Anissa S. Febrina ,  The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Tue, 05/12/2009 11:24 AM  |  People

JP/Anissa S. Febrina

In an era when moms are fluent bloggers and ideas are freely exchanged on the World Wide Web, there doesn’t seem to be anything special about what Nani Buntarian has done: Set up a mailing list for women’s rights activists.

But she did it more than a decade ago and it proved to be a gesture that went a long way.
“Back then, the most that people in Indonesia did with the Internet was to have an email address. Not many realized the potential of the medium,” says Nani, who works in the advertising industry.

In 1998, after being involved in a series of meetings between women’s rights activists, Nani decided to set up a mailing list aimed at connecting “women with an incredible passion for speaking out for their fellow women’s rights.”

“I have no background in the women’s movement nor am I working for any institution of that kind,” she says.

“But being involved with these activists inspired me to at least do something in my capacity.”
And with her interest in information technology and her then newly found fascination with the Internet, Nani decided that her role could be as a nanny in cyberspace, providing a space for activists to strategically link their activities and build a common ground.

Ten years ago, even email users would ask what kind of beast a mailing list is. For those in the circle of women’s rights activism, it was Nani who introduced the communication media to them.
She took the list of email addresses, found a free service offered by email list management website e-groups – which was later bought by Yahoo! and merged into Yahoo! Groups – and set up the Perempuan mailing list.

“I told them that a mailing list is a bowl into which you can pour knowledge and ideas, as well as drink from it,” says Nani, whose passion for computers dates back to 1984.

It may be just a simple mailing list, but Nani’s initiative has brought together many women who speak up against violations of their rights. It snowballed into a major movement, especially after the fall of Soeharto.

“There were lots of ideas and knowledge to be shared and they [women right’s activists] needed a way to get them to others in Jakarta and outside Java.”

One result was the establishment of the Indonesian Women Coalition Congress, partly made possible by having a more efficient way of communicating – that simple mailing list.

Currently, the mailing list, which started with only eight email addresses, hosts more than 1,300 individual and institutional members under the address perempuan@yahoogroups.com.

It remains a non-topical mailing list, meaning that it is used only to share information about events and activities.

And Nani still serves as its nanny, supervising membership and cleaning out unwanted spam.

The project was the start of her building further interest in the strategic exploitation of ICT for women as she was then invited to join the Asia-Pacific Women’s Electronic Network Training/Workshop and later became a trainer for the organization.

Nani, who is also involved in social work on HIV/AIDS issues, focused her contribution on the development of the content that women want to send through the Internet as “that is where the human part of technology lies”.

According to Nani, the Internet has a lot of potential that women can exploit – rather than being merely exploited by it as a target market.

“The blogging culture has had an impact on women in terms of self-expression,” she says, adding that being able to write about one’s feelings and opinions is a step toward empowering women.

Nani even defends the Facebook hype, currently infecting not only women – while also noting the negative aspects of its data-mining controversies – with what skeptics label as nurtured narcissism.

“It’s a human right to have self-expression. It contributes to diversity and helps us to have a space to reflect ourselves,” she says. “Don’t ever blame technology; it’s just about plugging and unplugging.”

She adds that despite her passion to help nurture the women’s rights movement, she wants to maintain her independence and not be affiliated with any institutions.

Nani’s fondness for information technology and especially the Internet comes from her insatiable curiosity and her love for indexing.

“As a child, I always loved reading encyclopedias where you just browse for a key word and could get a wealth of information on the subject,” she says, recalling her childhood memories of opening the Britannica set bought by her father.

And the Internet works just like that.

“It’s a knowledge-based space where people can actually take and give and be equal. It also makes us humble in the sense that what we thought we know is actually nothing compared to what other people have shared there,” she explains.

It is this kind of potential that Nani wants women’s rights movements to exploit.

“The use of ICT in women’s rights activism in Indonesia has picked up, but there are many that have not yet placed it strategically,” she says.

“Social change in this country takes place in everyday life and is done by nobodies.”