Short Resume of Onno W. Purbo May 2009
Onno W. Purbo
To see knowledge based society in Indonesia is his ultimate dream and passion. Knowing the Indonesian condition, self-finance and sustainable is an art and must be embedded in the process.
Born in Bandung, Indonesia, 17 August 1962, is an ICT evangelist in Indonesia. He is very active in writing ICT books with more than 40 books published in Indonesian. He believe in copyleft / creative common licensing and freely publish most of his work on the Web. Consequently, he has to give talk in many workshops, demo sessions, seminars to explain his ideas to public at a rate of 3-4 seminars per week.
He and his communities managed to liberate 2.4GHz in Indonesia in January 2005. Today, the Indonesian government has also liberated 5.8GHz for class license usage. He is pushing low cost Internet access through neighborhood network including the use of simple Wokbolic technology. Today, we see 3000-4000 installation new node per month in the neighborhood network as well as a significant grow of Wireless Internet related industries. On top of these network, we run VoIP to serve our voice communication needs. With help from IDRC and ISIF we would like to see a much stronger VoIP network in the region to serve the people.
In 2008, funded by Ministry of Science and Technology, he and his group written and published the ICT open source e-book for Indonesian high schools. We hope to see 20-30 million Indonesian students adopting open source software every years.
He received his undergraduate degree from Institute of Technology in Bandung in 1987. His master degree from McMaster University in Canada in 1989. His Ph.D from University of Waterloo, Canada in 1993.
He received several acknowledgement and awards, including, Eisenhower Fellow (2002), IDRC Sabbatical Award (2003), Ashoka Senior Fellow (2005), Indonesia Goes Open Source Award (2008), Indonesian 100 Innovators (2008), Indonesian Todays Hero (2008).
On the fun side, his Facebook fans profile at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Onno-W-Purbo/39125097711 is reaching 11,000 fans on May 2009.