DEAR INDONESIAN BLOGGERS!

SELAMAT HARI BLOGGER NASIONAL

:)

The greatest thing I heard about on re:publica, the German annual blogger´s festival, has got to be MySociety. MySociety is a group of websites from the UK that all aim at getting people involved with local issues and their community. In their own words:

mySociety has two missions. The first is to be a charitable project which builds websites that give people simple, tangible benefits in the civic and community aspects of their lives. The second is to teach the public and voluntary sectors, through demonstration, how to most efficiently use the internet to improve lives.

In oder to achieve that, Tom Steinberg, Francis Irving and Matthew Somerville, the founders of MySociety, have developed sites like FixMyStreet.com and TheyWorkForYou.com.

On FixMyStreet you can report problems in your neighborhood like pot-holes, street light etc. by simply entering your Zip-code and marking the specific area on a map. The report is then sent straight to the council responsible for this area. The site also shows when a reported problem gets fixed. It get´s even better with TheyWorkForYou. On this site you can find all members of parliament (MPs) and all Lords, subscribe to feeds of their activities, browse their last statements, monitor their voting behavior and much more.

I really think this is clever use of the internet and I hope that we get similar sites in Germany and Indonesia soon!

When I hear kambing I usually think of my favorite sate kambing grill on jl. karang tengah, or maybe I think of it´s relative, the sheep, which I secretly consider to be my totem animal.

But in this case, kambing (or goat) stands for a genius social initiative thought of and followd through by a group of Indonesian bloggers. This initiative, 'Bloggers for Bangsari' had bloggers collect money for a unique donation: from the collected money, goats where bought and sent to Bangsari, a small town in Java. There, they would be taken care of and bred by school children from poor families, the money arising from this helping to pay their tuition fees. All in all, 15 goats were sent to Bangsari!

Sadly, the blog about this initiative stops its entries with the arrival of the goats at their new home. I would really like to find out what has happened since then, and how the children are benefiting from this action. Are they now able to pay tuition fees and attend school, or are they too busy taking care of the goats?!

update:

The blog does go on reporting about what´s happening in Bangsari! Apparently, the number of goats increased to 43. The initiators of the program have recently visited each of the children taking care of some of the goats.

A couple of days ago I had the chance to meet up with Vera and Thamrin, both coordinators of the project 'blogging for democracy' as well as bloggers themselves.

They told me about the idea of their project (which is, in essence, to teach politicians and NGOs about blogging).

They said they were a bit disappointed only few of the politicians they had taught in seminars had actually become regular bloggers, but to me the fact that they participated in such seminars seems interesting enough!

We went on to chat about this and that. Some interesting issues came up that will need further investigation:

- Blogging and islam:Thamrin and Vera told me that the blogosphere has come to be a battleground for a growing islam issue. bloggers writing with more moderate views have received threats from fundamentalists groups an vice versa. The blog 'wadhel' (read 'what the hell') had been started in response the growing number of fundamentalists opinions but was closed down in May of this year.

- Blogging and women: Vera says, even though the distribution of men and women bloggers is about 50-50, the content of the blog is strongly dependant on the geneder of the author. Men tend to write about technology, politics and current issues, female authors tend to write about their families, cooking and their everyday life.