Questions/Answers

As weather patterns intensify and become increasingly unpredictable, cities in Indonesia are regularly faced with the challenge of anticipating and responding to extreme weather events. A lack of access to verified, real-time data compromise abilities to make informed, evidence-based decisions concerning planning and response - resulting in ineffective resource management, confusion,& conflict. The tacit knowledge of local communities and the dense network of mobile sensors connected via social media, provides a data source of unprecedented resolution for mitigating urban risk. PetaBencana.id is a free web-based platform, that supports the residents of Indonesia in reducing risk from disasters and increasing emergency response times, by providing free real-time disaster information and transparent communication between residents and government agencies. The platform produces megacity-scale visualizations of flooding using both crowd-sourced reporting & government agency validations in real-time. As part of a transparent two-way communication system, government emergency management agencies monitor the platform to assess the disaster situation, respond to resident needs, & update the map with time-critical information in order to alert residents to the severity of the flood. By enabling reliable, non-trivial communication between users and government agencies, the platform promotes civic co-management as a form of megacity climate change adaptation.

The transparent two-way communication platform has improved communication between formal and informal sectors of the city, improved social cohesion, and supported increased civic engagement in disaster response and infrastructure management. The platform provides information in a manner that is accessible for emergency managers operating at national, provincial, and city scales, and for the public at neighbourhood and street scales. To allow for transparency between decision makers and users, both groups reference the same map with the same data. Information sharing through open data and open APIs allow all users to inspect the software, review the system, and develop complementary tools and technologies that further enhance resilience within the information ecosystem.

By approaching flood management from a holistic view that includes ICT and public utilities for flood reporting, the platform implements integrated strategies for climate change mitigation and adaptation, and develops holistic disaster risk management across multiple levels and actors, in line with SDG 11b. The platform primarily supports SDG 13: by coordinating communities, raising awareness, and promoting behavioural change in response to the impact of emergency events, there platform has strengthened resilience and adaptive capacity to climate related hazards, improved recovery efforts, and facilitated greater cooperation before, during, and after emergencies.

It has been well documented that the urban poor, women, and disabled people suffer the effects of urban flooding much more acutely, due largely to inequalities in access to information that hinder abilities to make actionable decisions about safety and response in a timely manner. An unequal awareness on where and how to easily find time critical information, limits abilities to equally participate in decision making and resource management within their communities, and further amplifies confusion and risk. By providing free real-time disaster information, as well as the necessary skills to safely and easily access and share disaster information, the platform leverages capacities for all residents to equally participate in decision-making. The platform promotes civic co-management in disaster response and infrastructure management, boosts community-led risk resilience and increases disaster awareness. Through the design of a “data-light” platform that operates smoothly with other existing instant messaging, social media, and SMS-based communications that are already familiar to residents, the platform is designed for underfunded communities, agencies with limited technical means, and individuals with modest means for data usage to access; it encourages these groups to both understand and use the system effectively without extensive or costly training. By focusing our outreach on vulnerable, high-risk communities, and helping to improve disaster response agencies to understand and react to flood situations, the project helps overcome inclusion challenges while improving resilience for each city as a whole.

Through its integration in Indonesia’s existing disaster risk management information ecosystem, PetaBencana.id has proven the value of social media as a mega-city methodology for crowd-sourcing situational information to aid in decision-making and response coordination. Prior to the implementation of the platform, government agencies disseminated flood updates via static pdf reports every 6 hours. This not only limited access to critical information, but created information vacuums in the time periods between, creating difficulties for agencies operating at various local and national levels to make coordinated, evidence-based decisions. By providing a publicly accessible, real-time visual overview of flooding, PetaBencana.id improves situational knowledge for residents, increases response times for humanitarian agencies, and aids government agencies in decision making. It also allows government agencies to immediately share emergency information with residents, allowing them to navigate safely.

The platform is the first of its kind to prove the value of integrated social media and API-sourced data for the civic co-management of disasters resulting from extreme weather events in a major Southeast Asian megacity. Following a successful implementation of the project in Indonesia since 2014, the open source software developed by the team has now been adapted by various other communities across the world to build similar flood and disaster maps.

The project team designed the free and open source software underpinning the platform, CogniCity, to be translatable to a variety of geographies, hazards, and applications. The modularity of the software architecture enables the project to readily scale & replicate. Following a successful implementation of the pilot project in Jakarta from 2013-2015, the project continued to scale to cover 4 of the largest megacities in Indonesia in 2016-2017. In 2018-2019, PetaBencana.id will expand its coverage nationally across Indonesia & include additional hazards. The software has already been used by other teams to build local flood maps in Vietnam, India, & the United States.

By adopting a “people as sensors” paradigm, PetaBencana.id harnesses the heightened use of social media during emergency events to gather confirmed situational updates from street level, in a manner that removes the need for expensive & time consuming data processing. To filter through the noise of social media & collect verified disaster reports, the software listens for specific keywords in social media (such as flood) & sends programmatic invitations asking users if they would like to contribute to community disaster mapping. Chatbots guide users to submit anonymous flood reports. These reports are displayed on the public map in real-time, alongside relevant emergency data collected by local agencies (such as river water levels) . Government agencies also update the map to alert residents about the severity of the flood.

Enabled greater information sharing and coordination among residents and government agencies since its implementation in 2014, PetaBencana has proven that community-led data collection, sharing, and visualization reduces flood risk and assists in relief efforts. PetaBencana has experienced continuous growth of users, expanded to other cities, and is currently scaling nationally and to address other hazards. Developed through a process of sustained co-research with implementing partners and various user groups, has ensured sustained implementation. Involving government agencies, local community groups, and universities throughout key stages of the project development—including research, iterative design, testing, and socialization—has enabled diverse stakeholders to take ownership of the platform, thereby supporting its sustained use, improvement, and growth. Stakeholder feedback is continually integrated into the iterative design of the platform to ensure relevance. In 2017, despite three changeovers in the emergency management agency, PetaBencana was adopted without disruption as the team ensured the platform reflected changes to remain relevant to shifting institutional protocols. Frequent trainings with emergency operators and community outreach strategies facilitate sustained use of PetaBencana. The project updates comprehensive documentation and training materials to a standard that enables the project to be self-sustaining and fosters the employment of the software by other users.

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The project is evaluated according to academic and scientific standards through publications analyzing flood reports and monsoon activities. The project was also evaluated by independent organizations. In the 2015 World Disaster Report of the International Federation of the Red Cross, the project was recommended as a model for community engagement in relation to disaster response; in 2016, the Federal Communication Commission of the United States recommended the platform as the best model for a new disaster information crowdsourcing platform. Numerous other studies and “grey literature” reports have recommended and commended the platform.

The public website is monitored using the Google Analytics Suite, which enables an assessment of the number of times the website is accessed by unique users during flood events. This provides an indication of how often the platform is used by residents to make real-time decisions about safety and response. Scientific studies analyze the time between the first indicators of flood and government updates on the map, indicating how the platform has increased information updates and response times.

Since the launch of PetaBencana.id website in December 2015, the platform has been accessed 737,102 times by 361,478 unique users, with new users making up approximately 80% of these visits. The pilot project, PetaJakarta.org was visited more than 97,900 times over the course of the 2014/2015 monsoon season from December 2014 to March 2015, by over 68,000 unique users. While the number of website visits is typically less than 500 per day for the majority of the monsoon season, during peak events such as those experienced in February 2015, 2017, and 2018, the number of views has scaled up to 21,000%.

The project team builds collaboration into its approach throughout the duration of the process, from development to testing, implementation to monitoring & technology transfer. The main aspects of collaboration used by the team are: co-­research methodology; commitment to free and open source software; commitment to open data; integrated software development methodology that uses agile development and multiple testing feedback mechanisms to ensure a multistable platform that is responsive to localized contexts and multiple, and variable, stakeholder necessities. The project involves the widest variety of stakeholders - including disaster risk management agencies, government managers, scientific researchers, industry partners, local and international NGOs, community organizations, and local and international universities - throughout the development process. Throughout the project history, partners include: the Urban Risk Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Indonesian National Emergency Management Agency, Jakarta Emergency Management Agency, USAID, IFRC, University of Wollongong Global Challenges Program, DM Innovation, AusAid, Twitter, Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade of the Government of Australia, World Vision Indonesia, Australian National Data Service, Open Data Institute, Pasang Mata, Jakarta SmartCity, Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, the Pacific Disaster Centre of the University of Hawaii, University of Indonesia, National Geographic Indonesia, Urban Poor Consortium, Ciliwung Institute, Ciliwung Merdeka, WALHI Friends of the Earth Indonesia, World Resources Institute, Save our Borneo.

The team recognizes the significance of not only maintaining the technical components of the platform, but its integrated social components as well. Developed through a process of sustained co-research with a variety of local communities, NGOs, universities, research experts, and government agencies, the platform integrates various localized intelligences and develops in response to specific contextual needs. This process also strengthens community networks, whereby actors from diverse backgrounds are enrolled into a conversation concerning adaptation to climate change within contexts of vastly interconnected infrastructures.