Gadfly Tweaks Indonesians' Access to the Internet

By Tim Lougheed

Tears well up in Onno Purbo's eyes as he reaches the end of his presentation at the Ottawa headquarters of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). As he pauses to regain his composure, the screen shows a group of Indonesian children huddled around a computer with colorful drawings - the same simple houses, trees, and stick figures that kids draw all over the world.

"These are street children," he says after a long delay. "They have nowhere to live. And they made these pictures on the computer."

For Purbo, these children and their artwork are a testimony to what the computer is bringing to his native country, Indonesia. Purbo is ensuring that this technology gets into the hands of as many of his people as possible.

The cultural revolution that rocked the Western world during the 1960s is now in full swing in Indonesia, where it has joined forces with the technical revolution that ushered in the Internet during the 1990s. Purbo is the self-styled champion of this movement. Once a professor with Indonesia's most respected research university, he dropped out several years ago to become nothing less than a wandering technological gadfly.

Certainly, that is how the Indonesian government regards him. In fact, when Purbo spoke in Ottawa earlier this year, the country's ambassador to Canada did not hesitate to describe him as a "dangerous man." While Purbo may have irked various authorities in his homeland, however, his work is starting to show an economic and social promise that cannot be ignored.

Purbo has spent the past few years cultivating computer literacy in Indonesia, encouraging former and current students to produce basic textbooks on computer programming, hardware maintenance, and network operations, all written in local languages. He has also shown people across the country how to create local area networks by infiltrating existing telecommunications systems using the most inexpensive equipment available.

Some of these efforts skirt the edges of Indonesia's information and communications technology (ICT) regulations. Individuals have occasionally been arrested for setting up network nodes by piggy-backing on commercial access points. Yet even as such operations have been shut down, many more have been springing up. Some four million Indonesians now use the Internet on a regular basis, and many of them may be doing so because of Purbo's help.

"I am neither a social scientist nor a policy maker," he says. "I'm an engineer, so I tend to simplify things. That's why I'm a little dangerous. And I am very much biased by my experience in ICT community-based development in Indonesia."

The symbol of that experience may well be the humble potato chip can, which is put to use as a directional antenna in order to boost the range of a signal to nearby radio towers. This ingeniously simple technique, along with many more, are catalogued in the hundreds of texts posted on his "sandbox" Web site. Subscribing to a principle dubbed "copyleft," he invites everyone to download, copy, and distribute these articles and books, which include a number of straightforward handbooks for building wireless fidelity equipment on the cheap.

Projects like Purbo's are documented by WRI's Digital Dividend Project. It records and maintains an online clearinghouse with more than 1,000 examples of initiatives using ICT to serve the needs of poor people worldwide.

Purbo's activities have been supported by IDRC, which has a program to promote the application of ICTs in the developing world. In 2003 he came to Canada as a research fellow, meeting with engineers and policy analysts to discuss the latest prospects in the use of wireless connectivity as an agent for development.

This work has prepared him for his most ambitious undertaking yet - lobbying the Indonesian government to abandon telecommunications licensing. What is lost in direct licensing revenue, he argues, will be more than offset by the dramatic economic growth that will follow as people begin to use electronic networks more freely, building those networks at the neighborhood level with open source software.

It is an article of faith that might not have won much bureaucratic support a few years ago, but the dramatic spread of the Internet access in Indonesia may be changing many minds. And for Purbo, that may be all that is necessary to complete the same revolution that fostered the information economy of the West.

"It's not the technology that amazes me," Purbo says. "It's the mind-set that amazes me. Funding and cost is not a big issue, as all processes may be self-financed, community-based. Sound familiar?" (WRI Features, 776 words)