Bandung is emerging as Indonesia’s leading smart city. Spurred by Indonesia’s economic growth in the past decade, Bandung has developed into a thriving hub for manufacturing and creative industries. The city’s economy is growing at an annual rate of 9%, and its population is estimated to reach 4.1 million by 2030. With this rapid urbanisation, the city is starting to face a number of challenges such as traffic congestion, rising crime rates, waste management, air pollution and housing shortages.
To address these challenges, the government has announced that it will quadruple the budget for its smart city programme next year, from IDR25 billion (US$1.8 million) to IDR 100billion (US$7.3 million), which will be used to build up the city's digital infrastructure. Over the past year, the government has installed about 5,000 free wi-fi hotspots across the city, and they have set a target to install up to 40,000 hotspots to provide more citizens with access to free connectivity. “Bandung has 10,000 neighbourhoods and we intend to provide each with four wi-fi hotspots,” said Ridwan Kamil, Mayor of Bandung.
During his presidential campaign, Joko Widodo repeatedly vowed to implement an e-government system that would strengthen monitoring, improve accountability and ultimately curb corruption.
Coming into his second year in term, the president is finding the task easier said than done, as Indonesia struggles to cope with a lack of technical and human support for its e-government plans.
Read more: Indonesia E-Government Dream Needs Troubleshooting
As scholars conducting research on e-participation, with quite extensive experience in government administration, we were intrigued by Muhammad Fajar’s article in this newspaper on Aug. 4. In the article titled “e-Participation and democracy” he cited lapor.go.id and the latest program laporpresiden.org, to argue that e-government initiatives may lead to demobilization of people in the democratic process. Yet the ability of e-participation to mobilize or demobilize citizens can be very subjective, mostly attributable due to the following three main reasons.
First, e-government, in general, is not meant to be a direct support for democratic practices. E-government is just one method to achieve better governance. While democracy is only one of the final outcomes expected, it is not always necessarily the case. Therefore, judging the success level of e-Government practices by using the measurement of democracy can be misleading. Furthermore, e-participation cannot be viewed as representative of the whole e-government system. In fact, it is just a part of e-government, using the electronic version of ordinary participation practice that is mainly supported by the Internet.
Read more: ID: E-government, e-participation, and citizens’ mobilization
E-government expert from Universitas Indonesia gives GI his picks.
Indonesian President Joko Widodo came into office last year with a promise to improve public services through e-government systems. He has a record of doing so both as Jakarta Governor, and the Mayor of Solo before that.
GovInsider spoke to Dana Sensuse, Head of E-government Lab at Universitas Indonesia, about three noteworthy e-government projects across federal and local governments.
The government has invited hundreds of IT specialists from across the country to develop digital solutions to enable more efficient and transparent governance.
As part of an ongoing effort to realize President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo’s campaign promise of implementing e-governance, the Office of the Presidential Staff (KSP) is hosting the country’s first ever nationwide “hackathon” with the aim of crowdsourcing digital application concepts that will assist in the gathering of accurate data that could serve as a foundation for more effective policies.
Read more: ID: Digital solutions sought to create good governance