Join us in Akal Budi

It began in late 2009, when I wrote the post Free e-book – What Matters Now. As a response to an anonymous critic that ‘accused me of looking up to non-Malay thoughts’, I said I’d love to have a similar compilation by Malay minds - but who’s taking the initiative?

From then on, the seed of the idea grew because in my mind I see it as a fun and beneficial (to society) project. In this digital and internet age, contents are cheap (virtually free) to reproduce and distribute. And what better use of these tools other than to educate? I personally found initiatives such as Starfall Education, Khan Academy and MIT Open Courseware inspiring. One of my favourite daydream (angan-angan, daydream is not the exact translation) is to be able to convince/initiate KPM to do a tutorial portal containing the national (KBSR/KBSM) syllabus accessible online for free to all. Yes, yang macam Score-A tu. More recently, I was also influenced by a book I read, Wikinomics – How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, the principles of wikinomics being openness, peering, sharing, and acting global.

But I digress.

In early 2010, I got a few friends to share the excitement with and they’ve had some great ideas to build up on this. Asma & Lina suggested that, rather than distribute the content(s) gratis, let’s give people the option to donate. A (small?) part of the donation may be used to fund the next project and to maintain website, but the bulk of it will go to chosen charity bodies.

To solicit donation, it’s more transparent to use a group/society account, so we plan to register ourselves as a group under ROS (Registrar of Societies). It’s not very straightforward because minutes of meetings, committee list, logo etc need to be submitted together with the application. Also, we had started discussing about building our website. We’ve agreed on the group name (Persatuan) Akal Budi, the separate words respectively symbolizes the first (education) and second (charity) objectives, while the coined term ‘akal budi’ together meant ‘budaya - fikiran dan kelakuan yang baik’.

However, after my mother passed away in June 2010, I somehow lacked the will and energy to continue, and 2010 flew past without any further development (sorry, dears!). I’ve always known that I wanted to do this, but I just procrastinated. But now, energized by my 3-month maternity leave, I rekindled my desire to see this happen.

What a long story.

What I actually want to say is: if you are interested to join us in Akal Budi, please leave your email in the comment section, or email me directly at mynie.mat@ gmail.com. We really hope we can add more members to our team (there’s currently about 5-6 of us).

After taking care of the logistics side (as mentioned above) such as registering the group, opening a group bank account, and setting up the group website, the first project would be to compile and distribute a collection of pearls of wisdom from respected people in our communities, which would involve tasks such as: identifying and contacting them to seek their contributions/participation, following up, producing a compiled copy, and distributing. If all goes well insya-Allah, we’d like to put forth proposals to interested publishers for the compilation to be published as hardcopies.

Team members should feel free to pursue any projects of their own (for example, some of us are quite keen on early learning contents as parents’ teaching materials) that fits the group common objectives. Akal Budi would just be a platform – as an umbrella organisation, to bounce ideas, to seek support and participation from other members. As a virtual team, we’d discuss things mostly via emails or chat tools or FB or phone. Of course, I hope that we’ll meet face to face at some point in the future. Since we are juggling this besides other commitments and priorities, we don’t expect things to move quickly. But hopefully, we’ll be able to create values for our communities and have some fun along the way, insya-Allah.

So, join us?