Tanggap Bencana

Tanggap Bencana was built in the weeks after the 2018 Lombok earthquake. Volunteers went to affected areas and recorded what was at each shelter; the app turned that into a map relief efforts and government could work from.

What I worked on

This came out of the Lombok earthquake. The app is offline first, and that is the premise rather than a feature. The network goes down in precisely the places and hours where the data matters most.

Volunteers collect it. Someone walks into a shelter, counts how many families are there, how many children, what they are short of, and records it on a phone with no signal. It syncs when they next find some. What comes out is a picture of where people actually are and what they actually need, which is what lets logistics reach the worst-off shelter first instead of the most reachable one, and gives the government numbers it would otherwise be guessing at.

The engineering that matters here is unglamorous. Data entered offline by many people has to survive, reconcile when two volunteers reach the same shelter, and be trustworthy enough that someone will move supplies on the strength of it.

The work was later carried forward as Peta Bencana, which is where the idea lives now.

Notes

Civic software has a different failure mode from commercial software: it is used hardest exactly when infrastructure is worst. The interesting constraints were all about degradation — what the map still tells you on a bad connection, during the hour when everyone in the city opens it at once.