Indonesia’s capital, Jakarta, will invest IDR 30 billion (US$2.4 million) on its smart city project this year, the team told FutureGov.
60 per cent of the money will be spent on building an operations centre that will help monitor and respond to complaints from citizens, said Alberto Ali, Head of Technical Unit, Smart City Jakarta. The remaining will be used for operations and human resources to run the centre, he said.
Read more: Indonesia to spend US$2.4 million on smart city project in 2015
Their experiment, as stated by Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt in 2013, shows that the Internet has become the largest experiment and is full of surprises.
Indonesia has had a Freedom of Information Act since 2008, but officials are still reluctant to release open data to the public, according to the government’s open data team.
The biggest challenge is to convince ministries and agencies that open data is good for them, Prasetya Dwicahya, Associate Director, Open Government Indonesia said.
Read more: Open data misunderstood by Indonesian officials - Open Government Indonesia
Indonesia’s Ministry of Administrative and Bureaucratic Reform (PAN-RB) has launched a new programme to put nearly every single public service online by 2019.
The programme is jointly developed with the Ministry of Information and Communication (Kementerian Kominfo) and is looking to be completed by the end of new Indonesian President Joko Widodo’s five year term.
Read more: Indonesia aims to put all services online by 2019
To anticipate the project, Marwan urged village heads to build their information technology skills so that they could communicate online with their villagers.
“All village heads must be knowledgeable about the Internet,” Marwan said as quoted by tribunnews.com.