Background

  •  Indonesia experiences a wide range of natural hazards because it is located along major tectonic plate boundaries. It is along these boundaries that the biggest volcanos and earthquakes happen, including those that cause tsunamis such as the one that devastated many countries in Asia in December 2004.
  • The Australia-Indonesia Facility for Disaster Reduction (AIFDR) is a joint initiative of the Governments of Australia and Indonesia reflecting Indonesia’s and Australia’s concern over the growing impact of disasters in the region. AIFDR aims at building Indonesia’s capacity to self-manage disasters by strengthening national and local capacity in disaster risk reduction in Indonesia and the region.
  • BNPB has identified a priority need to improve its methodology for contingency planning with an emphasis on the use of realistic disaster scenarios as the starting point for this new, comprehensive process. BNPB has been working with AIFDR and the World Bank on a methodology and associated software tools for developing realistic disaster scenarios for contingency planning.
  • The scenario development methodology has been implemented in a simple, open-source software tool InaSAFE. This software is based on straightforward and standardised approaches to integrating hazard and exposure data to estimate a range of impacts of a possible disaster scenario including the:
  • number of people likely to need emergency shelter;
  • amount of food, water, sanitation, etc required in line with BNPB’s PERKA no. 7/2008;
  • number of schools and hospitals likely to be severely impacted; and
  • roads that will be temporarily closed.
  • To date, the approaches at the heart of InaSAFE have been piloted throughout 2011 to develop scenarios to support:
  • The ASEAN Regional Forum’s Disaster Relief Exercise in Manado
  • The Indonesian National Disaster Exercise in Maumere; and
  • Flood Contingency Planning in Jakarta.

Project Overview

  • The BNPB in partnership with AIFDR and the World Bank have developed a concept for developing realistic scenarios to inform contingency planning and disaster preparedness. The application will combine fundamental spatial datasets such as population and infrastructure with hazard levels and produce a range of products such as estimated number of fatalities, buildings damaged and crops destroyed. The outputs will take the form of maps and tables as required by BNPB and BPBD’s. The application is called InaSAFE (Indonesia Scenario Assessment For Emergencies) and it is based on the Open Source tools QGIS (Quantum Geographical Information System), GDAL (Geospatial Data Abstraction Library) and the programming language Python.
  • The entire framework can be built using only Open Source Software components, which are free of charge and can be modified, built upon and deployed without any licence fees or functionality limitations.
    • This project aims at continuing the development of InaSAFE to implement impact analysis according to BNPB’s priority needs.
    • All information about the InaSAFE project is available at http://www.inasafe.org and the source code is hosted at https://github.com/AIFDR/inasafe.

Objectives

The current InaSAFE application version 0.2 has the basic required functionality already implemented. However, appropriate software web development skills are needed to

  • Help address outstanding issues (see https://github.com/AIFDR/inasafe/issues)
  • Develop new functionality as required
  • Help AIFDR deploy tools to provide emergency managers with a capability to create scenarios and analyse impacts according to specified guidelines.

Scope

A contractor is sought to

  • Develop, test, deploy, maintain and document the software components of InaSAFE.
  • Collaborate with the open source software development communities behind the dependencies of InaSAFE to ensure that errors and patches are reported upstream and that improvements find their way into the application.
  • Assist BNPB, AIFDR and the World Bank in training, deployment and trialling, gather feedback and provide written recommendations for further development.
  • The deliverables of this contract will be
    • Finished, production grade version of InaSAFE deployed in the field by March 2013.
    • Preliminary versions deployed and trialled monthly for the duration of the contract.
    • Documented software architecture and source code available under an Open Source license.
    • A two months period of support, bug fixing, documentation and reporting after the field deployment.
    • Progress and funding will be evaluated on 31th July 2012 and a decision will be made whether to continue the contract for the full term.
    • The position is to report to Dr Ole Nielsen as a project supervisor.

Essential skills

The essential skills sought from the contractor are

  • Solid experience with the Python programming langue and numpy
  • Experience in web development
  • Good communication skills
  • Proven ability to develop quality software
  • Demonstrated ability to prioritise tasks and deliver work on time.
  • Documented ability to work independently as well as in teams

Highly desirable skills

  • Understanding of software engineering practices and tools including revision control, regression testing, continuous integration and issue tracking.
  • Experience in QGis or the QT4 Gui development framework on which QGis is based
  • Experience with GDAL
  • Experience with restructured text and Sphinx.
  • Experience with Linux and other Open Source tools
  • Experience with spatial information systems
  • Familiarity with PostGIS
  • Familiarity with web services architectures (WFS, WCS, …)
  • Some knowledge of the English language

Term of Employment

The position is a full time position (approximately 40 hours per week) with initial appointment for 12 Months starting May 2012 – May 2013.

Location

The position will be based in AIFDR office that currently located in Jakarta and will spend time at BNPB’s offices in Jakarta.