Sebangsa, a powerful new service for citizens and government to talk with each other.
One of the largest users of social media in the world, Indonesians are taking it a step further with a new social network just for public services.
Enda Nasution and his team have built an app called Sebangsa, or Same Nation, featuring Facebook-like timelines (or Twitter-like feeds) for citizens to share about public services.
They want to introduce an idea they call “social government” in Indonesia, Nasution told FutureGov, going beyond e-government and open government to build a social relationship between the government and citizens.
Sebangsa911 and 1800
After a year of researching and another of developing, Nasution and his team launched Sebangsa in November, available both as a mobile and web app.
It has two features that stand out. One called Sebangsa911 is for Indonesians to post emergencies, much like they might on Twitter or Facebook when they see an accident on the road or a crowd getting violent, for instance. Indonesia does not have any single national emergency number.
Another feature is called Sebangsa1800 which is a channel for people to post reviews, questions and complaints on public services and consumer products.
Why another social network?
But why build another social network when there are millions of users on Facebook and Twitter already? One reason is to provide a service that focuses on Indonesians, Nasution said - the app is in Bahasa.
Another is because existing social networks are not built specifically for public services. If you post a photo of an accident on Twitter, how many and how fast people see it depends on how many followers you have, Nasution said. These reports are also unstructured because they are “scattered all over Twitter”, he said. The app “introduces a little bit of structure to the reports”.
Government buy-in
The success of the app depends on whether agencies get involved in Sebangsa and respond to reports, he admits. Currently, there are no agencies responding to the reports, but the team is in talks with the centre through ICT Minister Rudiantara and with local governments to get buy-in from them.
“The government seems to be happy that we’re doing this,” Nasution said, but not all officials understand the benefits.
“Usually they don’t see social media as a priority for what they’re doing”, he said, and majority of them believe the Twitter or Facebook pages they have are sufficient.
More Indonesians on mobiles
The Sebangsa team believe the app is beneficial to government because in five years’ time “more people will have access to the internet and they will mostly access it through their mobiles”, led by the development of infrastructure and lower costs of data and devices. At that time, even more Indonesians will be on social media and they will have higher expectations from their government.
Once agencies register on Sebangsa, they get access to a backend system to respond to the reports and also get analytics such as the number and locations of reports every day, week and month. Senior officials can even track the performance of their agencies in responding to reports on the app.
Perhaps another draw for agencies would be the number of Indonesians using the app. Currently this hovers around 7000, but the team are working with community groups to get more people on board and plan to launch another seven or eight Sebangsa services this year.
Nasution and his team have built a service that could have a powerful effect on how the Indonesian government interacts with its citizens, but now they have to beat the numbers and get more people on it.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Medha Basu
Quelle/Source: futureGov, 25.03.2015
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