Transforming Indonesia into Evidence Based Societies

What we need for Indonesia now is how to shift from verbal culture society into evidence based society. Data should be placed in the center of every decision making, to compare the process, outcomes and changes in the society overtime within the country or even between countries.

Now the world has been poured by data following what we call as data revolution.
According to IAEG (Independent Expert Advisory Group) on Data Revolution, around 90 percent of data available in the world has been produced in the last 2 years. Fantastic.

Data in the most recent times are not only important to provide information describing the real situation of the life of people, but also data should be transformed as s lifeblood of every decision-making, for accountability, for every development dialog, for monitoring the progress of development. We now need more diverse quality data (BPS-Statistics Indonesia has produced abundant-rich types of data) as a trustworthy information which can be used for many purposes including as a source for real-time people-government dialog.

One of the great challenges for Indonesia today, data available has already been used by central government but not by civil society. There has been a huge gap between development observer in most developed countries and in the developing countries. For the first, every dialog, criticism and discourse based on data as a basis for people-government dialog. With data, quality data, which underpined every evaluation, the level of understanding of the problem and alternative strategy/solution could be produced. Data has been put in the center of every development observation and evaluation.

For the second, local government, development observer, development reader, are still lag behind in using and understanding data. There are suffering from world of data. They are data illiteracy. This is the real situation of Indonesia today. Many politician, observer, civil society give critics to government without any rasional basis..this situation not only unproductive but also dangerous. The media including social media poured by disinformation, hatred or even defamation. Low quality of civil society.

What Indonesia needs today is more of data based society, evidence based society, and data literacy society for more productive government-civil society partnership.

Jousairi Hasbullah
16 June 2018.