PetaBencana: Jakarta's disaster agency adopts real-time crowdsourced flood mapping

Jakarta, one of the world's most flood-prone megacities, relied on its emergency management agency (BPBD) issuing static PDF situation reports every six hours — too slow for neighborhoods where water rises in minutes. Meanwhile, Jakartans were already flooding Twitter with real-time flood reports: during the 2013–2014 monsoon, researchers counted over 150,000 geolocated tweets about flooding.

A University of Wollongong team led by Tomas Holderness built CogniCity, open-source software that "listens" for disaster keywords on Twitter and invites users to submit structured reports — location, water depth, photos — creating a live map called PetaJakarta. The project won Twitter's DataGrant in 2014, giving researchers firehose access to validate the approach.

In 2015, Bambang Surya Putra, head of informatics at BPBD Jakarta, saw the platform's potential and made the pivotal decision: formally adopt PetaJakarta into the agency's operations. BPBD built a Risk Evaluation Matrix (REM) that fuses crowdsourced reports with official verification, then publishes both on the same portal. This turned a research prototype into an operational decision-support tool.

Rebranded as PetaBencana (Disaster Map), the platform now covers earthquakes, fires, smog, and volcanic activity. It has been adopted in the Philippines, Hong Kong, and Vietnam. During 2020–2021 floods and Cyclone Seroja, news outlets and agencies cited PetaBencana data to direct evacuations and relief. The system replaced "best guesses in the dark with actionable information," in experts' words.

Real-time verified flood maps adopted by Jakarta BPBD, expanded to Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam; agencies see live road conditions, hospital status, evacuation needs.

Citizens were already reporting disasters on social media faster than any official channel could collect them

The CogniCity software added a critical verification dialogue: "Are you being affected? Tell us more" — turning one-way chatter into structured, geolocated reports

BPBD leadership recognized that information is a form of aid and chose to institutionalize the platform rather than treat it as an experiment

The REM verification layer gave officials confidence to act on citizen data without sacrificing credibility

Open APIs and multi-source integration (Qlue, Pasang Mata) prevented vendor lock-in and let the system scale beyond Jakarta

Official adoption of citizen data with institutional verification turns chaotic social media into actionable disaster intelligence outperforming top-down reporting.

PetaBencana became the primary real-time disaster view for Jakarta's agencies and spread to three other countries. BPBD's Surya Putra now advocates for open humanitarian data APIs, arguing political barriers to data sharing cost lives. The platform demonstrated that a government agency's decision to trust and verify citizen-generated data can transform disaster response from reactive to anticipatory.