Designing a Working Environment Around Media

I started studying at Telkom Institute of Management in August 2012, but I didn’t immediately join any student activity unit. I wanted to understand university life first, while also focusing on the faculty-level Students Executive Board that had already caught my attention. I was also involved in several relatively large regional and national-scale events, so joining more organizations at the same time didn’t make much sense to me. A year later, after becoming more comfortable with university life, I started looking again at the student activity units that might interest me. That was when I found Central Computer Improvement, or CCI, an ICT-oriented student organization with divisions covering Web Development, Data Research, Media Management, Design, and also Games and Gadget.

I joined because I had been interested in web development since junior high school, and the organization appealed to me because I heard its members enjoyed exploring and experimenting with tech and gadgets. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm disappeared almost immediately. There was very little activity, and because I didn’t know anyone there well enough to simply walk into the group, I became a passive member and stopped returning to the secretariat room. I had technically joined CCI, but I wasn’t really participating in it.

Returning to CCI

In 2014, after I had been appointed Minister of ICT at the Visual Communication Design student association, a former colleague invited me for coffee. I hadn’t spoken with him for some time, so I accepted without expecting anything particularly important. When I arrived, however, several people I didn’t recognize were already there. I vaguely recognized some of their faces, and eventually realized that they were CCI members.

The conversation was casual, but at some point they began persuading me to become active in CCI again. I remember telling them that I still wanted to do activities there. That distinction mattered to me. I didn’t say that I wanted to remain a member. I wanted to make something. Being a member without having anything meaningful to participate in was exactly what had made me leave in the first place.

They offered me a position in Media Management, which made sense because several people there had previously worked with me in the Students Executive Board and already knew that I actively managed its social media. I accepted, and for a moment I thought that was the end of the discussion. Then they brought up Students, the cyber-journalism publication managed by Media Management, and asked me to become its CEO. I rejected the offer immediately.

It wasn’t because I lacked the time. I already had another organizational responsibility, but I knew I could probably manage both. What actually made me uncomfortable was that I didn’t understand what I was being asked to lead. I knew how to manage social media, but I didn’t understand the culture behind Students, how its publication operated, how its monetization worked, and so on. More importantly, I had only just returned to Central Computer Improvement after being practically absent. Why should someone like me suddenly take its most important position?

They told me I could think about it, but I still refused. Eventually, the position was temporarily taken by a CCI vice chairperson. Only later did I realize that my discomfort had been pointing toward something real.

Keeping the News Alive

At the time, Students practically had only three active people handling its daily publication. There was no elaborate division of editorial roles between us. We were all journalists because the situation demanded it. The priority was much simpler. We didn’t want to let a single day pass without publishing news.

For months, we worked around that constraint. Sometimes I had to write news about subjects I barely understood, which was uncomfortable but also became an unexpected learning opportunity. At the time, I was more comfortable writing articles than daily news, so adapting to the faster rhythm and different expectations of news writing became part of the learning process.

At some point during this period, a senior member discovered a backdoor on the Students website. The site was running on WordPress with an online template, so I saw the security concern as an opportunity to rethink the website itself. I volunteered to redesign it and decided to build the WordPress theme from scratch, even though at the time I only knew HTML and CSS. CCI was an ICT-oriented organization, and I felt that we should at least be able to build a WordPress theme for our own website. More than just improving the interface, I wanted the website to feel like something we had built ourselves, because it was one of the organization’s own products.

The situation around us became more concerning when CCI opened recruitment in mid-2014. Hundreds of new students joined, many of them from technology-related majors, but the size of the recruitment didn’t translate into sustained activity. As their expectations met what the existing divisions could actually provide, many gradually disappeared. The three of us in Media Management witnessed that decline while we were still trying to keep Students running, and by the time we prepared our own recruitment in early 2015, the possibility of losing members in the same way had become something we couldn’t ignore.

When new members finally joined Media Management, we became more conscious of how to give them things to do and opportunities to develop. I started noticing gaps beyond writing news, including the need for better featured images, so I began hunting for suitable stock photographs. For a short period, I also took on the role of designer, mostly producing featured images along with occasional posters and infographics. Eventually, these responsibilities evolved into a more defined role as senior editor, primarily checking and editing article drafts. Even then, the title never became a strict boundary. In CCI, a role described your primary responsibility rather than everything you were allowed to do, and that flexibility mattered because we were still working with limited resources.

With the new members in place, we began creating objectives that encouraged them to produce and improve their work. One mechanism was deliberately competitive. We chose another student organization involved in journalism as a benchmark and challenged ourselves to outperform them in both quality and quantity, even though they obviously had no idea they were part of our rivalry. After we exceeded those targets, we looked for a new benchmark, eventually turning toward commercial media with stronger audience reach.

The approach worked effectively. Members had something meaningful to pursue, and the division became considerably more active as a result. More importantly, it gave people a reason to develop themselves through actual work rather than simply holding membership status without meaningful involvement.

When One Division Became Its Own World

The problem with a successful mechanism is that its consequences can extend beyond what it was designed to achieve. Over time, the competitive mindset that helped Media Management become more active also made the division increasingly self-contained. Other CCI members began noticing the distance, and what had originally been a way to prevent members from disappearing was starting to threaten the cohesion of the organization itself.

I didn’t see this as a reason to blame Media Management. I was part of that division, and the mechanism had genuinely helped us solve a very difficult problem. The issue was that we had optimized one part of CCI without sufficiently considering what that optimization was doing to the rest of the organization.

By then, I was already an extraordinary member rather than an active operational member of a division. Together with other extraordinary members and several core committee members, particularly the chair and vice chair, we began discussing how to address the situation without turning it into an accusation against anyone. We kept the discussions informal even when the subjects were serious, because that gave us room to think more creatively and honestly.

One practical opportunity appeared when the Students website was later compromised and defaced. This was no longer something Media Management could reasonably handle entirely alone. I used the incident as a reason to bring Media Management, Web Development, and Networking into the same problem-solving process together. A security problem had created a shared responsibility, and that was more effective than simply telling different divisions that they needed to collaborate more closely.

Other measures followed, including gradually repositioning the publication’s identity and periodically observing its development with the division leadership over time. These were small interventions, but the principle behind them was considerably larger. CCI could specialize through its divisions without allowing those divisions to become isolated organizations within the organization itself.

Designing Through Participation

Looking back, I spent around six years as an active member of CCI, including a later return to active membership after I resumed studying in 2018. Those years taught me things that formal classes couldn’t provide in quite the same way. I learned by entering situations where there was no predefined solution, questioning assumptions, trying things that seemed reasonable, and then dealing with consequences that only became visible afterward.

That experience also changed how I understand design more deeply. A working environment is itself a system, even when nobody formally designed it. People respond to incentives, expectations, relationships, traditions, and opportunities around them, and changing one part can produce consequences somewhere else within the system. The Media Management experience showed me that a successful intervention isn’t necessarily a successful design if it improves one component while weakening the broader system around it.

For me, participation in an organization was never supposed to replace formal education. The two should complement each other. Studying gives us structured knowledge, while an environment like CCI gives us opportunities to test that knowledge through real problems, imperfect decisions, and consequences that cannot be simulated entirely in a classroom. Spending years inside CCI was valuable not because I spent years simply following what had already been established, but because I had the opportunity to question why things existed, experiment with what could be changed, and eventually take responsibility for what happened next.