@rebecca: sad to hear igdore indonesia is closing down… anything we can do to prevent that, or is it already too late? 
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keeping this here for posterity… or at least until this forum closes down too…
@jon_tennant @dasaptaerwin / @Dasapta_Erwin_Irawan
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@surya - don’t worry, coworking.igdore.org can live on in the Wayback machine (it should also captured the outlinks)
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We haven’t been able to get the operational license. Out notaris made a mistake when starting up the foundation (yayasan): she categorised us as a social yayasan, because she thought that scientific research goes under ‘social’, but we should apparently have been categorised as an educational yayasan. This mistake has ultimately made it impossible for us to get the final license to operate.
In addition, recent changes by the Indonesian government means that we will never be able to independently collect data in Indonesia. This means that it’s no longer meaningful for us to have a campus there.
Thirdly, we could potentially have tried to continue focusing on being a coworking space and conference venue for academics. If doing that, we would have had to start a new company or try to get the operational license from the social office in Gianyar. The first option would mean that we lose all the money we have already invested in the foundation (we would not be allowed to reallocate the money invested) plus we would have to invest an additional huge amount of money as required for foreigners by Indonesian law. This could potentially have been manageable if only we could see that the venue would actually be used by academics. But we have existed on Bali since 2017 and the few researchers we’ve had spending time at the campus have most of them done so for free, without interest in paying for their stay. Affiliated researchers can and should stay for free, but we also have a number of other people who have found ways to stay for free for example by getting temporarily affiliated with IGDORE. This means that we have had lots of expenses but basically zero income. If I had done this all over from the start, with fresh energy, newly invested funds, and a focus from start on being a conference venue and coworking space for academics - rather than a campus - then it might had been possible to survive financially by putting lots of effort from the beginning on lab retreats and marketing toward universities and labs in Australia. But on the other hand, a conference venue and coworking space was never what I personally wanted to create; I wanted to create a social science laboratory and a meeting place for open science researchers, whistleblowers, and graduate students who feel bullied into bad science. Indonesian bureaucracy stopped that from happening. That’s indeed sad. But closing down in Indonesia has given me renewed energy and I’m now focused on setting things up here in Sweden instead. We also have Ljerka Ostojić (@Ljerka_Ostojic @ljerka.ostojic) who might be organising things in Croatia. So IGDORE overall is thriving (we’re growing rapidly and have a great team of people in the Global Board and volunteers) and we can all look forward to a bunch of exciting things happening at IGDORE (in Europe) in the future!
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Thanks rebecca… It seems too late to do anything now… Indonesian bureaucracy can indeed be stifling and disheartening… 
“I wanted to create a social science laboratory and a meeting place for open science researchers, whistleblowers, and graduate students who feel bullied into bad science.”
That is exactly what is missing from indonesia, and indeed the world… Kudos for keeping up the fight… As they say,
“When the going gets tough, the tough gets going!”
See you when you get there…
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Rebecca, and all, thanks for sharing the background. I live in Asia, and visited Indonesia for the first time last year, and I also thought of moving there at some point (not yet ruled out), I wanted to say, thanks for trying to set up an IGDORE Indonesia, and sorry to hear the application did not go right, I wish I could have helped. At the same time, there are other ways to operate in Indonesia that do not require setting up a company or a complex bureaucracy, IGDORE Sweden could simply apply to become part of an incubator in Bali - there are many - as a foreign company, I attended a startup incubator event in Bali last year, and there are a lot of options for having a presence there, One can be an IGDORE researcher from sweden, and be resident in Bali (provided the activity is not classified as work, which would require a work permit) So I d like to invite IGDORE to keep an open mind as to continue the dream, even if the application was made in the wrong category I must say, that it shoujld be possibly to change the category if it was entered incorrectly, So if you decide to go back to that application, I can look into it That said, I am happy to offer my company registered in Taiwan as a host for IGDORE Taiwan (provided there are some reputable IGDORIANS here) AND to make available a small plot of land in Tenerife for a campus. I have a small terrace with cave overlooking the ocean in Tenerife, still without water and electricity. I mentioned it briefly to Enrico. I have plans to develop it into a place for scholarly residencies, and would like to make it available to IGDORE as well. I ll continue to look around to see if there is anything I can contribute My idea is to continue to develop rigorous science and expose the scientific abuses and misappropriation carried out by academic institutions.
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