
Andreas Siagian representing Lifepatch with Irfan D. Prijambada representing Microbiology of Agriculture Department UGM in Seminar Lintas Batas
In August, Lifepatch had the opportunity to do a presentation in a seminar organized by PKKH UGM, a cultural center hosted by UGM. They asked us to share the experience on working collaboratively with academician like Microbiology Department of Agriculture Faculty UGM. With the invitation, we recommended that the speaker should be from both from Lifepatch and Microbiology Lab, and so Irfan D. Prijambada and Andreas Siagian were doing a presentation in the seminar.

Rector UGM, Prof. Dr. Pratikno, M.Soc.Sc. giving a Keynote speech as the opening of Seminar Lintas Batas
In the seminar, Andreas mostly sharing the idea of Lifepatch in Citizen Initiative as a “common ground” between people from any background and practices in interdisciplinary collaborations. The dependency of collaboration with others needs a mutual interest and benefits, while the sustainability of the collaboration should be focus with a consistency of small-scale activities to create synergy between both sides. He stated the strong sense of community in Indonesia have a major role in the mentality of collaboration and the development of the community itself is much more important compare to the goal of a collaborative project. With this mindset as the basis, a space for flexible working methodology from the academician side is needed while the creative community such as Lifepatch must construct their structural way of work. His statement was presented in showing some cases of collaboration that Lifepatch have conducted with local communities such as Green Tech Community, and Microbiology Department of Agriculture Faculty UGM. In international scale he showed the collaboration of Lifepatch with Hackteria, and projects such as HackteriaLab – 2014, Jogja River Project with Bio-Design for The Real World.
The seminar continued with presentation from Irfan D. Prijambada, sharing Microbiology Department experience through many activities that was conducted since 2008. He stated that for academician, it’s quite hard to understand creative communities practices, and it needs an open minded mentality from his side. He stated that the long process of collaboration bears better fruit of result, in which the output of the collaboration could be in forms of anything. With Donny Widianto, they have invite their students to see their own practices from another perspective such as art, and he was pleased with the activities of sharing knowledge between academician and communities could be established, local and internationally. He gave an example of MiCam (Microscope from a hacked webcam) workshop from Marc Dusseiller – Hackteria in Microbiology Department was very interesting and appropriate to the situation in Indonesia. Jogja River Project, HackteriaLab – 2014 and Bioartnergy was several example of activities of collaboration that bear interesting experience from his side.
Documentation of the Seminar Lintas Batas is available in Lifepatch: http://lifepatch.org/Seminar_Lintas_Batas