2025: Indonesian Vision towards Knowledge-Based Society
Adison Wongkar

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I. Introduction

The Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology has laid a national vision towards Knowledge-Based Society by 2025 through effective use of ICT (Information and Communication Technology). This paper discusses the rationale behind this vision and attempts to elucidate the various facets and challenges in realizing this vision. This paper also draws a link between knowledge-based society development and the larger areas of national development.

II. The Third Wave

We are living in a peculiar time that Alvin Toffler called the third wave. For the first time in history, knowledge is eclipsing capital and land as the dominant driver of economic growth. Fluid knowledge and information interchange between firms have activated markets for knowledge innovations.

Thus far, large multinational corporations (MNCs) and advanced countries such as United States, has been the sole benefactor that enjoy this knowledge and information advantage. So much so that today, MNCs like WalMart, Ford and Chrysler could easily dwarf Indonesian national GDP in comparison due to their innovativeness, effective use of knowledge and information exchange amplified by globalization.

<Please refer to the .PDF for image> Exhibit 1. GDP of Malaysia, Indonesia and revenue of major companies, 2000 (in billion US$) Source: ASEAN Statistics http://www. aseansec.org/macroeconomic/, Der Spiegel 30-07-2001

III. Indonesian National 2025 Vision

Tapping ICT potential to rapidly transfer knowledge in the social, economic, political and educational interaction becomes a key requirement for Indonesia to develop not just economically but also holistically. Information and knowledge capital has a continuous, reverberant effect to influence other development areas. In socio-political development, for example, knowledge capital spurred by ICT development would supply the cognitive resources needed for a true democracy to take place and foster the growth of middle class who could be agents of change.

In short, Indonesia has to develop a society in which knowledge and information are valued as important capital that has productive value. Therefore, it is only right that Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology brought forth a national vision towards ICT and knowledge-based society. The vision is captured in the outline below:

<Please refer to the .PDF for image> Exhibit 2. Indonesian ICT & knowledge-based society vision and timeline. Source: Indonesian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology

IV. Characteristics of a Knowledge-Based Society

The conception of knowledge-based society and how could it drive a holistic development of Indonesia is what this article tries to unfold.

In lieu of a standard definition, we may adopt a definition for knowledge-based society as a learning society in which the academic and the business community are engaged in research and production of innovative technological goods and service. Further, this national innovation system is integrated with global knowledge network. In this society, knowledge becomes a capital in a realistic sense to empower people culturally and economically towards a sustainable development.

Learning Society

Knowledge-based society is a learning society in that it has an aptitude for acquiring and transferring knowledge. To support this characteristic, all forms of knowledge (for example: scientific, vernacular, practical or theoretical), must be organized and managed in network structures in a way that allows them to be accessed in various (traditional and new) ways. The architecture of content repository support must be designed to cater to multiple medium as well as information consumption pattern. ICT infrastructure must be developed to acts as an enabler so that information could be turned to meaningful knowledge and knowledge sharing in disparate contexts could be facilitated.

While installation of a better ICT infrastructure could certainly pave the way for speedier unhindered knowledge sharing, it must be understood that ICT infrastructure in no way guarantees that useful knowledge would be shared and content would transpire. As a case in point, last month president SBY unveiled an initiative called Jardiknas or the Indonesian Education Network. Under this initiative, all schools nationwide from all levels could store some sort of content on the Jardiknas server machine. The biggest concern immediately haunting this initiative, voiced by many including the educational community, is that this facility has a high likelihood to be severely underused. There is simply no organizational design and incentive in place to start sharing institutional and educational knowledge. If this issue goes unmitigated, the infrastructure that are put in place might very well be a solution looking for problems to solve. Therefore ICT initiatives must be strategically conceived along with socio-cultural and econo-political learning initiatives.

The heaviest challenge to develop a knowledge-based, learning society lies exactly in transforming the Indonesian society today into a society that values knowledge and able to wield that knowledge innovatively to further develop better technology. To build innovativeness, emphasis must be given to knowledge transfer pertaining to design and creation of new innovation and technological product, instead of merely catching up with the technological trend as the end user of technological products or services.

Aside from emphasizing creative learning, it is also should be an important national agenda to foster the proliferation of technology-entrepreneurial activity. As experiences in knowledge-based countries ahead of us have demonstrated, technology does not grow in economic vacuum. It takes collaboration among government, academia, and industry to spurt technology innovation growth, with the emphasis in industry sector.

Equal Access and Information Asymmetries

Information is power and as such, we must prevent its misuse and existence of access gap. In a knowledge-based society, there is a hope that the problem of economic inequality and the ever widening gaps that exist between the haves and have-nots would be alleviated by equal learning opportunity. Therefore, information accessibility (or inaccessibility thereof) should not be a new form of social inequality. Equal access to information and knowledge it represents by the population is critical and should be made a political priority, lest the economic inequality be amplified by the unequal learning opportunity.

ICT initiatives must therefore be designed to support this goal in mind. This usually means the information and communication infrastructure must be made accessible and ubiquitous to as general an audience as possible.

Providing equal access is not merely a matter of providing access to ICT infrastructures such as internet connectivity, but also it means building pockets of information that could empower the mass.

One way this could be realized is by building pockets of online learning resources. Good examples of such initiatives are: • Indonesian Computer & IT open eLearning community – http://www. ilmukomputer.com • MIT Open Course Ware – http://ocw. mit.edu

Joseph Stiglitz spoke of information asymmetries that result from unequal access to information. Again, ICT has the potential to alleviate or even correct this imbalance by providing information pertinent to the area of need. Simple portals of information providing crop pricing information for farmers that is accessible through mobile phone, for example, might prove to be useful for farmers to tilt back the information asymmetries to a fair balance.

Indonesia has seen a stunning acceleration in mobile phone usage. There are estimated 60 million mobile phone subscribers in 2007, a significant increase from 20 million in 2005. It is predicted that this figure will improve to 100 million by 2010 [Source: ResearchAndMarkets.com]. Data usage (like text messaging) through mobile phone is significantly higher than voice, with ratio of about 10 to 1. However, it remains to be seen how this impressive rate of technological adoption could be more than merely a social trend. The untapped potential offered by the proliferation of mobile technology could be engineered to address information asymmetries.

V. Conclusion

The vision outlined by the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology for Indonesia 2025, Knowledge-Based Society, is a step to the right direction. However, challenges abound and attention must be paid to ensure the knowledge, the main capital in the knowledge-based society and economy, be created, transferred, and used in an effective way using ICT technologies. The whole initiative must be placed under socio-cultural consideration because arguably the hardest part of achieving a knowledge-based society is in transforming the society itself, not merely in laying down the supporting ICT infrastructures.

Knowledge based society is not an end by itself, but rather a means towards developing Indonesia holistically. Therefore initiatives in achieving a knowledge-based society must critically assess inherent inequality issues that have the potential to either diminish or amplify the current widening gap of economic inequality.

Adison Wongkar currently works as a software engineer in Austin, TX. His interest includes ICT and economic development issues.

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