Indonesia
Base data serves many needs in humanitarian response. Often responding organizations are scrambling to gather data because it is not readily available. The focus of HOT’s work in Indonesia has been data preparedness and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR). The original pilot of this project was declared successful and it has now moved into its second year.
In order to minimize the growing rate of exposure and rising vulnerability, governments need to first identify where and who is exposed to disaster risks. AIFDR has developed an open source risk modeling software, InaSAFE, that performs these calculations. The ¨Indonesia Scenario Assessment for Emergencies¨ (InaSAFE) is free software that produces realistic natural hazard impact scenarios for better planning, preparedness and response activities. In order to use this software sufficient base data, such as critical infrastructure, is necessary. HOT focuses on teaching how to collect and map this data.
Phase II (July 2012- March 2013)
Through a partnership with AIFDR, GFDRR, ACCESS and BNPB, HOT has concentrated on enabling communities and governments to collect exposure information, which in turn feeds into the impact modeling software. This data collection has occurred through two methods: building a team of OpenStreetMap experts in Indonesia and teaching workshops in vulnerable areas to collect better data. Since August 2012, HOT´s developing expert team has taught various OSM tools and techniques in six disaster prone provinces (East Java, West Java, West Sumatra, South Sulawesi, NTT, West Papua). HOT is also continuing the work that was started last year with ACCESS. For these workshops, HOT has created beginning, intermediate and advanced guides, which are all translated into Bahasa Indonesian, and will be found at learnosm.org in the future months.
HOT is helping to build the OpenStreetMap community in Indonesia. The team has created a website, http://openstreetmap.or.id, for which people can gather resources, read about what the OSM community is up to, and contact trainers for further support.
Phase I: Pilot Year
Last year, HOT focused on urban mapping through workshops and a mapping competition (KompetisiOSM). A few students from the five universities that competed joined the HOT training team. The focus of the competition was to map roads and individual buildings in Padung, Jakarta, Surabya, Yogjakarta, and Bandung. A student from each university that mapped the most received a scholarship to State of Map 2011 in Denver, CO, USA.
Rural areas were also mapped with ACCESS, which is an AusAID poverty reduction project to help with community strengthening and resilience. Over the course of a month, HOT had seven workshops with eight ACCESS sub-districts and other PNPM facilitators (National Government poverty reduction program).
Through this multi-faceted approach of workshops, contests and translation with our partners HOT hopes to answer the question, “Can OpenStreetMap be used to collect exposure data?” Time will tell as communities, translated documents and tools get up to speed. So far though, the answer appears to be yes.
