On the 15th of June, 2016 the OpenDRI Sri Lanka team held a Code for Resilience (CfR) problem statement workshop at the Disaster Management Center of Sri Lanka (DMC) with more than 25 representatives from government, media and the private sector in Sri Lanka. Participants at the workshop worked in teams to identify the most significant problems with disaster management in Sri Lanka today and possible ways to improve the situation. At the end of the event each team presented their top two problems and solutions and answered questions from the entire group. We then compiled the top ideas into a shortlist of small, specific problems and solutions for the DMC to choose the final problem statement for Code for Resilience from. Afterwards the DMC team debated the outputs and settled on a problem to address: citizen-based incident reporting. By improving the flow of information during disasters this system will help the DMC to respond quicker and more appropriately to emerging situations.
Code for Resilience leverages the technical accomplishments of over three years of OpenDRI work in Sri Lanka, especially the soon-to-be-launched RiskInfo data sharing platform. Yet while CfR itself focuses on technology, this session thought more broadly; we encouraged participants to develop non-technological ideas that could be addressed outside of Code for Resilience. The quality of the brainstorming was excellent and we emerged with a lot of useful non-technological ideas for improving the way the Disaster Management Centre works, like organizing social media volunteers and streamlining the permissions process during disaster events. While Code for Resilience helps the DMC upgrade the information that flows from citizens during a disaster, the DMC itself will try to act on these other ideas or prioritize them for future investment.
See more photographs from the event on geoedge.lk/cfr/.