Onno build bridges across the digital divide

Vishnu K. Mahmud, Contributor, Jakarta

When Onno Purbo walks into a room, it immediately lightens up. Relaxed, easy going and gregarious, strangers might assume he is a grad student meeting old friends.

In reality, he is a former university professor who is fighting to bridge this country's increasing digital divide.

It has been said that more and more people are being left behind in the Information Technology revolution. The reasons are many -- lack of funds for purchasing the latest computer hardware, inefficient telecommunications infrastructure, and costly Internet connections.

But what happens if you can bypass all that?

Onno Purbo believes there are alternative, reasonably priced solutions to access the World Wide Web and the wealth of knowledge it holds.

"People's education is very vital for Indonesia in bridging the digital divide," he said via e-mail. In one of his many articles, he wrote that it would be pointless to give everyone computers if they do not know how to use them.

As such, the jovial former Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB) professor and his colleagues travel around the country, sharing their knowledge on how to use affordable conventional solutions such as the Linux operating system, secondhand computers and accessing the Internet with the help of the latest wireless technology.

Last Sunday, when we met, he was invited to take a look at the school of street children at Taman Ismail Marzuki arts center complex in Central Jakarta, where there was a first meeting to expand its IT lab.

Born on Aug. 17, 1941, Onno Widodo Purbo is the eldest of four children of Hasan Poerbo, an architect who was said to be one of the first Indonesian students to Liverpool, England, on a scholarship, and Tini, a former school teacher. With all this education floating around the house, it's no wonder that academia and teaching became his career.

After completing his bachelor's degree at ITB, Onno went to Canada for his master's at McMaster University and a doctorate at the University of Waterloo. Upon his return, he became a teacher for seven years until finally leaving after trying to educate the Indonesian government on the concept of community-based infrastructure.

A concept on an Indonesian National Information Infrastructure model was developed and sold to the World Bank for a loan in November 1997, but he said that it resulted in nothing but mostly impractical policy regulatory papers. There was instead a lack of funding for most implementations.

Now, as "an independent IT writer", Onno can transfer his knowledge to a wider audience.

"At ITB, I normally teach about 100-200 students/semester. Sometimes students are chasing after grades or certificates," Onno said. "As a free man, I can teach over a thousand people per day who look for knowledge over various (Internet) mailing lists."

His dedication to building a knowledge-based society in Indonesia is so high that he practically gives away his teachings, using "copyleft" -- a concept that goes against the more known "copyright" by allowing for the free flow of knowledge.

Many of the more than 30 books he has authored are available to be freely downloaded at websites like www.bebas.vlsm.org.

Onno is also a strong believer in a "bottoms up" solution to bridging the digital divide. During the Indonesian Internet boom of the late 1990's, Onno notes that most of the infrastructure and market was created by the private sector. Small and medium enterprises would create businesses and began to build an Internet community within the country. They include Internet Service Providers, web portals (such as Detik.com and Astaga.com), web cafes (known as warnet) and the like.

"Successive Indonesian governments have actually been a stumbling block for Internet development," he said. "These governments have stifled creativity, as they require everything to be registered and licensed. Government policy lags behind developments and fails to provide the industry with a competitive safeguard."

A case in point is the 2.4 GHz controversy. In Indonesia, radio frequencies are regulated, compared to other countries which have set aside certain radio bands for Industrial, Scientific and Medical (ISM) purposes, as well as for Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure (UNII) located on the 2.4, 5.2 and 5.8 GHz frequencies, as recommended by the International Telecommunications Union (www.itu.int).

These frequencies are useful for cheap Internet connectivity, with the help of the latest Wireless Fidelity (WiFi) technology.

"It is a much better situation for both the government and the Indonesian people to free up the band," argues Onno. "A simple calculation will show that freeing 2.4GHz and 5GHz will increase the number of WiFi nodes from 5000 nodes to about 130.000 nodes!"

Petitioning the government to relax its licensing policies over the two bands, Onno calculates that this could lead to an increase in the number of Internet users to about 17.8 million (from about 4 million today), an increase in service taxes to Rp 128 billion/year (from Rp 22 billion/year using current licensed frequencies) and the government could receive about Rp 600 billion from value added tax based on IT hardware investment.

"Having a broadband local access is important to generate local Indonesian content and to remove our dependence on international content providers. My mission is to increase local content and local knowledge."

So far, Onno and his team have taught hundreds of people on how to make a neighborhood network using WiFi, sharing Internet connections with an Internet provider, and setting up community- based IT infrastructure. They have even set up a Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) system for making phone calls over the Internet. Many warnet (Internet kiosks) and neighborhood (RT/RW) networks have been set up with the help of Onno and co.

Onno has also spoken in various seminars and countries, with many parties and governments interested in implementing their own community-based IT program. Hopefully, the government will also jump onto the bandwagon and reap the rewards of Onno's hard work, thereby sharing them with other Indonesians.