Indonesia is one of the world’s hottest and fastest growing digital markets. “With around 90 million Internet users and more than 281 million active mobile phone subscriptions, we can anticipate the development of the digital ecosystem in Indonesia that will lead the growth,” Shinta W. Dhanuwardoyo wrote in “Strategic Review: The Indonesian Journal of Leadership, Policy and World Affairs” last year. “E-commerce has been one of the vital driving forces of Indonesia’s digital economy.”

Unfortunately, this growth has been uneven, and not all Indonesians have access to this burgeoning digital economy. Although it’s improving, only a little more than half of Indonesia’s population has regular internet access, and outside major cities, broadband access is severely limited. Smartphones — the most common method for accessing the internet in Indonesia — are almost all either manufactured abroad or domestically by international companies.

Koperasi Digital Indonesia Mandiri (KDIM), a cooperative based in the country’s capital, Jakarta, is trying to bridge this digital divide. It’s developing a locally-produced, low-end smartphone for Indonesians left out of the digital boom. It’s also building a platform for users to access services from other cooperatives on their phones.

“Unlike commercially distributed phones, this smartphone can only be obtained by becoming a member of the cooperative via its website, after which one needs to pay Rp 100,000 (US $7.48) per month for one year,” The Jakarta Post reported.

The phone had its soft-launch in late March, and will be available for all members in the coming months. We spoke with Adie Marzuki, chair of KDIM, to learn about how the organization uses the cooperative model to bring digital technologies and services to underserved Indonesians.

Can you tell us about how KDIM started, and why you decided to form a cooperative rather than a regular, for-profit company?

KDIM was initiated by two organizations, APJII [Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association] and MASTEL [Telematics Society]. We believe that we need to build inclusive economy for Indonesia. We have a very huge market here — more than 80 million smartphones users in the [Indonesian] market right now. But we still we have 60 million of our population un-served — this means that 60 million people in Indonesia have never had a smartphone. That’s why we need to have a domestic smartphone industry that serves the underserved in Indonesia — and that’s why we are creating an entry-level smartphone. They are not served by the current industry right now.

photo courtesy of KDIM

For that, the model of a cooperative makes the most sense. It is a fundamental economic system in Indonesia. We have the power of population, that’s why we built KDIM as part of an inclusive economy, so that we can leverage our numbers.

We don’t have power of capital — but we have power of the people.

What are your operating costs? How did you raise the capital to start the cooperative?

Our operating costs covered by collecting membership share from members. Membership share is a term used to refer to the contribution required for a person to become a member of the cooperative. The initial funding/equity capital [was] provided by the founding members, which consists of KDIM members of APJII and MASTEL.

Indonesia has many cooperatives. Can you tell us how you are similar, and different, from other cooperatives in the country?

We are the first Indonesian digital cooperative. There are other efforts to support the un-served people, but they are not in the digital industry — we thought that now, we need to engage all the population to emerge in the digital life, and benefit from it.

We created KDIM based on our own formulation — this is a completely new model for Indonesia. Other cooperatives in Indonesia are all in conventional businesses. We want to work with them, and we are asking the other cooperatives to follow in our way, and we are ready to serve them and give them the platform they need.

We are not trying to make our cooperative the biggest cooperative — we are offering the other cooperatives to use our platform to benefit and go to the digital era.

Once consumers become members of the cooperative, do they have to remain involved in the cooperative for as long as they’re using the phone? What do your members gain besides the phone itself, and how are they involved in KDIM?

Our members will use the phone itself as their membership tool. Members will benefit from the use of the phone as we have digital advertising system embedded in the platform. Members also gain points when they use the apps in the phone e.g. digital transaction, purchasing, and other digital activities, which are provided by the KDIM phone. Their points will be reflected in annual closing book, and members will redeem their points in rupiahs. In our annual meeting, each member will have one vote.

What’s your current membership base, and what are your medium-to-long-term goals? What kind of impact would you like KPIM to have on the country’s technology sector?

Currently we have 25,000 members. Of those, 5,000 of are directly, KDIM members, and the rest are from other cooperatives. Our medium-term goals are to invite lots of other cooperatives to benefit from our platform, while still allowing them to use their own cooperative brand. We will give white label B2B services to other cooperatives while we also inviting more members to join. Our long-term goal is to have our own digital industry ecosystem, which will serve all the 49 percent digitally un-served sector of society.

We are hoping our business model will inspire other tech players to be more inclusive and eventually close Indonesian digital divide. We haven’t officially launched yet, and we are aiming for an official launch of our phone in May, probably before the start of Ramadan.

Photo by AdamCohn

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Arduino was the brainchild of Italian Massimo Banzi and his colleagues David Cuartielles, Tom Igoe, Gianluca Martino and David Mellis. Originally an educational project for students, the Arduino collaborators in 2005 expanded the venture as a way to make cheap but sophisticated computer boards more available to the open source community. It is also seen as a way to bring artists, engineers and creatives together to find new ways of using technologies for the greater good.

Since its founding, Arduino has become part of the larger worldwide movement of open innovation, technology and creativity. The reference designs for Arduino hardware are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, and the source code for its software is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). While Arduino technologies can be freely copied by anyone, Arduino has created its own line of self-produced “Arduino At Heart” branded products. The official product sales support the Arduino enterprise while still allowing competitors to make “clones” at cheaper prices.

Arduino is officially a business whose chief asset is its trademark, the name Arduino and its logo. Anyone can use the Arduino designs for free, but if they wish to sell them under the Arduino name, they must pay to use the trademark. Besides licensing the Arduino trademark, the firm produces its own line of Arduino-branded devices. Paradoxically, the ability of others to freely use Arduino designs does not undermine sales of the Arduino-branded products because this openness has merely enlarged the market for Arduino technology while boosting trust in the Arduino brand compared to cheap knockoffs. Massimo Banzi’s design firm also makes money creating customized Arduino-based products.

Besides computer boards, Arduino offers its own self-designed kits, materials for wearable technologies and 3D printers, tools, books, manuals and workshops. There is now a vast global community of Arduino users, with many regional networks and groups devoted to special types of microprocessing boards.

Arduino enthusiasts and companies see the open hardware platform as an important infrastructure for building a new economy based on collaboration and collective knowledge. While Arduino systems can perform familiar tasks such as remote control of a car or the doors of a house, they also have great potential as the core of cheap but powerful smartphones; systems to collect, purify and distribute water in marginal areas; and systems that can generate clean, renewable energies.

But achieving the full potential of Arduino-based open platforms will require more focused public education about its capabilities. In this regard, Arduino – and other open technologies – still have a long way to go. While many governments have created digital agendas to boost their economic and social development through information technologies, few public schools have recognized the great promise of open source principles by teaching students about open source coding or open hardware development.

Even in countries like Spain that require young people to take programming courses in school, the government and schools have ignored the open source revolution, preferring to make agreements with big companies such as Microsoft, Oracle and SAP to teach students about (and buy) their proprietary software. The same blindness affects government procurement of information technology, where governments tend to buy technology from the big firms instead of encouraging or requiring open source technologies that could improve their domestic research and development.

There are some bright signs, however. There is now a global robotics competition for students called RoboCup, which hosts a number of competitions using Arduino kits in the creation and programming of machines. Some big companies like Intel and MediaTek with their own proprietary microprocessors have decided to design products that can communicate with Arduino platforms, thus expanding their usefulness and appeal.

The unmet challenge is for governments to put Arduino and other open source technology at the core of their development agenda and educational programs. The benefits would be especially significant for smaller, emerging economies which otherwise depend on expensive foreign technologies with restrictive intellectual property terms.

Arduino is that rare commons that has successfully combined stable social collaboration with market sales. As an open technology, it has significantly advanced innovation in computer hardware while enhancing economic opportunities for millions of people.

Patterns of Commoning, edited by Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, is being serialized in the P2P Foundation blog. Visit the Patterns of Commoning and Commons Strategies Group websites for more resources.

Julio Sanchez Onofre (Mexico) is a tech journalist for the newspaper El Economista in Mexico City.

Photo by dubiella

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It’s time we technology consumers began demanding something different from our manufacturers: longevity. That’s a big ask. Even when our phones don’t wear out, they are nonetheless obsolesced by OS upgrades and network changes that seem designed to do little more than force new hardware purchases.

Now that Apple has disappointed early adopters with a mere incremental iPhone upgrade, and Samsung has done even worse by releasing exploding Galaxy Note 7s, the preposterous futility of the smartphone wars should be coming apparent. Those people who are trading in perfectly usable phones for the latest models are the suckers.

A brand new smartphone is anything but a status symbol. It simply means you’ve been fooled into valuing a shiny new object over its impact on labor, the environment, or even your own time. And it’s not entirely your own fault.

After all, our Twitter streams are filled with comments about Apple’s latest product launch and links to Medium posts and unboxing videos by those delighted or vanquished by their new purchases. It’s hard not to want the button, the two-lens camera, or iris-recognition security. Such innovations make a single lens or thumbprint security feel, well, so last quarter.

Yet the gadgets truly in need of glorification in our Instagram feeds are those battered, bruised, and still-ticking devices that don’t demand their own replacement every 365 days.

The less-told stories here, and the ones deserving our attention, are the human and climate cost of all these new and unnecessary devices – costs brilliantly externalized by the aesthetic and marketing of tech products.

The Bauhaus elegance of an iPhone, for example, makes it feel as if the device’s primary functions are really occurring inside its new, water-resistant case. The battery is for your screen, and little else. The lion’s share of processing activity – and energy consumption – is actually occurring on servers streaming all those videos and making all the harder calculations and analyses. Siri is not in your phone, she’s on a bunch of HP servers in the cloud. That energy consumption is immense, particularly in comparison with that of recharging our phones every night.

And all that electricity only accounts for around 20 percent of the electricity a smart phone will use in its lifetime, once you factor in the energy used for production and distribution of the phone itself. If the phone materials were actually recycled, there would be additional energy costs – but at least those would have been well spent. As it is, most e-waste is just dumped in huge piles in developing nations, forming small mountains of toxic trash on which impoverished families scavenge for sellable parts. is estimated to reach 60 million tons next year.

Finally, every new smartphone contains several grams of rare earth metals and “conflict” minerals including gold, tin, tungsten, and tantalum. These are mined for, at gunpoint, by child slaves in the Congo. That’s right: Your purchase of a new smartphone requires a kid to go into a cave for minerals, and empowers the people and companies who are exploiting him. (To be fair, most smartphone manufacturers feel really bad about this, and wish they could come up with a way of supplying you with a new phone every year that didn’t depend on raping and killing children.)

Companies have an excuse. Corporate activity has almost always depended on slave labor and environmental destruction. Meanwhile, shareholders demand quarter-over-quarter growth from the companies they own – particularly when they’re technology companies. When Apple sells fewer iPhones than it did the year before, the company’s valuation decreases by billions of dollars.

What’s our excuse? Is a wireless headphone port or wraparound screen really worth the social and environmental cost? How many socially conscious tweets would it take to compensate for the damage caused by a single smartphone purchase?

No, the only real response – the true techie’s response – is to learn how to make one’s phone last as many years as possible. Instead of buying our way out of obsolescence, we program, adapt, and workaround. What makes a phone great is not how new it is, but how long it lasts.

That’s why the person who wins my admiration at a party or conference is not the guy with the latest model smartphone or laptop, but the woman sporting an iPhone 3 and a 2009 MacBook Pro. And not because she’s a luddite, but because she’s the one with user mojo capable of participating at high efficiency in any essential digital activity with the same technology that less savvy consumers would have to consider obsolete.

I once had a guitar teacher who tried to make me feel better about the fact that all the other kids in the music school had expensive Martins while I had a used no-name. He said that in his experience, people’s ability to play was inversely proportional to the cost of their instruments. Willie Nelson’s guitar – holes and all – is testament to the sort of materialism that values the world’s existing objects more than those that have yet to be sourced and assembled.

It’s time we technology consumers began demanding something different from our manufacturers: longevity. That’s a big ask. Even when our phones don’t wear out, they are nonetheless obsolesced by OS upgrades and network changes that seem designed to do little more than force new hardware purchases. App developers can be wiped out by a single iPhone update, and are often forced to choose between serving those on the “old” OS or those who have moved to the new one.

And the more of us stick with the phones we have, the more pressure we will exert on developers to maintain true backwards compatibility – the same way committed Windows 3.1 users forced Netscape and Internet Explorer to remain compatible with them if they wanted to gain market share in the browser wars of the late ‘90s.

Our numbers matter. If we flocked to the new phones, we support a technology landscape that favors change for change’s sake over stability, ease of use, open development, environmental sustainability, and basic human rights.

Love the phone you’re with.

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People gather during last year’s Occupy Hong Kong protests. Photo via Flickr user johnlsl

During the fall of 2011, when Occupy Wall Street inhabited a chunk of New York’s Financial District, many of us reporters found ourselves especially fascinated with the media center on the northeast end, a huddle of laptops and generators surrounded (at first) by a phalanx of bikes. I spent a lot of time there myself. After the christening of Tahrir Square as a “Facebook revolution” a few months earlier, this was the place where one would expect to find The Story, the place where the hashtags were being concocted and the viral videos uploaded. From #OccupyWallStreet to #BlackLivesMatter, it has become customary to name our movements after hashtags, and to thank our smartphones for bringing us together and into the streets.

As Occupy blew up around me, and as I tried to figure out what to write about it, I was lucky to have the guidance of Mary Elizabeth King, who worked for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights era and went on to become a scholar of movements around the world. I was editing a column of hers then, which gave us an excuse to check in regularly.

“Social media alone are not causative,” she wrote in one of her columns around that time. “Nonviolent movements have always appropriated the most advanced technologies available in order to spread their message.” This was something she told me again and again. Which is to say: Don’t be distracted by the technology—it’s not as big a deal as everyone thinks. She helped me listen better to the people themselves, to their ideas and their choices. Such meatspace-centrism also helped me understand why much of Occupy’s momentum was lost when police destroyed the physical protest camps.

We’re often told, especially by those who profit from them, that the latest gizmos change everything, that they spread democracy as a byproduct of their built-in disruptiveness. But whenever a Facebook-driven protest fills Union Square, I think of the May Day photographs from a century ago, when the same place was just as filled, or more so, by protesters in ties and matching hats—no Facebook required.

Socialists in Union Square, New York City, on May Day, 1912. Photo via Wikimedia Commons

Power is still power, and a lot of the techniques for building it and challenging it from the past aren’t going away—unless we let ourselves forget them. And I worry that the gizmos many of us depend on are too good at helping us forget.

What online social media excel at is getting an idea out to a large number of people really quickly—but only for a brief period of time. They’re great at spurring bursts of adrenaline, not so much at sustaining long-term movements. This shouldn’t be so surprising, because the developers of social media networks optimize them for rapid-fire advertising. A labor organizer working with low-wage workers recently lamented to me that many of those she works with are using Instagram—which is even worse on this front than some other popular networks.

“There’s only so much you can do by sharing photos,” she said.

The problems that viral media present are not entirely new. They’re akin to what happened in 1968 in France, when students and artists filled Paris with their slogans and provoked an uprising that nearly brought down the government. And then the unions stepped in—at first, they supported the students, but then, by negotiating with the government and wielding their economic power, the unions took the gains for themselves. A similar story unfolded in the wake of Egypt’s “Facebook revolution”: The young, tech-savvy liberals may have instigated the uprising’s early days, but when the fairest election in the country’s history came around, they didn’t stand a chance against the Muslim Brotherhood, who had spent decades organizing through neighborhood mosques and social services. The Muslim Brotherhood later fell to the US-funded Egyptian military. The liberal Facebookers still have a long way to go.

If a viral, revolutionary rupture were to happen in the United States right now, who would be best poised to benefit? Walmart? The military? I doubt it would be the self-styled radicals loosely organized across the country. Whenever I’m in a meeting of anarchists talking about how they’d be stronger if they provided childcare, I think of the evangelical megachurches I’ve been to that are actually doing it, big time.

Protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. Photo via Flickr user Ramy Raoof

Effective resistance movements depend on networks that are flexible, durable, and can adapt their strategies to changing conditions over time. They need to provide support to members and would-be members who want to ditch the institutions that prop up the current system. And they need to develop alternative institutions that build a new world in the shell of the old. None of these are things that Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat do terribly well—though, in principle, they could.

DemocracyOS, built by Argentinian activists, and Loomio, built by Occupy veterans in New Zealand, are open-source tools that facilitate collective decision-making; both are already being put to use by a new generation of internet-based political parties. CoBudget, a new add-on for Loomio, helps groups allocate resources collaboratively. Another open-source project, Diaspora—a Facebook-like network that allows users to control their own data instead of entrusting it to a corporation—works well enough that the Islamic State has turned to it. CoWorker.org is a platform that helps workers connect with each other and mount campaigns to improve their conditions. Movement-friendly technologies like these, however, tend to be far less market-friendly than their competitors, and don’t attract the private investment that commercial platforms use to build a critical mass of users.

Smartphones, meanwhile, make it easier than ever before to document police abuse and blast the evidence out everywhere. Organizations like Witness are equipping activists to be even more sophisticated in putting mobile cameras to good use. But these phones also come at the cost of perpetual surveillance by increasingly sophisticated—and militarized—police forces; there are times when they are better left at home.

If you look beyond devices and apps, there are lots of reasons to be hopeful about the future of protest and activism. Never before has there been so much knowledge available about what makes protest effective, or so many opportunities for getting good training. Researchers like Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan have been sifting through data on past movements to determine what works and what doesn’t. Historians, meanwhile, are rediscovering forgotten stories of popular uprisings that shaped our world. The country’s first program in civil resistance, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, offers hope that someday schools teaching people power may be more plentiful than war colleges.

One thing that struck me over and over during my time among the Occupy encampments was the amnesia. The young activists’ familiarity with protest movements even a decade or two before theirs was scattered and piecemeal compared to their knowledge of celebrities, wars, and empires. Perhaps this is why so many participants succumbed to despair when the movement didn’t succeed quite as wildly as they’d hoped after just a few months. Perhaps, too, this is why so many people have given up on the Arab Spring after the horrors of Egyptian military rule and the Islamic State. We forget that the French Revolution underwent similar throes in its Reign of Terror and the rise of Napoleon; paradoxically, it was through Napoleon’s autocratic conquests that democratic ideas spread. In the United States, critics of Occupy fault it for not becoming more mixed up with electoral politics, like the Tea Party, but they rarely notice how it enabled the rise of progressive politicians like Bill de Blasio and Elizabeth Warren.

That protest may be over, but the movement is not. I hope that those fighting the racist justice system today keep a longer view in mind than Occupiers generally did.

If there is one thing I have learned from covering protests, it is not to trust anyone’s predictions—including my own. Movements will always surprise us. But I think we know enough now to stop expecting some killer app to come along and change the world for us. That’s something we’ll have to do ourselves.

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