Indonesia’s Akademi Berbagi: How Social Media is Used for Social Movements [INTERVIEW]

In this social media era, a single Twitter update can have huge repercussions. Topics of discussion can range from often-meaningless trending topics to mobilizing efforts to help earthquake victims. We’re big fans of the latter, as social media can often be a catalyst for entire social movements.

Consider Indonesia’s Akademi Berbagi (“the Sharing Academy”) which organizes small weekly classes about different topics such as copy writing, art directing, online journalism, social media, photography, financial planning, and music. These subjects are usually expensive to learn, but in Akademi Berbagi, we can learn from expert practitioners for free. That’s a pretty sweet deal!

According to a recent report in The Jakarta Globe, Akademi Berbagi started June of last year. They tweeted, telling Indonesian advertising expert Subiakto that they wanted to learn advertising but couldn’t afford to pay him. Now a year later, they inspire more than ten other cities in Indonesia and Singapore, with a group of experts who teach the classes for free, and thousands of students attending.

To gain some insight into this community and how it uses social media to run its movement, Penn Olson interviewed Akademi Berbagi founder Ainun Chomsun (pictured above) via email. She’s a social media activist and freelance public relations consultant. Recently Ainun was crowned as a ‘Digital Community Leader’ at the Bubu Awards v.07.

1. How powerful is social media usage in Indonesia? Could we say that without social media, Akademi Berbagi wouldn’t exist?

I feel social media is very powerful, particularly for Akademi Berbagi. I get all the teachers, venues for classes, and volunteers to help via social media. Social media publishing is also very fast and effective for spreading out a sharing spirit to all corners of Indonesia.

2. Why are there also Akademi Berbagi classes in ten other cities beside Jakarta? Were you asking people there to create other Akademi Berbagi classes? What’s social media’s role there?

They are people who read my tweets about Akademi Berbagi all the time. They volunteered themselves to manage or become “headmaster” of Akademi Berbagi classes in other regions. I didn’t ask them at all. They volunteered because they felt it was needed and were inspired to have Akademi Berbagi classes in their regions.

3. How does Akademi Berbagi organize its classes?

Every region is independently managed by its headmasters and volunteers. They discuss about every classes on our mailing list. After everything is fixed we announce the schedule, topics, teachers, and venue via Twitter @akademiberbagi and our web portal akademiberbagi.org. Volunteers contact and ask teachers to contribute via Twitter or email.

So everything is organized via the mailing list and Twitter. For Jakarta classes, we meet and discuss face-to-face once a week.