To say that Indonesia’s capital is prone to flooding would be an understatement. Well over 40% of Jakarta is at or below sea level. Add to this a rapidly growing population of over 10 million and you have a recipe for recurring disasters. Increasing the resilience of the city’s residents to flooding is thus imperative. Resilience is the capacity of affected individuals to self-organize effectively, which requires timely decision-making based on accurate, actionable and real-time information. But Jakarta is also flooded with information during disasters. Indeed, the Indonesian capital is the world’s most active Twitter city.
So even if relevant, actionable information on rising flood levels could somehow be gleaned from millions of tweets in real-time, these reports could be inaccurate or completely false. Besides, only 3% of tweets on average are geo-located, which means any reliable evidence of flooding reported via Twitter is typically not actionable—that is, unless local residents and responders know where waters are rising, they can’t take tactical action in a timely manner. These major challenges explain why most discount the value of social media for disaster response.
But Digital Humanitarians in Jakarta aren’t your average Digital Humanitarians. These Digital Jedis recently launched one of the most promising humanitarian technology initiatives I’ve seen in years. Code named Peta Jakarta, the project takes social media and digital humanitarian action to the next level. Whenever someone posts a tweet with the word banjir (flood), they receive an automated tweet reply from @PetaJkt inviting them to confirm whether they see signs of flooding in their area: “Flooding? Enable geo-location, tweet @petajkt #banjir and check petajakarta.org.” The user can confirm their report by turning geo-location on and simply replying with the keyword banjir or flood. The result gets added to a live, public crisis map, like the one below.
Over the course of the 2014/2015 monsoon season, Peta Jakarta automatically sent 89,000 tweets to citizens in Jakarta as a call to action to confirm flood conditions. These automated invitation tweets served to inform the user about the project and linked to the video below (via Twitter Cards) to provide simple instructions on how to submit a confirmed report with approximate flood levels. If a Twitter user forgets to turn on the geo-location feature of their smartphone, they receive an automated tweet reminding them to enable geo-location and resubmit their tweet. Finally, the platform “generates a thank you message confirming the receipt of the user’s report and directing them to PetaJakarta.org to see their contribution to the map.” Note that the “overall aim of sending programmatic messages is not to simply solicit a high volume of replies, but to reach active, committed citizen-users willing to participate in civic co-management by sharing nontrivial data that can benefit other users and government agencies in decision-making during disaster scenarios.”
A report is considered verified when a confirmed geo-tagged tweet includes a picture of the flooding, like in the tweet below. These confirmed and verified tweets get automatically mapped and also shared with Jakarta’s Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta). The latter are directly involved in this initiative since they’re “regularly faced with the difficult challenge of anticipating & responding to floods hazards and related extreme weather events in Jakarta.” This direct partnership also serves to limit the “Data Rot Syndrome” where data is gathered but not utilized. Note that Peta Jakarta is able to carry out additional verification measures by manually assessing the validity of tweets and pictures by cross-checking other Twitter reports from the same district and also by monitoring “television and internet news sites, to follow coverage of flooded areas and cross-check reports.”
During the latest monsoon season, Peta Jakarta “received and mapped 1,119 confirmed reports of flooding. These reports were formed by 877 users, indicating an average tweet to user ratio of 1.27 tweets per user. A further 2,091 confirmed reports were received without the required geolocation metadata to be mapped, highlighting the value of the programmatic geo-location ‘reminders’ […]. With regard to unconfirmed reports, Peta Jakarta recorded and mapped a total of 25,584 over the course of the monsoon.”
The Live Crisis Maps could be viewed via two different interfaces depending on the end user. For local residents, the maps could be accessed via smartphone with the visual display designed specifically for more tactical decision-making, showing flood reports at the neighborhood level and only for the past hour.
For institutional partners, the data is visualized in more aggregate terms for strategic decision-making based trends-analysis and data integration. “When viewed on a desktop computer, the web-application scaled the map to show a situational overview of the city.”
Peta Jakarta has “proven the value and utility of social media as a mega-city methodology for crowdsourcing relevant situational information to aid in decision-making and response coordination during extreme weather events.” The initiative enables “autonomous users to make independent decisions on safety and navigation in response to the flood in real-time, thereby helping increase the resilience of the city’s residents to flooding and its attendant difficulties.” In addition, by “providing decision support at the various spatial and temporal scales required by the different actors within city, Peta Jakarta offers an innovative and inexpensive method for the crowdsourcing of time-critical situational information in disaster scenarios.” The resulting confirmed and verified tweets were used by BPBD DKI Jakarta to “cross-validate formal reports of flooding from traditional data sources, supporting the creation of information for flood assessment, response, and management in real-time.”
My blog post is based several conversations I had with Peta Jakarta team and on this white paper, which was just published a week ago. The report runs close to 100 pages and should absolutely be considered required reading for all Digital Humanitarians and CrisisMappers. The paper includes several dozen insights which a short blog post simply cannot do justice to. If you can’t find the time to read the report, then please see the key excerpts below. In a future blog post, I’ll describe how the Peta Jakarta team plans to leverage UAVs to complement social media reporting.
- Extracting knowledge from the “noise” of social media requires designed engagement and filtering processes to eliminate unwanted information, reward valuable reports, and display useful data in a manner that further enables users, governments, or other agencies to make non-trivial, actionable decisions in a time-critical manner.
- While the utility of passively-mined social media data can offer insights for offline analytics and derivative studies for future planning scenarios, the critical issue for frontline emergency responders is the organization and coordination of actionable, real-time data related to disaster situations.
- User anonymity in the reporting process was embedded within the Peta Jakarta project. Whilst the data produced by Twitter reports of flooding is in the public domain, the objective was not to create an archive of users who submitted potentially sensitive reports about flooding events, outside of the Twitter platform. Peta Jakarta was thus designed to anonymize reports collected by separating reports from their respective users. Furthermore, the text content of tweets is only stored when the report is confirmed, that is, when the user has opted to send a message to the @petajkt account to describe their situation. Similarly, when usernames are stored, they are encrypted using a one-way hash function.
- In developing the Peta Jakarta brand as the public face of the project, it was important to ensure that the interface and map were presented as community-owned, rather than as a government product or academic research tool. Aiming to appeal to first adopters—the young, tech-savvy Twitter-public of Jakarta—the language used in all the outreach materials (Twitter replies, the outreach video, graphics, and print advertisements) was intentionally casual and concise. Because of the repeated recurrence of flood events during the monsoon, and the continuation of daily activities around and through these flood events, the messages were intentionally designed to be more like normal twitter chatter and less like public service announcements.
- It was important to design the user interaction with PetaJakarta.org to create a user experience that highlighted the community resource element of the project (similar to the Waze traffic app), rather than an emergency or information service. With this aim in mind, the graphics and language are casual and light in tone. In the video, auto-replies, and print advertisements, PetaJakarta.org never used alarmist or moralizing language; instead, the graphic identity is one of casual, opt-in, community participation.
- The most frequent question directed to @petajkt on Twitter was about how to activate the geo-location function for tweets. So far, this question has been addressed manually by sending a reply tweet with a graphic instruction describing how to activate geo-location functionality.
-
Critical to the success of the project was its official public launch with, and promotion by, the Governor. This endorsement gave the platform very high visibility and increased legitimacy among other government agencies and public users; it also produced a very successful media event, which led substantial media coverage and subsequent public attention.
- The aggregation of the tweets (designed to match the spatio-temporal structure of flood reporting in the system of the Jakarta Disaster Management Agency) was still inadequate when looking at social media because it could result in their overlooking reports that occurred in areas of especially low Twitter activity. Instead, the Agency used the @petajkt Twitter stream to direct their use of the map and to verify and cross-check information about flood-affected areas in real-time. While this use of social media was productive overall, the findings from the Joint Pilot Study have led to the proposal for the development of a more robust Risk Evaluation Matrix (REM) that would enable Peta Jakarta to serve a wider community of users & optimize the data collection process through an open API.
- Developing a more robust integration of social media data also means leveraging other potential data sets to increase the intelligence produced by the system through hybridity; these other sources could include, but are not limited to, government, private sector, and NGO applications (‘apps’) for on- the-ground data collection, LIDAR or UAV-sourced elevation data, and fixed ground control points with various types of sensor data. The “citizen-as- sensor” paradigm for urban data collection will advance most effectively if other types of sensors and their attendant data sources are developed in concert with social media sourced information.
iRevolutions 