“They are stealing your work!”, said a friend of mine, when I sent her the picture after I landed in Makassar.

I created the togeanislands.com website in one afternoon when I was bored in a hotel room.

Then, I got one of my virtual assistant to fill it with content.

Togean Islands is a group of 58 islands right behind Buka Buka Island, where we build Reconnect.

For some, our island is part of it, for others, we don’t.

And for me, it doesn’t matter.

The government never bought the best domain names for the region, and nobody ever made a decent website to share informations about the Togean Islands.

So I did one, with the assumption that it would easy to rank it on Google, and that I could, eventually one day, use it to help the 30-ish resorts in the area, do their online marketing.

Quite a long shot, and very little time to work on it.

I kept offering the government to use it, for free, and work together to develop it and make it an official platform.

So far, it didn’t lead to anything.

However, when I was on my way to pick up my bag at the airport tonight, I saw this gigantic 15meters x 2meters ads in the airport.

And when I saw the contact links, I saw that the first website they put there, is mine.

I wish they at least consulted me, so we could have designed a good looking banner, and worked on the message, the call to action, and an actual strategy.

But it was probably easier to take my work and put it out there without even saying a word.

It’s not like I have half of the local government as a friend on facebook, and they could have sent me a message to talk about it.

Either way, the path of least effort often leads to the path of least result.

I am not going to complain, we are getting hundreds of visitors for a few weeks, for free, and now I can finally understand why.

Would have been fun to tell you this was the fruit of a meaningful collaboration with the local government, and how I was happy to have been given a chance to share my knowledge with them to create a real work of vision and impact for the Togean Islands.

But for now we might just have to wait for them to have more budget (I offered them to help for free), and willingness to actually do a meaningful work to help develop the region sustainably.

Meanwhile, thank you for the free advertising and traffic.

It’s always fun to see how a bit of chosen thoughtful work can lead to unexpected results 🙂