by Lieselotte Heederik
In October 2015, experts of the Netherlands Study and Training Center for the Judiciary (SSR) will conduct their third visit to Indonesia. The purpose of the visit is to further strengthen the capacities of the Judicial Training Center of the Supreme Court in Indonesia (JTC), which is responsible for training candidate judges. Within the Judicial Sector Support Program (JSSP), SSR will assist the JTC with the further development of the management of the courses and the monitoring and evaluation. One specific aspect will be how to monitor the performance of the candidate judges after they have finished their training.
To prepare for the visit, CILC and LEiP organised a video conference between SSR and JTC. As with most long distance conferences, the challenge was to find good locations with good internet connections. As this was a hybrid meeting with webcams, the connection had to be extra good (which is sometimes particularly challenging when communicating over long distances).
The other challenge was to find the right time slot that would be convenient for both parties. We are thankful for the flexibility of the colleagues at SSR to start this meeting relatively early.
So the conference started at 2PM Indonesian time and 9AM Netherlands time. For the Indonesian participants from JTC it was the first such “hybrid” meeting. At both locations we made use of laptops, with microphones too weak to hear the voices of everyone in the room. However, the fact that we used a translator helped overcome this.
It was very nice to witness how every time SSR came with a suggestion of what could be further done to improve the performance of JTC, a discussion emerged among the Indonesian participants, who openly manifested their approval and acknowledged the need for support.
We soon discovered how useful sign language can be during conference calls. Gestures of “I can’t hear you”, “yes this is clear”, “please continue” where often used, with the most frequent one being thumbs up. 🙂
On the other hand, what made the Indonesian participants quite uncomfortable was the fact that they had an overload of snacks and brownies and tea and coffee, whereas they noted that the Dutch colleagues only had a glass of water.
After taking a traditional Indonesian group picture, the participants noted that the meeting was very successful and they expressed the wish to have these kind of meetings more often.
Thumbs up, and for the next meeting: don’t forget the cookies! 🙂
