The Jakarta provincial government developed the Smart City Platform which consists of an issue–reporting app known as Qlue; a flood map that crowdsources citizen flood reports from Twitter, called PetaJakarta; and a crowdsourced traffic management tool based on Waze, Google’s navigation app.

Focusing on citizens rather than smart infrastructure and hardware allows Jakarta to build on its unique attributes, including the fact that it tweets more than any other city in the world and, as a result, produces a huge amount of data for researchers and city officials to analyse.

PetaJakarta (which means map Jakarta in Bahasa Indonesian) was set up by researchers at the University of Wollongong in Australia in collaboration with the Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD) to take advantage of this. Floods are a major issue in the city, with thousands of people forced to abandon their homes every year. Petajakarta uses Tweets about floods to create a real time, crowdsourced map of flooding in the city.

Accuracy is always an issue of concern with crowdsourced data. Another innovative feature of the platform is its partnership with Twitter. If a resident of Jakarata tweets the word flood, Twitter will send them a message asking for verification. If the person confirms they were trying to report a flood, the message will go on to the crowdsourced map.

Read Peta Jakarta's report: 'Assessing the Role of Social Media for Civic Co‑Management During Monsoon Flooding in Jakarta, Indonesia'

Image courtesy of Charles Wiriawan on Flickr