The hype around “Smart Cities” has influenced discussions on urbanism worldwide. Locally in Indonesia, the concept of smart cities is becoming more popular, and cities across the country are starting to integrate and harness technology for more efficient and smarter public administration.
Making All Voices Count in Indonesia believes that the power of technology alone is not sufficient to make cities more sustainable and suitable for everyone. We need technology combined with citizen participation and open data. Following this belief, in June 2016 Open Data Lab Jakarta with the support of Making All Voices Count launched an innovative project called “Innovating for Open Cities”. An initiative that aimed to turn cities into “people-centered smart cities”.
Open Data Lab worked with outstanding partners to change the trend from smart cities to “open cities”, such as Radya Labs, a finalist of HackJak 2015 – a hackathon event organized by Hivos Southeast Asia. Hivos coordinated with the Provincial Government of Jakarta to run HackJak as an annual event to encourage creative minds and the tech savvy to develop tech-based approaches in education, healthcare, disaster management, tourism and social empowerment. There were three categories for the competition: Scrapathon, Visualthon and Hackathon. Radya Labs learned an important lesson from HackJack 2015, namely provide better public service.
Through the “Innovating for Open Cities” project, Radya Labs developed an innovative system named DARU, which aims to help the Jakarta Fire Department improve their public service delivery in firefighting by utilizing a system that is based on open data. DARU brings together all necessary information in real time, integrates data from other parties and visualizes the rescue plan. This way, the fire department personnel can have a bird’s eye view of the rescue operations in the field and all necessary information will be at their fingertips in real time.
DARU is formed by two government agencies, the Jakarta Fire Department and the Jakarta Smart City (JSC). JSC are planning to integrate the information obtained from DARU platform to help them develop a service app that will deliver immediate information – such as disaster alerts – to Jakarta citizens.
The system will soon be implemented at the Jakarta Fire Department. In the future, Radya Labs will establish formal working relationships to finish the project. Additionally, they will try to offer this solution to other cities and work with the private sector to expand the user base.