Director of Operations, International Youth Summit on Renewable Energy
Jakarta, Indonesia – Jan 2021 to Jan 2022

Running operations for a renewable energy summit

IYSRE is a large-scale, volunteer-run renewable energy summit: seven main events plus 70+ sub-events, run by students from across Indonesian universities. As Director of Operations for this renewable energy summit, my remit ended up wider than the “IT” framing I originally gave it.

I collaborated with a vice director, five managers, and 40+ operations personnel across everything from the website and payment integration to UI/UX, digital live broadcast, merchandising, and international shipping and logistics.

• I led the end-to-end development and launch of iysre.com within two weeks using Scrum and a hybrid way of working, collaborating closely with the graphic design team to create a responsive platform for seven main events and 70+ sub-events.
• I managed the entire Midtrans payment integration process, including account setup, document verification for the foundation, and coordinating fund disbursements to the bank.
• I supervised UI/UX design, web development, digital live broadcast, merchandising, and international shipping and logistics, including food and beverage distribution, alongside domestic and international operations.
• I managed vendor relationships, negotiated contracts, and optimized logistics operations to enhance cost-effectiveness, working with cross-functional teams to align IT and operations with the summit’s overall objectives.
• I led a coordination team of 7 managers and 20+ operational staff from over 10 universities across Indonesia, handling over 1,000 registrations.

Why the payment integration carried the most risk

Two weeks is not a comfortable timeline to build and launch a website meant to handle real payments for a multi-event summit. However, it is fairly typical for student-run organizations, since the event date does not move regardless of how ready the tech is.

Setting up the Midtrans integration was the part with the least room for error. Verifying documents for the foundation and coordinating actual fund disbursements meant that a mistake was not just a bug. It was someone’s registration payment going to the wrong place.

What volunteer teams need that paid teams do not

What made this role different from a typical IT lead position was how much of it lived outside a screen entirely: negotiating vendor contracts for merchandising, figuring out international shipping logistics, and making sure food and beverage distribution did not fall apart mid-event.

Coordinating 7 managers and 20+ staff spread across more than 10 universities, most of whom I had never worked with before, taught me that remote, volunteer-led teams need clearer structure than paid teams, not less. Without a manager checking in daily, ambiguity about who owns what tends to surface much faster. That lesson about operational clarity, learned running this renewable energy summit, has carried directly into other community work since.