Onno Purbo
Sep 25th, 2003 by jimmoore
Our fiends at the quite wonderful Canadian International Development Research Center hosted a small (34 participants) meeting this past weekend here in Cambridge. The title was Information and Communications Technologies for Poverty Reduction. I’ve had a very busy week, but want to highlight a few faces now, and more later. Among the activists present was Onno Purbo, an extraordinary leader within the Indonesian web community—he and his followers have written literally hundreds of books in Indonesian about technology—mostly about how to put together home-brew networks and computers, including ham-radio-based long distance nets, high powered wifi, and other strange and wonderful combinations of gear that is relevant to communicating in a far-flung land where the proliferation of ICTs among the poor is at best discouraged by the government and the monopoly telco. Very inspiring—the spirit of the early days of the personal computer and the Internet—and now scaling up with perhaps 4 million Indonesians currently involved. The second superpower spreads in the archipelago.
