onno shares his ‘know how’ with a broad spectrum of society, from bureaucrats to businessmen, university students to religious communities, he sees young people as the key players in the shifting paradigm of access to knowledge and global interconnections.  To reach out to them he fosters strategic partnerships with individual institutions and individuals within the ministry of education.

Problem

The digital divide cuts a deep gash through Indonesian society with the majority of the people on the “have not” side.   Onno sees this as an urgent issue because with the shifting paradigm of how we learn about the world and access information, more and more Indonesians will be left behind.  Not only is there lack of access to the technology, lack of education and information about how to use what is available are also serious problems.  Currently there are only about 4 million internet users out of the 210 million plus people living in Indonesia. Some of the problems include the telephone companies (PT Telkom and Indosat) trying to monopolize connections to internet server providers, and government policies to limit access to information, misuse of loans for programs that do not serve the public, etc.  In 1998 the Indonesian government received a World Bank loan to help internet development through a program known as Information Infrastructure Development Program.  Much of the money has been channeled to pay costly consultants to write concept papers, and little has been invested in infrastructure to support the public in attaining access to internet.  According to the Association of Indonesian Internet Cafes (AWARI) the approximately 2000 internet cafes in Indonesia are mostly self-financed with much of their cash flow going directly to the telephone companies for the privilege of line rentals.  

Onno knows that the problem is not just in the number of computers or connection lines available. " The digital divide has never been about just access to computers: it is also about education and opportunity.  If every family in every community had Internet access tomorrow, the digital divide would still be there because access to technology is useless without the computer skills needed to really take advantage of that technology”.   Often a high level of education and even English language skills are needed for people to understand technological advances and to have the computer literacy level necessary for them to reap the benefits.

Indonesia’s geography, some 17,000 islands spread across a span equal to the distance of New York to San Francisco, coupled with the huge population contribute to the difficulties in spreading ideas and information across the nation.  The lack of infrastructure, especially outside of Java is also daunting.  Although electricity has reached more remote areas in recent years, the availability of telephone lines is still severely limited and expensive, not only in the islands of eastern Indonesia but even in cosmopolitan centers like Bandung.  If connectivity is dependent upon this infrastructure, it will severely limit the access for a huge portion of the population.  Technology-assisted education, a potentially powerful tool to reach students in remote and underserved areas has not yet been a focus of development. Out of the 1300 tertiary institutions, 10,000 high schools, 10,000 Islamic schools and 4,000 vocational schools in Indonesia, currently only 200 universities and some 2000 schools are connected to the Internet.

Strategies

Onno Purbo is working at a non-stop pace to overcome some of these problems.  Firstly, he has pioneered an inexpensive system to provide access to the infrastructure of internet technology even to areas which have no telephone line access.  This involves a “Wi-Fi” or wireless system (LAN- Local Area Network) linked to high speed radio frequencies via a simple antennae in a tin can.  Such a system can provide 24-hour internet access to a neighborhood, school or internet café for about Rp. 330.000/month.  The antennae costs between $5 and $10 to build. Onno is spreading the information of this technology  through mailing lists, talk shows, a prolific number of articles which he has written, presentations and seminars.   He shares his hard drive freely for participants to copy.  10,000 CD-ROM of his information have been produced and distributed freely with the support of Apkomindo (the Association of Indonesian Computer Businesspeople).  

Onno believes in and deeply values the free access to information.  This has led him to be a proponent of the copy-left movement in Indonesia, the followers of which do not agree with copy-righting their writing or patenting their innovations.  

Onno sees the hope for the future development in this field lies with young people, especially those of junior and senior high school age.  To involve them in large numbers in his movement, Onno has reached out to public and private schools and the ministry of education.  The most supportive response so far has been with the pesantren (Islamic boarding school system) and with the Director General for vocational education.  With 10,000 pesantren in Indonesia often serving poor, rural communities, Onno sees this as a strategic entry point.  For vocational schools, he is working with the Dirgen of vocational schools on a set up scheme with a rotating fund.  He trains the school in wireless internet technology, and with an investment of Rp 20 juta they can set up a network.  The students and teachers pay between Rp. 1,000-5,000 a month for internet access and the initial investment can be paid back in a couple of years.  Already 1,000 out of the 4,000 vocational schools nationally have been connected to this system.

In all of the strategies that Onno is currently employing, he is looking towards high quantity impact.  It is important to him that all he is doing to share his knowledge is done through community support or is self supporting, and that there is no need to depend on the government or loans.

Person

Onno W. Purbo was born and raised in Bandung, West Java,  41 years ago in the intellectually stimulating environment of the Bandung Institute of Technology’s (ITB) campus.  This environment and his own innate curiosity were important contributing factors to his choice of his path in life.  His desire to serve society or as he says, “…being a human being, one can only survive if the majority of the society receives a significant impact from one’s existence…,” are part of a philosophy undoubtedly influenced by his late father.  Prof. Hasan Poerbo was a leading architect for the poor in Indonesia who pioneered ideas such as participatory rural action planning and bottom-up development at a time during the New Order regime when such ideas were extremely radical.  The focus on our interconnectedness and the need to build networks to accomplish change are some of the philosophy young Onno grew up with. 

As a youngster he enjoyed adventure, both physically through scouting activities and mountain climbing, and mentally through learning the principles of aerodynamics and short wave radios.  He had a passion for taking things apart and putting things together, building a viable model airplane and his own amateur radio transmitter. In the early 80’s when computers were still rare in Indonesia, Onno convinced friends in the ITB neighborhood to let him take apart and experiment with theirs.  He went on to study and be awarded honors as an electrical engineer, organizing a student club in his department at ITB which gathered together used and broken down computers to repair and create a network.  In 1987 he went on to do a Masters and PhD degrees in electrical engineering in Ontario, Canada.  

When Onno returned to Indonesia in 1993, he began teaching at ITB.  He pioneered internet technology and together with his students created a campus network of computers, eventually linking up some 200 universities.  He was appointed head of the ITB library and he was innovative in creating a database for an on-line library system and working to develop ways to improve the skills and the welfare of the library staff.  His passion to spread his ideas and information to a broader public led him to travel widely and present his ideas and share his skills at workshop and seminars off campus.  Eventually he was expected to decide where he wanted to focus his energy and he left the safety of the campus world, the position of a civil servant with guaranteed income and pension, and decided that his work would be more effective if he was a freelance IT activist.  Onno now lives with his wife and five children in Jakarta, keeping up a full schedule of writing, presenting, speaking and spreading his mission to help Indonesians get connected easily and inexpensively.