[Kabar-indonesia] Jeffrey Winters: Why Joyo is so important and deserves our support

[Joyo at aol.com]

Message from Jeffrey Winters, professor of political
science at Northwestern University and noted Indonesia
specialist:

Why Joyo is so important and deserves our support

This news service is truly unique and immensely
valuable.  No such service exists for any other
SEAsian country, and in talking to my Africanist and
Latin Americanist colleagues, no such service exists
for any country in other regions.  I've been a Joyo
subscriber since before Joyo existed as Joyo.  It
began when one particularly industrious,
information-hungry person in New York 
began scouring the online world daily for everything
being published on Indonesia and especially East
Timor.  I believe there were four of us back then who
were the happy recipients of his daily mailings.  We
forwarded the material to others we felt would
appreciate Joyo's efforts.  Then they got added to the
list, and things took off from there.  The Joyo
subscriber list quickly grew into the thousands, 
weaving together a global community of people keenly
interested to follow daily developments in Indonesia
(students, scholars, journalists, artists, business
people, NGO activists, lawyers, consultants, risk
analysts, diplomats, government officials,
intelligence and defense types, and many individuals
not included in these categories).

What has always made the Joyo news service valuable is
that we do not receive a machine-dump of everything
out there.  Joyo reads the pieces, considers how much
additional content each piece has, and decides whether
subscribers would benefit from the material.  Then the
text must be grabbed, reformatted, and then sent off. 
Along the way, Joyo has had to wrestle with the most
inane things -- like the rise of spam, and how you
convince a mind-numbingly impersonal behemoth like AOL
not to treat your emails to subscribers as spam (either
blocking or intercepting them automatically).  How
many of you have ever tried to send an email to a list
of several thousand people at once?  Joyo is not
automated.  In fact, truth be told, it's barely
computerized.  Behind this service are flesh and blood
people who work in shifts around the clock to keep the
flow of information flowing.

Joyo does not charge subscribers.  From the start, the
commitment has been to keep this service free.  There
is no website you click to where you can read Joyo
postings while being inundated with flashing ads that
generate some operating revenues.  The news service
has received some foundation support over the years
(but you know how they get fatigued with giving and
move on to other things), it has received some
generous grants from private individuals who admire
what Joyo is and stands for, and it has received
voluntary support from subscribers -- from you.

I cannot begin to describe what Joyo has meant to me
as a scholar.  I would wager that you benefit from it
too.  I not only read the Joyo feed daily, but I have
kept every single article sent from day one.  It is a
database of some 300,000 articles dating back over a 
decade, all carefully selected by Joyo and the news
service team.  And thanks to the Google Desktop search
engine, I can find anything I need in the Joyo
database in a flash.

Had I hired a research assistant at Northwestern
University to gather all this material for me daily
over the years, what would this have cost me?  Had I
done all this work myself, how many hours would it
have taken to copy and paste and format and save all
this information, and would I have consistently
covered as many sources as Joyo does -- to say nothing
of those gems not related to Indonesia he sometimes
tosses into the mix because the piece is just too
funny or ironic or insightful to miss?

To all of you in the Joyo community, I urge you today
(right now) to do as I am doing -- to renew your
financial support for the Joyo News Service.  You
won't get a mug or a t-shirt or hear your name on the
radio thanking you for your support.  But what you
will get is more of what is too easy to take for
granted -- a pure public good for all of us who desire
to keep abreast of things Indonesian.

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How to contribute...

Annual Appeal 2006 

Please take a few minutes from your busy schedule to
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You know how long you've been subscribing, the value
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Please be as generous as possible! 

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PO Box 8000, 
JKTJ 13040, Jakarta, 
Indonesia

*Please send notification of contributions, comments
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Thanks very much! Terima kasih!

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Joyo Indonesia News Service
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