Indonesian News Outlet, Tech Community, and “Karya Anak Bangsa”
The year 2020 was a mess. The global pandemic have kept everyone stuck at home, from workers to students, and as I write this article, we’re still stuck here.
However, forcing most people to do their daily task at home is not easy, as many of the tasks that they need to do were never intended to be done at home. Tech companies started to capitalize this issue, such as Zoom, which reached over 300 million daily active users (DAU) on April 2020, up from the 10 million in December 2019.
Seeing this kind of growth, it’s understandable that the public of Indonesia really hopes that someone, an anak bangsa, would chime in in creating innovations that would help a lot of people get through the new work from home trend. However, this overly — albeit understandable — patriotic view can instead backfires and slows down innovation, as seen on October 2020.
School Election During A Pandemic
It’s October 2020, time for Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 Grobogan — a school in Central Java — to do their annual election to decide who would lead the student council. This time is different however, since their school is closed and everyone is studying at home. A different approach is needed to perform the voting.
Rizki Hidayat — the leader of the election committee — decided that the only solution to perform the election during a pandemic is e-voting. To do this, the team used a very simple, wildly available tech: by using Google Forms.
To our eyes in tech, it is not the most secure election solution, nor does it upholds great secrecy. However for a student council election in a school setting, it is good enough solution that doesn’t take a lot of effort, time, and budget.
The solution works. The election went successfully. The school deems the e-voting system as very effective. Everyone’s happy, right? That is true, until an Indonesian media heard about it and decided to report on it.
The Arguments For and Against “Karya Anak Bangsa”
“ Karya anak bangsa”(lit: “the work of the nation’s children”) has been a jargon used throughout the nation to upsell a product and services made by Indonesian.
The jargon itself is not without controversies, with some claiming that the jargon has been overused as a way to ‘force’ people to use a product or service, when in reality, the product or service should be the one who works toward appealing themself to Indonesians by tailoring to Indonesian needs. Others complained that some companies that uses “ karya anak bangsa” jargon doesn’t even deserve to use the jargon because they hire a lot of non-Indonesian, or even have office outside of Indonesia to do their development, such as Gojek.
On the other side however, some argues that the “ karya anak bangsa” jargon is essential to motivate Indonesian to keep innovating. Buying a product or service simply because it is made by Indonesian is also important to push the country’s innovations.
Both side have a really good argument on the importance — or lack of — of the “ karya anak bangsa” jargon. However, it can’t be denied that the jargon itself have created over-patriotism that may ended up backfiring us.
Indonesian Media and “Karya Anak Bangsa”
One of Indonesian largest news outlet, Kompas, heard about Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 Grobogan’s online student council election, so they decided to make a news report out of it.
Don’t get me wrong, it does make a lot of sense: An Indonesian high-schooler successfully uses technology to create a solution to a problem is a big thing, and they really do need to be appreciated. So it’s understandable why a big media wanted to report on it. The issue here is how they reported it.
“To avoid crowd during the Covid-19 pandemic, students of Madrasah Aliyah Negeri 1 Grobogan, Jawa Tengah, uses an e-voting system to solve the issue of student council election, which two students made the application on their own.” Source: Kompas.tv
Sure enough, the report itself quickly turned into a joke around Indonesian tech communities for obvious reason: an e-voting system powered by Google Forms definitely does not deserve to be reported as “made the application on their own”. It was reposted on Sheetposting Informatika — one of the largest tech-oriented shitposting Facebook group — and even the comment section of the video called out on the report.
“Meanwhile, schools that uses their own student developed web with their own server did not get reported by the news”
“It’s just Google Forms, don’t overreact!”
“Overreaction. It’s just Google Forms!”
“(quoting sarcastically) ‘made the application on their own’”
“My God, t_hey’re not a creator, they’re just a user!”_
As we see, the media’s over-enthusiastic report to the student’s solution has backfired, causing people to mock, rather than support, the students.
To be fair, the mocking went down pretty quickly. Many people shifted the blame towards the media for overreacting rather than the students, who never intended to get reported this big. During the interview itself, the students were really honest, saying that “ we made the e-voting application using Google Drive”, so it’s not like the students are trying to make their work sounds more complex than it is. It’s just the media’s overreaction that causes the backlash.
However, this isn’t the first time such backlash happened. Let’s go back to 2011.
Social Media, Developed by Junior High Student
The year was 2011. I was a Junior High School student. Facebook had just gotten popular in Indonesia, and me — an over-enthusiastic kid who knows very basic (though at that time, I thought it was advanced) web development using PHP — decided to write my own social media called _“_MyTeamPal”, a play on the word “ metimpal” which means “making friends” in Balinese.
With this in mind, sure it fills me with rage (mainly due to enviousness) when I heard that another Junior High School student made it to the news for developing his own social network: SalingSapa.
SalingSapa is an Indonesian muslim-focused social network made by Muhammad Yahya, a 13-year-old junior high student, two years younger than me. He had a decent user base even prior to the news report, and he also have struck deals with multiple mosques to livestream khutbah (sermon) on their site. However, the one that made me mad was not just the fact that he made it to the news, but the fact that the website itself was not ‘hand-made’ as many news reports made it sounds like. It was made using Jcow.
Jcow is a social network content management system (CMS) written in PHP. Given a PHP web hosting — which was, and still, can be gotten for free — anyone can make their own social network. This made me mad because my social network — which was hand-made by myself — did not get popular, but his social network did. Adding to the fire was that he used an illegitimate copy of the software.
Of course, the biggest difference between his social network and mine was, his social network gave something that many Indonesian — which predominantly muslims — wants and successfully made a large user base even before it got reported by the news — which is a big achievement on its own. Mine? Well, it wasn’t even half done and it was just a Facebook rip-off.
However, my junior high ego did not have the same perspective as I do now, and unfortunately for Muhammad, neither did the ‘netizens’.
He got cyber bullied, real hard.
Introducing The Most Intimidating Online Community: The Tech Communities
For everyone who’s been in tech for a while, you know how fierce online tech community can be. It even has become a meme, with a lot of StackOverflow thread jokes.
If you’ve been in any Facebook group for discussing programming matters, you probably know how fierce the senior members can be when a programming-newbie asks a basic question. Even I was guilty for it. I used to reply to every newbie questions with an LMGTFY ( Let Me Google That For Y ou, a website that ‘shows you’ how to use Google) link anytime a newbie asks a question.
The reason behind it is sincere: to push newbies to be independent and use Google before asking any question, which unironically is exactly how professional software engineers do their job. However, this “toughen-up, kid!” behavior had instead backfired and pushes newbies away from software engineering.
The software engineers in tech communities, especially software engineering students, can also get very sensitive when someone who they deem “undeserving” gets attention, such as the case of SalingSapa. The news made it sounds like he’s a programming prodigy who wrote his own social network, while to the tech communities, he’s just a user of a CMS software.
This created a lot of bullying, especially on forums such as Kaskus, as shown in a Kompasiana post. The website got defaced soon after, which forced his dad to make a clarification defending his son.
Unfortunately, I can’t find the archive of the clarification post. But if my memory serves me right, the overall message was that Muhammad Yahya never said that he made the website from scratch, as he only said he “ mengembangkan” (developed) the website and it was the media who made it sounds like he “ menciptakan” (created). Surprisingly, despite my enviousness, my junior-high self agreed, and many of my tech friends did too.
He had achieved something that a junior high kids can only imagine: developing a platform that gave what many Indonesian wanted, but ruined because the news media decided to focus on the topic that there’s an Indonesian tech-prodigy kid who made a social media with his bare hands.
This incident shows that over-enthusiastic approach of Indonesian media when it comes to Indonesian kids in tech, combined with the ‘sincere’ fierceness of the tech community, has instead backfired and hurt kids and teenagers who’s interested in tech.
What News Outlets Should’ve Done
Despite all the issues, I really do appreciate news media who reported innovations made by “ anak bangsa”, as it helps motivate many more kids, teenagers, or even adults, to join in, learn about software engineering, and help push Indonesian tech forward.
However, I believe that news outlets should always discuss tech professionals (or tech specific journalists) first before making a news report on it, as it may affect the fate of the subject of the matter, especially if it involves students.
News outlets need to understand the complexity of the tech stack, so they know clearly which part of the ‘innovation’ should be focused on. They also need to choose the words carefully, such as either to use the word ‘created’ or ‘developed’.
We need the media to report on Indonesian tech innovations, but we also need them to be really careful on how they’re reporting it as to avoid backfire that will hurt kids and teens in tech.
What The Tech Communities Should’ve Done
Don’t bully the newbies and kids in tech.
If there’s a newbie who asks basic easily-googleable question, guide them instead of mocking them. Help them understand how easy it is to find the solution to their technical problems. Mocking newbies — especially kids — who are interested in tech will only hurt the community.
Fortunately, after few months, the bullying of SalingSapa reduced. The website still lives on, and everyone seems to have forgotten about the incident.
The tech community also moved on, by bullying a 10-year-old kid who developed his own game using RPG Maker instead.
I on the other hand, continued working on my social network, which at the end, I got too bored and never finished it — like a true programming hobbyist. I lost the source code of the website after I formatted my laptop’s hard drive. Thank God I knew nothing of version control software and hosting at that time as seeing my junior high school code today would be a nightmare.