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Indonesians Organize Disaster Relief Efforts via Twitter

by Amar Toor on November 23, 2010 at 06:30 AM

mount merapi
As state authorities struggle to effectively manage disaster relief efforts across tsunami-and-volcano-ravaged regions of Indonesia, many citizens looking for help have turned to a decidedly more instantaneous medium: Twitter.

Although the country's shoddy public infrastructure has severely hampered large-scale efforts, Indonesia's digital networks remain mostly intact -- and well used. According to a recent survey from comScore, 21-percent of all Internet-equipped Indonesians used Twitter during the month of June -- the highest percentage of any country, and notably higher than the 12-percent of U.S. Web surfers who used the microblogging platform during the same period. And, when they suddenly found themselves trapped in the middle of an unrelenting series of natural disasters, many found a lifeline online.

Jalin Merapi, for example, is an information network of locals living near the volcanic Mount Merapi, which violently erupted last month. The network originally launched as a radio community in 2006, but soon branched out to Twitter, from which its leaders have been helping to coordinate relief efforts, 140 characters at a time.

When some of the organization's 700 volunteers realized that aid supplies had arrived in a nearby village, but had not yet been delivered, Jalin Merapi posted a tweet asking for help. Within ten minutes, a fleet of cars arrived, and delivered the food to its final destination. "It was so fast I almost didn't believe it," Jalin Merapi member Akhmad Nasir told Reuters.

This month, Jalin Merapi has posted over 12,000 tweets on its account, and has attracted over 33,000 followers. The organization's primary goal is to efficiently allocate resources to the roughly 700 shelters scattered around Mount Merapi, where more than 200,000 refugees have sought protection. And although the government has implemented communications systems for volunteers and soldiers, it still struggles to help those who need it most. "Little shelters often cause problems in aid distribution," said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, director of disaster risk reduction at the National Disaster Mitigation Agency. "To equally divide aid to 700 different shelters is difficult, almost impossible." Fortunately, both Jalin Merapi and Twitter are there to help.

Tags: disaster, DisasterRelief, indonesia, IndonesiaVolcano, JalinMerapi, MountMerapi, politics, SocialNetworking, top, twitter

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