HISTORY
First initiated by Dr. Tomas Holderness and Dr. Etienne Turpin in 2013 as part of their collaborative research on provisioning difficult-to-formalize urban infrastructure, CogniCity.Info was conceived, developed, tested, and deployed in collaboration with a multidisciplinary research team. The first instance of the software was made public as PetaJakarta.org and was deployed with the support of the Smart Infrastructure Facility at the University of Wollongong, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, Twitter, and the Jakarta Emergency Management Agency (BPBD DKI Jakarta). Its value for coordinating disaster response during the Indonesian monsoon was realized by all users and plans for its expansion soon followed.
Subsequent instances, including all of the variations that have been released via PetaBencana.id, have received additional support from USAID, MIT Urban Risk Lab, Mapbox, Pacific Disaster Center, International Federation of the Red Cross, Mercy Corps, and World Vision. In 2017, the PetaBencana.id project team incorporated as Yayasan Peta Bencana and thereby became the primary steward of the CogniCity.Info repositories. In 2019, Yayasan Peta Bencana signed a development partnership with Civic Data Lab, who became co-maintainers of the code and continue to support PetaBencana.id in Indonesia, MapaKalamidad.ph in the Philippines, and additional urban experiments with the code in Asia and beyond.