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As part of a series of lecture events held in collaboration with universities across Indonesia, Peta Bencana Foundation was excited to engage with the community at Paramadina University on November 22nd, 2017. The event was held in collaboration with the university’s Department of Student Development, and the student organizations, Khatulistiwa, and Paramadina Social Care (PSC).

The lecture, titled “Harnessing Social Media and Open Source Software as Infrastructure for Climate Change Adaptation” was opened by Leonita Kusumawardhani, professor of Communication Studies at Paramadina University, and attended by 36 students (10 male and 26 female).

The enthusiastic response displayed by the students led to productive conversations about the ways by which public platforms can support individual and collective decision making during disaster events. The students were especially enthusiastic to discuss methods of verification of crowd-sourced data, and how resident-conveyed information could be effectively employed by disaster managers for evidence-based response. Peta Bencana was happy to have such an engaged audience, and some great conversations at Paramadina University!

Both organizations are enthusiastic for further collaboration to continue alongside similar partnerships in Indonesia, with the hope of building well informed and resilient communities across country.

Indonesia is the world’s largest producer and exporter of palm oil. But, to meet rising global demand, Indonesia is creating vast palm oil plantations by clearing peatlands for production. Produced by PetaBencana.id, for the “Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest]” exhibition at the Zoologisches Museum, Centrum für Naturkunde, Universität Hamburg, this video explains the local impacts of peatland destruction as well as the importance of peatland ecologies for the Earth System and its climate.

In preparedness for the 2017-2018 monsoon season, the Peta Bencana Foundation is launching a series of lecture events  in collaboration with universities across Indonesia. On the 8th of November 2017, we kicked off this program at the Department of Urban Planning and Real Estate, Engineering Faculty, University of Tarumanagara, Jakarta.

The talk organized by Peta Bencana,  “Using Social Media and Open Source Software as Infrastructure for Climate Change Adaptation”, was attended by 56 participants (27 male, 29 female). The head of the urban division from the Department of Urban Planning and Real Estate, Dr. Ir. Parino Rahardjo, M.M, warmly welcomed the foundation and opened the event.

In discussing the ways by which the public platform,  PetaBencana.id, supports individual and collective decision making during disaster events, students expressed their enthusiasm, pulling out their phones and taking selfies to practice participating in community disaster mapping. Participants practiced submitting reports through social media (Twitter) and instant messaging (Telegram), and were immediately able to view their contributions on the map.

The University of Tarumanagara warmly presented Peta Bencana with one of their publications,  as a memento of the event. Both organizations are enthusiastic for the partnership to continue alongside similar partnerships in Indonesia, with the hope of building well informed and resilient communities across the country.

This type of information will assist us with assessing damage in real time during the storm event and help prioritize response efforts after the storm.        

The MIT Urban Risk Lab is successfully employing the software developed for PetaBencana.id to support risk planning for Hurricane Irma. Through gathering crowdsourced confirmed situational reports via social media, the platform, RiskMap.us, tracks flooding during Hurricane Irma in real time.

The publicly available map, currently being piloted in Broward County, Florida, allows residents , government officials, and first responders to stay informed about changing flood conditions across the county, in order to prepare for and respond to emergency events. At a news conference on Friday, Broward County Mayor Barabara Sharief said that the map will help assess the damage in real-time and help prioritize response efforts.

We’re excited to see CogniCity Open Source Software continue to support geographies outside Indonesia, and in the spirit of open-source, the ways by which partnering teams have been able to build and expand upon existing bodies of work!

Read more about the launch of RiskMap.us here.

Find out how to report to RiskMap.us here.

Members from the team at SmartSaigon, an open source flood mapping platform in Vietnam, came to visit PetaBencana.id to exchange ideas on the use and implementation of crowdsourced data for disaster risk management. The team has adapted the same software powering PetaBencana.id, CogniCity Open Source Software, to develop and support a flood mapping platform for Saigon. It was great to see how CogniCity has been able to serve as a framework supporting geographies outside Indonesia, and how the team at SmartSaigon have used the software to build and expand upon existing bodies of work. 

The SmartSaigon team also met with the Jakarta Disaster Management Agency, Jakarta Smart City, and Pulse Lab Jakarta, to learn about PetaBencana.id’s collaborations with various stakeholders in Jakarta. While SmartSaigon and PetaBencana serve very distinct contexts, we were able to share lessons learnt from both similar, and dissimilar, experiences. PetaBencana was very excited to learn about the ways that SmartSaigon has developed strategies to support the unique urban practices in Saigon, including the incorporation and integration of chatbots on different social media platforms pertinent to the city. It was great to also learn about the ways in which CogniCity has been modified to attune to the unique perceptions of risk in Saigon.