Australian National University – 16-17 September 2016

Conference Program

Speakers

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  Eve Warburton

  Political Update 2016

  Eve Warburton has spent the last decade studying, working and traveling throughout Indonesia, and is now a PhD candidate at the Department of Political and Social Change, in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. Eve has a BA (Languages) (Hons) from the University of Sydney and an MA in Human Rights from Columbia University, where she focused on the human rights responsibilities of businesses. She has worked on various research projects and managed academic programs at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre, the Earth Institute, Human Rights Watch, and the Aceh Research Training Institute in Indonesia. Her research interests include the relationship between business and politics, and the politics of natural resource policy in Indonesia and the Southeast Asian region. Eve’s work has been published in Inside Indonesia, New Mandala, East Asia Forum, The Alternative Law Journal, and Southeast Asia Research.

  President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) made a remarkable political recovery in 2016. During his first year in office, Jokowi was overwhelmed by a combative and divided parliament, disunity in cabinet, and tensions with his own party. By June 2015, the president’s approval rating had fallen to just 41 percent. However, over the past 12 months Jokowi expanded his parliamentary majority, he reshuffled his cabinet with unexpected ruthlessness, and public approval has risen to almost 70 percent. How did Jokowi consolidate his power and transform the political landscape? What does political consolidation mean for how we understand Jokowi and the kind of Indonesia he is shaping? I argue that President Jokowi has emerged from this past year looking more powerful, more conservative and, at times, more autocratic than many expected. Jokowi increasingly views political reform as disruptive and complex. The result is that problems of law, corruption, human rights and good governance, are no longer a priority. Instead, Jokowi’s administration focuses narrowly upon a set of developmental goals: infrastructure, de-bureaucratisation and deregulation. The president lacks a coherent strategy for implementing this agenda, and his decisions often appear ad hoc and contradictory. And yet I suggest that over the course of 2016 a Jokowi-styled new developmentalism began to emerge. It is pro-poor and technocratic, politically conservative, and economically nationalist. There are uncanny echoes of the past in Jokowi’s developmentalism, and its conservative and nationalist features reflect political trends that predate Jokowi’s presidency. But Jokowi’s personal style, and his preference for simple, technocratic programs over complex political reform mean that old developmentalist ideas have been given new life in 2016.
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  Ross Tapsell

  The media industry

  Ross Tapsell is a lecturer and researcher at the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. Upon completion of his PhD, Ross was a recipient of the Australian Government Endeavour Postdoctorate Award. He has been a Visiting Fellow at The University of Indonesia (Jakarta), Airlangga University (Surabaya) and Indiana University (Bloomington, US). He has previously worked in Indonesia with The Jakarta Post and the Lombok Post. Ross is involved in a number of Southeast-Asia activities at the ANU, including the Indonesia Project, the Southeast Asia Institute, and the academic news/analysis website New Mandala. He is also on the editorial board of the scholarly journal Asiascape: Digital Asia (Brill).

  The business models of the mainstream media industry have been thrown into disarray since the arrival of the internet, which has enabled widespread diversification of media content, mostly delivered for free. Indonesia is no exception, despite its slow growth in internet penetration. This presentation provides an overview of the Indonesian media landscape, arguing that digitalisation has allowed for further concentration and conglomeration of the industry. Put simply, big media is getting bigger in the digital era, and medium-sized and smaller media companies are struggling to survive. Indonesia’s media landscape is dominated by Jakarta-based, national digital conglomerates, most of which look the same in business structure, operations and in the media content they provide. While ‘digital giants’ Google, Facebook and Twitter provide a serious threat to the industry’s financial health, Indonesia’s media companies are swiftly adapting to become not only media content providers, but larger, digital information and service ‘ecosystems’. Despite new digital media technologies and participatory media platforms, industrial journalism remains a key space where elites exert their power. Media owners in Indonesia have generally gained wealth, are more politically powerful and have become more dynastic. As a result, the media has become considerably partisan, as exemplified by coverage of the 2014 elections.
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  Martin Slama

  Social media and Islamic practice online/offline

  Martin Slama is a researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences. He has extensive fieldwork experience in Indonesia conducting research on young internet users (for his PhD), on diasporic Hadhrami-Arab communities (post-doc), and currently he directs the research project “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia”. His latest publications include “File Sharing and (Im)Mortality: From Genealogical Records to Facebook” (in Sanjek, Roger/Tratner, Susan, eds.: eFieldnotes: The Makings of Anthropology in the Digital World, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); From “Stone-Age” to “Real-Time”: Exploring Papuan Temporalities, Mobilities and Religiosities (co-edited with Jenny Munro, ANU Press, 2015); “From Wali Songo to Wali Pitu. The Travelling of Islamic Saint Veneration to Bali” (in Hauser-Schäublin, Brigitta/Harnish, David, eds.: Between Harmony and Discrimination: Negotiating Religious Identities within Majority/Minority Relationships in Bali and Lombok, Brill, 2014).

  This paper views the internet as a collection of interfaces among which social networking sites feature prominently. It investigates Islamic everyday piousness and regular religious gatherings as they are linked to social media usage. These interfaces provide ample opportunities to exhibit visual and textual material, especially people’s religious expressions. In the Indonesian context, social networking interfaces have become sites where the country’s many “Islamic faces” are displayed. This paper examines the emerging forms of conveying and expressing Islam as well as the socialities that are generated in these intersecting online/offline realms. It particularly focuses on the connection between emerging forms of sociality and the construction of religious authority. It also investigates the role of self-discipline in religious practices enabled by social media, and analyses new ways of proselytization (dakwah), especially by representatives of the mobile Muslim middle-class. The paper concludes with an overall argument of the close connection between consumption, piety and self-discipline as well as the tensions and contradictions that are generated in these new online/offline Islamic environments.
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  Günther G. Schulze

  Macroeconomic Performance, Fiscal Prudence, and Tax Amnesty - An Assessment of Recent Policy Developments

  Günther Schulze is Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics of the University of Freiburg, Germany, and Director for Social Sciences at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies. He received his PhD in 1995 from the University of Konstanz, was visiting scholar at Stanford University in 1996 and completed his Habilitation in 2000. He holds the chair of International Economic Policy at the University of Freiburg. His research areas comprise international economics, development economics, political economy, and the economics of conflict and terrorism. One particular regional emphasis is on Southeast Asia, Indonesia especially, where he has analyzed inter alia the effect of decentralization and democratization on governance quality and public service delivery. He is author of The Political Economy of Capital Controls (Cambridge University Press 2000) and has coedited and coauthored International Environmental Economics (Oxford University Press 2001). He has published in peer reviewed journals such as European Economic Review, Journal of Law and Economics, European Journal of Political Economy, Word Development, Economic Inquiry, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Economics of Governances, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies, Asian-Pacific Economic Literature and Economics Letters and others. Natasha Hamilton-Hart is Professor in the Department of Management and International Business of the University of Auckland Business School and Director of the New Zealand Asia Institute. She has a BA (Hons) from the University of Otago and a PhD from Cornell University. Natasha joined the University of Auckland in 2011, after teaching at the National University of Singapore for ten years and holding a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian National University. Natasha’s research interests lie in the areas of comparative and international political economy, particularly the political economy of monetary policy and financial regulation, business-government relations in Southeast Asia, the palm oil industry and the international relations of East Asia. She is the author of Asian States, Asian Bankers: Central Banking in Southeast Asia and Hard Interests, Soft Illusions: Southeast Asia and American Power, both with Cornell University Press, as well as numerous scholarly articles.

  This paper surveys and assesses the macroeconomic situation in Indonesia including recent changes in economic policy. We observe a relatively stable macroeconomic environment that is characterized by the adjustment to the fall in commodity prices which has impacted the public revenues, but also on terms of trade and overall GDP growth. We analyze the public debt situation and potential cash flow problems of the treasury. While the overall debt situation is not yet alarming the declining revenues and the budget cuts that do not fully reflect this decline put pressure on increasing debt levels. We also investigate the situation in the banking sector which is characterized by high net interest margins of the banks and a change in monetary policy introducing the seven-day reverse repurchase (repo) rate as new reference rate and a interest rate cap for bank lending rates relative to that rate. We study the development of food prices, rice prices in particular, and relate it to trade protection measures by the government of Indonesia. As a major policy reform we look at the tax amnesty that has been introduced recently and study to what extent results have fallen behind expectations.
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  Onno Purbo

  Bridging the 'digital divide' in Indonesia

  Onno W. Purbo holds a Ph.D in Electrical Engineering from University of Waterloo, Canada, is a copy left, educator and ICT evangelist. He has published 40+ books, including free ICT ebook for high school in 2008. The latest books in 2016 entitled, "Perjuangan Menyebarkan Internet" and "Buku Pegangan Internet untuk Desa". He led the first Internet connection at ITB and use it to build the first education network. He liberates WiFi frequency, and introduces neighborhood network and wajanbolic antenna. He led the first community telephony network over Internet, VoIP Merdeka, later known as VoIP rakyat and uses +62520 and +62521 area code. He currently actives in introducing e-learning, run the largest free e-learning servers with 15,000+ participants.

  Indonesia's internet penetration is only around 20%, far below other countries in Southeast Asia including Malaysia (68%), Vietnam (52%) and the Philippines (44%). This presentation will review the predicament Indonesia faces, which is poor Internet access to rural areas and villages. For many years, the Indonesian government has tried to rectify this problem. In this presentation I will examine 'top-down' government approaches, as well as 'bottom up' community-based self-financing approaches. I argue that 'top-down' government approaches have largely failed. For example, in 2012 the government started to build Internet infrastructure in Indonesian villages and districts through its 'cyber cafe' and 'mobile cyber cafe' programs. These programs were deployed with very limited field surveys on the needs of citizens, and not much training for human resources that will handle the system. By 2016, it was widely reported by the Indonesian media as having failed. On the other hand, various communities have run ICT training activities at colleges and schools through local self-financed initiatives. This has resulted in the growth of community neighbourhood networks in many rural areas. As of June 2016, 3,374 villages are running neighbourhood networks to provide internet access in rural areas. My experience in the field have shown that ‘top-down’ approaches with limited attention to the user needs tends to fail, while the slower, self-finance ‘bottom-up’ approach with heavy community empowerment tends to be successful. However, the legal telecommunication framework clearly states that only licensed operators may deploy network infrastructure. This presents a problem for some unlicensed 'bottom-up' initiatives. I will argue that the simplest option to increase internet penetration in Indonesia is to improve the empowerment processes of citizens, and conduct larger surveys before infrastructure deployment is implemented by the government. This is essential to ensure
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  John Postill

  Digital Indonesia in comparison

  John Postill is a Vice Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT. He holds a PhD in anthropology (UCL) and specialises in media and digital anthropology. He has conducted long-term field research in Europe and Asia-Pacific, including Malaysia and Indonesia, and is particularly interested in digital activism and socio-political change. He is the author of Media and Nation Building: How the Iban Became Malaysian (Berghahn, 2008), Theorising Media and Practice, (ed. Berghahn, 2010), Localizing the Internet: An Anthropological Account (Berghahn, 2011) and Digital Activism and Political Change (Pluto, forthcoming).

  As the internet and digital media become an ever more integral part of our social and political lives, the struggles over control of these technologies continue to intensify. Recent years have seen the emergence of a global digital rights movement led by citizen initiatives such as WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Wikipedia, and Global Voices. This heterogeneous, rapidly evolving movement draws together tech-minded activists from around the world working on equal internet access, mass surveillance, online censorship, intellectual property and related issues. The study of the digital freedom movement and its impact on political reform is still in its infancy in Southeast Asia, a region where the movement is rapidly gaining momentum. I explore ways in which digital rights activists in Indonesia (and elsewhere) seek to translate or 'modulate' key digital rights issues for diverse constituencies across the private, public and civil society sectors. I draw from ethnographic research in Jakarta and Yogyakarta on three digital initiatives: SAFEnet, Kawal Pemilu and EngageMedia. I argue that Indonesia's digital rights activists have developed a social typology in which three particular digital personas stand out, namely victims (korban), volunteers (relawan) and voices (suara) of the digital age. Each of these media personas (or agents) is endowed with specific attributes and entangled with its own set of digital issues, but they all contribute to a common range of discursive practices embedded in Indonesia's political culture, yet with obvious parallels to other countries in the region and beyond.
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  Mari Pangestu

  Digital Economy and Indonesia: A look at the Potential of Creative Destruction and the Emerging Opportunities

  Professor Mari Pangestu served as Indonesia’s Minister of Trade from 2004 to 2011, and as Minister of Tourism and Creative Economy from 2011 until October 2014. She obtained her Bachelor and Master degrees in Economics and Doctor HC degrees from the Australian National University (ANU), and her PhD from the University of California, Davis, in 1986 where she specialised in macroeconomics, and international trade.

  This paper presents the potential of Schumpeter’s creative destruction that may manifest in the emerging digital economy. We present business economic analyses, policy frameworks to date, and conclude with policy recommendations. First we look at how digitization fundamentally impacts economic activity by reducing market frictions and inefficiencies in ways that are not available in the non-digital environment. We use the traditional market and transaction costs framework to discuss the changing practices at both elemental (market and transaction) level and systemic (from corporate-centric to crowd-centric). Second, we present preliminary quantitative estimations on the impact of digital economy on the economy such as GDP, labor productivity and firm’s performance. We will also provide an analysis on how business models are changing, including the potential of digital economy for greater inclusion, drawing on Indonesian examples. We conclude by looking at Indonesia’s current policy framework and response towards the changes that the digital economy is bringing, and offer some policy recommendations in light of global developments in policy and technology.
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  Navhat Nuraniyah

  Online extremism: the advent of private chat groups and its policy implications

  Navhat Nuraniyah is an analyst at the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC). Prior to joining IPAC, she worked as a terrorism analyst at the Centre of Excellence for National Security (CENS), a research unit of the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies (RSIS), Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. She holds a Master of Arts in International Relations, with Honours, and a Master of Diplomacy, with distinction, from the Australian National University (ANU), where she received the James Ingram Prize for Excellence in Diplomatic Studies. She obtained a BA in International Relations from Muhammadiyah University Yogyakarta. Navhat is also trained in Arabic and Islamic studies at various pesantrens (traditional Islamic boarding schools) in Java. Navhat has published a number of articles for both academic journals and newspapers and spoke at various international conferences. Her research interests include religiously motivated terrorism, online extremism, women in jihadi community, and anti-Shia campaign in Indonesia.

  While face-to-face interaction remains the most common mode of terrorist recruitment in Indonesia, extremist groups have increasingly relied on Internet for communicative, instrumental, and operational purposes. The presentation will look at new trends in extremist online activities, focusing on the shift from conventional social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to mobile chat apps, particularly Telegram. It will zoom in on two private chat groups (one men-only and one women-only group) as a case study to categorise and quantify chats based on topics. The topics range from dangerous activities such as facilitation of travel to Syria and discussion of terror plots to benign ones such as discussing personal issues, gossips, and matchmaking. There are some gender-based differences in the topics discussed. Men, for instance, are more likely to discuss terror plots while women seem more knowledgeable in helping with hijrah trips and contacts. The latter further demonstrates how information technology enables women to play more active roles including in internationalising local networks. The analysis would reveal how online group develops into tight-knit community that could last longer than its online lifespan, what makes its membership shrink on its own (which could provide alternatives to disbandment), and to what extent it compliments or substitutes terrorist activities offline. Such an analysis is instrumental to formulate online counter-extremism policies.
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  Yanuar Nugroho

  E-governance under Jokowi administration: Political promise or technocratic vision?

  Yanuar Nugroho is the Deputy Chief of Staff for analysis and oversight of strategic issues on social, cultural and ecological affairs at the Executive Office of the President, Indonesia. He is also an honorary research fellow with the Manchester Institute of Innovation Research at the University of Manchester, UK. He works and publishes in the area of innovation and social change, sustainability, civil society and third sector, knowledge dynamics, and informatics innovations for development. As a senior official with the President’s Office, Yanuar is responsible in translating President’s political vision into actionable development plans at the ministerial and local government levels and oversight of national priority programmes. Previously among Indonesia’s lead negotiators for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), he is now tasked to ensure its implementation in the country. He also bears responsibility in ensuring that Open Government initiatives and Nationally Determined Contribution in tackling climate change are well executed.

  Among the most recent innovations in public sector is the advancement and adoption of e-governance, beyond e-government. Focusing on the application of digital technologies, e-governance has been praised to have transformed the ways government delivers services to citizens in a convenient, efficient and transparent manner by ensuring interactivity between the two. The use and governance of information and communication technologies (ICTs), organisational change and new skills are the core elements in e-governance. They improve public services and democratic processes and strengthen support to public through the involvement of government, citizens and businesses/interest groups. This presentation centres on few cases that depict how the Indonesian government under President Jokowi has been campaigning e-governance as ‘by the governed, for the governed, and of the governed’. As digital technology advocate, the administration believes that the use of ICTs can boost quality service delivery, reform bureaucracy, and at the same time engage with citizens. But is the use of e-governance merely a populist political promise to win the heart of today’s generation, or a well-thought technocratic vision? We argue here, through the cases of LAPOR!, One Map, One Data and smart cities, that successful application of e-governance requires at least three integrated frameworks: regulatory, institutional, and accountability mechanism. Only when they are in place, e-governance as a political promise can be translated into programmatic intervention. This is crucial as the government very strongly aspires to provide citizen-centric services, convince market and economy, and also consolidate political support.
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  Edwin Jurriëns

  The art of hacking

  Edwin Jurriëns is Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at The University of Melbourne and Adjunct Lecturer with the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at The University of New South Wales (UNSW) Canberra. Before joining The University of Melbourne, Edwin was Lecturer in Indonesian Studies and Southeast Asian Social Inquiry at UNSW Canberra (2004-2012) and Postdoctoral Fellow at Leiden University, The Netherlands (2001-2003). His monographs and co-edited volumes include Visual media in Indonesia: video vanguard (forthcoming), Disaster relief in the Asia-Pacific: agency and resilience (Routledge, 2014), From monologue to dialogue: radio and reform in Indonesia (KITLV Press, 2009), Cosmopatriots: on distant belongings and close encounters (Rodopi, 2008) and Cultural travel and migrancy: the artistic representation of globalization in the electronic media of West Java (KITLV Press, 2004).

  This presentation focuses on digital art as a creative expression of major socio-cultural and technological developments in contemporary Indonesia. It is meant as an early inquiry into the much flagged idea of ‘the digital revolution’ by putting both the ‘digital’ and the ‘revolution’ into critical perspective. I will discuss how the contemporary art market, as an essential part of Indonesia’s creative economy, has been shifting interest from traditional media such as painting and sculpture to new media such as digital art. Some artists and art collectives have remained under the commercial radar, however, due to the nature of their works, ideas and interests. I will demonstrate that some of them use techno-cultural hacking strategies to go beyond the market, and establish creative connections with various groups in society that are ignored or underrepresented by mainstream politics and business. Their collaborative projects with local communities creatively and critically address urgent social issues such as health care and food security. I will argue that such projects are not the product of a digital revolution only, but build on a longer history of socially engaged creative practice in Indonesia.
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  Usman Hamid

  State crackdowns online

  Usman Hamid is an MPhil graduate in the Department of Political and Social Change. In 1998, Usman was a student activist from Trisakti University where four students were shot dead—this incident triggered a nationwide protest that toppled the Suharto regime. He subsequently became the coordinator of KontraS, the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence. In 2004 Usman was appointed a member of the Presidential Fact-Finding Team that investigated the 2004 murder of prominent human rights defender Munir Said Thalib. He also served as an expert adviser to the International Center for Transitional Justice, Jakarta office, from 2010 until 2012. In 2011 Usman was appointed to the Presidential Working Unit for the Supervision and Management of Development, where he reviewed the policy on Indonesia’s Human Rights Nation Plan of Action of 2011–2014. In 2012 Usman co-founded the Public Virtue Institute and the Indonesian Branch of Change.org, the world’s largest online petition platform. He has been a visiting scholar at University of Columbia (2003) and held a fellowship at Nottingham University (2009).

  In this presentation I evaluate the dramatic expansion of social media on the quality of freedom of expression in Indonesia. To be sure, social media has expanded the space for citizens to express their views, allowing more public participation in socio-political affairs; but this progress is counterbalanced through the intimidation suffered by many online users; cyber attacks and content manipulation initiated by the targets of online criticism; criminalisation of Internet activists; and, in some cases, physical violence. The main drivers behind this violent and manipulative response to expanding social media discussions are political and economic elites who have the resources to purchase the technical expertise, legal representation and cooperation of security forces to threaten and/or silence online activists. Hence, social media rarely leads to significant leaps in democratic quality, or, more concretely, the quality of freedom of expression. Rather, solid democratic conditions need to be in place in order for social media to develop its full “liberating” potential. In defective democracies such as Indonesia, weak rule of law, traditions of violence and patterns of oligarchization continue to constrain Internet users in their efforts to engage productively – and freely - in online discourses.
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  Michele Ford

  The Go-Jek Effect

  Michele Ford is Professor of Southeast Asian Studies and Director of the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre at the University of Sydney, where she holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship. Michele’s research interests focus on Southeast Asian labour movements, trade union aid, and trade union responses to labour migration in East and Southeast Asia. She is the author of Workers and Intellectuals: NGOs, Unions and the Indonesian Labour Movement (NUS/Hawaii/KITLV 2009) and (co)-editor of several volumes including Beyond Oligarchy: Wealth, Power, and Contemporary Indonesian Politics (Cornell SEAP 2014) and Social Activism in Southeast Asia (Routledge 2013). In addition to her academic work, Michele has a strong record of disciplinary service and extensive consultancy experience for the Australian Government and the international labour movement.

  The worldwide rise of app-based transportation services like Uber has been the subject of enormous controversy, not least because of its potential to contribute to the informalisation of employment. A similar controversy has arisen in regard to car-based taxi services in Indonesia. The situation is quite different, however, when it comes to motorcycle taxi services, which have never been regulated in the way that car-based taxi services has. Having mapped out the public and regulatory response to app-based platforms, we examine the effect the growth of Go-Jek has had on the income and working conditions of motorcycle taxi drivers who have shifted to app-based employment and those who have remained in the conventional sector. Based on fieldwork data collected in Jakarta, Bali and Makassar, we find that Go-Jek has increased competition and depressed the income of conventional motorcycle taxi drivers. At the same time, however, it has not only delivered higher incomes to motorcycle taxi drivers using the platform but also made it possible for them to organise collectively to make demands on the company when issues of subsidies and suspensions have arisen. This, we argue, constitutes a degree of formalisation in the employment relations in the sector.
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  Bayu Dardias

  Political update discussant

  Bayu Dardias began his PhD studies at the Department of Political and Social Change in December 2012. He completed his Master of Public Policy at ANU’s Crawford School of Public Policy in 2009. He received his BA from Gadjah Mada University (UGM) in Yogyakarta (2002), and subsequently became a research assistant. In 2010, Bayu became a lecturer in the Department of Politics and Government, UGM. Bayu has had numerous research projects with local and national governments, along with international institutions. Bayu’s study interests are on traditional politics, decentralisation, political corruption and government networks. Bayu is working on the revival of aristocrats in Indonesian politics. Since Indonesian independence, traditional institutions and aristocrats have had no formal place in political institutions, although they played pivotal roles in real politics. Since 1998, aristocrats have resurfaced in politics, and through traditional support, they have gained key positions in modern institutions.

  Details to follow.
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  Emma Baulch

  Mobile telephony

  Emma Baulch is a Senior Research Fellow at the Creative Industries Faculty, Queensland University of Technology and a Chief Investigator of the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. Her work seeks to understand how media technologies, policies and contents shape the cultural and political development of Indonesian societies. It also seeks to identify ways that emerging media technologies can be harnessed to overcome pressing social challenges. She has led projects investigating the impact of digital technologies on pop music production, the role of web literacy in poverty eradication, and the digital literacies resulting from the popularization of the mobile phone. e.baulch@qut.edu.au http://staff.qut.edu.au/staff/baulche/

  The paper provides a snapshot of mobile telephony in Indonesia. It does so by attempting a sweep of the panorama of deregulated telecommunications in Indonesia: its regulatory environment, the development of markets, and what social science and humanities research tells us about the implications of the rapid growth of these markets in recent years. The paper will include four sections. First, it will consider the regulatory environment that enabled the establishment of telecommunications providers in the 1990s. Second, it will sketch market for telecommunications products in present day Indonesia. Third, it will briefly overview the body of scholarship attending to the social ramifications of the widespread uptake of mobile telephony in the 21st century. Finally, it will propose some future directions for an agenda of social research on mobile telephony in Indonesia.
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  Muhamad Chatib Basri

  Economics update discussant

  Dr Muhamad Chatib Basri is one of Indonesia’s leading economists and policymakers. He held two cabinet-level positions in the second Yudhoyono presidency, first as Head of the Investment Board and later as Minister of Finance. He serves on numerous high-level international and domestic boards and committees, and has been Indonesia’s ‘sherpa’ to the G20. He is the author of numerous academic publications, as well as being a prolific public commentator. Graduating from the University of Indonesia, he holds Masters and PhD degrees from The Australian National University, and has subsequently visited Australia on many occasions. He has held several major international fellowships at Harvard and elsewhere. He is currently the ANU Indonesia Project's Thee Kian Wie Distinguished Visiting Professor.

  Details to follow.
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  Kathleen Azali

  Digitalising Knowledge: Education, Libraries, Archives

  Kathleen Azali is Research Officer at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. In 2008, she founded an independent library in Surabaya called C2O library & collabtive, which has also evolved into a community and co-working space. As a researcher and a practicing designer and programmer, she is interested in the histories and intersections of information, design, (digital) technology, and society. She holds a Master in Cultural Studies from Airlangga University, with a thesis on alternative libraries, which was awarded 2013 Asian Graduate Student Fellowship support from the National University of Singapore. Her writings have been published in Networked Researcher Open Access Week (2012), Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Bulletin (2014), Arsipelago: Archival Work and Archiving Art & Culture in Indonesia (2014), SOJOURN (2015, 2016), PORTAL Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies (2016), and forthcoming “Cashless in Indonesia: Gelling mobile e-friction?” in Journal of Southeast Asian Economies (2016). Email: k.azali@ayorek.org

  All over the world, the ubiquitous growth of digital technologies have brought massive changes to the ways information is collected, stored and accessed—thus significantly implicating various education institutions, libraries, and archives that have been traditionally associated as gatekeepers of information storage and access. Whereas recording might be easier and cheaper, preservation and archiving are subjected to rapid technical obsolescence and physical decay, thus bringing difficult, expensive cost in ensuring interoperability and longevity. This paper presents an overview of digitalising knowledge, specifically in relation to education, libraries, and archives in Indonesia. I begin by briefly laying down how the contexts of tropical, humid climate of its archipelagic geography, and the historical contexts of colonial and autocratic regimes implicate libraries and archives in Indonesia. I then present snippets of various empirical and theoretical works in “digitalising knowledge” processes that has started around the turn of the century, not only within the library and information science (LIS) profession in the higher education and government sector, but also outside—involving open source, visual arts, music initiatives, among others. I conclude by highlighting historical precedent, and urging for more socio-political analysis on the (digitalising) knowledge construction in libraries and archives, particularly as we are entering its transitional stage.
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  Diastika Rahwidiati

  Harnessing new data sources for policy development in Indonesia

  Diastika Rahwidiati is passionate about civic innovation, and especially interested in the thinkers, doers and fixers that create positive change across Indonesia. As Chief Technical Advisor for Pulse Lab Jakarta she connects ethnographers, social activists and technologists to the Lab's big data research projects to add local context and encourage the diffusion of the technologies they embody.

  As a by-product of the pervasive use of technology in our daily lives, vast amounts of diverse, real-time digital data are generated. Referred to as “big data” for the speed, frequency and volume by which it is produced and collected (UN Global Pulse 2013), these new data sources have the potential to provide deep insights into human behaviour. For policy makers, big data can provide new insights into citizen behaviours; reduce the amount of time and money required to collect information; and allow for faster response and decision-making. In Indonesia, where social media use is ubiquitous and electronic platforms are increasingly pervasive in daily lives of citizens, the possibilities of these new insights are exciting. How do we make sense of new data sources? How can they inform policy issues, and help decide which policy issues are salient? This paper answers these questions by taking as case studies several prototypes developed by Pulse Lab Jakarta – a data innovation lab jointly set up by the United Nations and the Government of Indonesia. The paper examines factors that shape the adoption and use of these prototypes by government stakeholders. The paper argues that although advanced data analytics and data visualisation help in making sense of new data sources and in attracting policy makers to some of these prototypes, actual usage is more likely to depend on non-technical factors. These include the relevance of insights to a current policy issue; the availability of resources to adopt the prototypes; access to data sources needed to power the analytics; and the presence of political imperatives.
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  Budi Rahardjo

  Cyber Security

  Budi Rahardjo is a lecturer at School of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Institut Teknologi Bandung (ITB). After graduated from ITB in 1996, he pursued his Masters and Doctoral degrees in Canada. He received his PhD from University of Manitoba, Canada, in Electrical Engineering in the field of Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Design. He ran the .ID (Indonesia Domain name) from 1997 to 2005. He also founded Indonesia Computer Emergency Response Team (ID-CERT) in 1998 and co-founded information security consulting company. He is a serial technopreneur and mentor for quite a number of startup companies. His research area includes security (cryptography, elliptic curve cryptosystems, software security) and big data analysis (social network analysis).

  This presentation documents the status of Indonesia's cyber security. Due to its large population, and an increasing amount of digital applications and programs being used on a daily basis, cyber security is an increasing concern for citizens, the private sector and the Indonesian government. Problems include web defacing, online frauds, and service attacks, amongst others. Indonesia is ranked second among countries where cyberattacks are launched, and is most prone to cyberattacks. These cyberattacks in Indonesia rose 33 percent in 2015 from the previous year. Various security initiatives, from ad hoc local attempts to a more centralized, structured approach have been tried. The Indonesian government is currently developing a nation-wide Cyber Security Council, and there are efforts to develop 'cyber war' capabilities.
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  Bede Moore

  The development of the Indonesian eCommerce industry

  Bede Moore studied Indonesian history at Harvard and Leiden University, receiving his MPhil (Hons) for his thesis on the relationship between the Republic of Indonesia and Australia during the Independence Period. Bede lived in Indonesia from 2011 – 2015, where he worked in the development of the country’s eCommerce and retail industries. Bede was a Senior Associate at the Boston Consulting Group in Australia and Jakarta, before departing in 2012 to co-found Lazada Indonesia, Indonesia's largest eCommerce company, which was recently sold to the Chinese eCommerce company, Alibaba, and where he acted as Managing Director. In addition, in 2013, he co-founded the Indonesia fashion group and brand partner, Paraplou Group. He was the first foreign entrepreneur selected as an Endeavor Entrepreneur for Indonesia. Bede is also the Founder and Chair of CAUSINDY (Conference for Australian and Indonesian Youth). CAUSINDY is a bilateral conference that promotes and supports young leaders in the two countries.

  This paper examines the development of the Indonesian eCommerce industry, particularly focusing on the five years from 2011 – 2015. Like many comparable developing markets, Indonesia did not develop a comprehensive eCommerce industry until relatively recently. Some local companies made early forays during the late 1990s and early 2000s, but ongoing “household” names within the industry predominantly started in the last five years, with a couple of notable exceptions. The face of the industry changed with the successful entrance of some major foreign companies in the 2010s. Most notably, Rocket Internet played a significant role in the development of an “eCommerce” culture during this period by investing heavily in advertising, order costs and the upskilling of local teams. As a result, the appearance of the market shifted rapidly: whereas the earliest companies occupied only a few “verticals” (e.g. classifieds, marketplaces, and relevant infrastructure such as payments), companies providing a wide array of services rapidly emerged during 2013 – 2015. These companies, and their local counterparts, encountered a number of systemic issues that were a significant impediment to growth: a shortage of local talent; inadequate or non-existent infrastructure, especially in payments and logistics; ill-conceived regulations for foreign ownership; and a shortage of venture capital. Many of these issues remain unresolved, but a renewed policy focus on supporting the industry is at least one positive sign of improving conditions.

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