President Joko Widodo did a lot more than play zero gravity virtual reality ping pong with Mark Zuckerberg while he was visiting Silicon Valley in the United States last week.
In addition to meeting with the Facebook founder, President Jokowi also visited the headquarters of Twitter and Google. He asked each of the tech giants to help support Indonesia’s growing digital economy and the folks at Google immediately responded with a big pledge to help train the next generation of Indonesian mobile application developers – 100,000 of them to be exact.
It’s a huge pledge, but one that Google will be taking numerous steps to fulfill. As detailed by Jason Titus, vice president of Google’s Developer Product Group, on the official Google Asia Pacific Blog, the ambitious plan to get 100,000 Indonesian mobile application developers not only trained up but also producing viable commercial products over the next 4 years will involve multiple initiatives.
Some of those initiatives include partnering up with Indonesian universities to set up semester-long courses on developing quality Android apps, translating Google open source programming courses into Bahasa Indonesia and holding Google “Developer Study Jams” in cities across Indonesia.
We all know that Indonesia has a huge wealth of programming and design talent, so Google’s pledge could be a huge boost to tapping into all of that potential – but that’s assuming the government doesn’t block off all pro-LGBT websites and services (which, of course, includes Google).
