Disaster preparedness and response, owned by the community it protects.

What Siaga is

Siaga means ready in Bahasa Indonesia: prepared and alert before a hazard arrives. It is software a community owns and runs itself, to prepare for a disaster and to respond when one strikes. It works with no signal at all.

In calm times a community builds and holds its own record of the hazards it faces, its preparedness plan, and a map of its households and shelters. When a cyclone, flood or earthquake hits, the people responding open that same record and work from it: who needs what, which shelters are open and who has arrived, and where the supplies and tents and shelter kits are. The community owns that record the whole way through.

How it will work

Field teams record everything on an ordinary Android phone, with no signal, for as long as they need to. When a phone comes back into range it syncs to a box the community owns, at the hall or the command post. During a response that box shares what the community permits with the responding organisation or government office, and nothing more. Help reaches the right door, and the list of who is vulnerable and where they live does not leave the community unless the community decides it should.

Age and sex are part of the record from the start, and only where a household agrees to give them. Disability is recorded with the Washington Group short set, the standard six questions, so the numbers line up with what a government or agency already collects and hold up when someone questions them. Two volunteers assessing the same household during a response both keep their observations, reconciled by a coordinator rather than overwritten by the software, so no field report is silently lost.

Who it's for

The village, desa, barangay, ward and island-community committees that hold their community's plan; the volunteers who walk door to door to build the map; the coordinators who run an evacuation centre; and the disaster-management offices that support them. Built for the Asia-Pacific, where phones are Android, power comes from generators and solar, and the signal drops out exactly when a response needs it most.

How it's held

Of everything we build, Siaga holds the most sensitive data: who is vulnerable, and exactly where they live. That record stays with the most local group able to look after it, usually the community itself. It holds only what a response needs to know, each household is asked before its details go in, and a household can have its record deleted on request. Siaga follows the same rule as Kora, Suara, Selo, Aprende and Bukti: your data, your infrastructure, your control. No central pool of everyone's data, and nothing sent back to us, ever.

Where it's up to

Siaga is in development. It is being designed before it is built, so that the communities and responders who would use it help shape it from the start. A community that did not help design a tool has no reason to keep it running.

The decisions that matter most are ones we want to make with a partner rather than ahead of one: what a coordinator can see about named people during a response, who holds the household map and how households are registered, and which local hazards and vulnerabilities the standard checklists miss. We are committed to launching Siaga, and we want to build it in the open.

Get involved

We are looking for a partner to design Siaga with: a community, a responding organisation, or a disaster-resilience network in the Asia-Pacific, willing to shape it and then test it in real conditions. If that could be you, tell us what you are working on and we will be in touch. Reach us at hello@openimpact.studio.