Malasakit 1.0: A participatory online platform for crowdsourcing disaster risk reduction strategies in the philippines
Brandie Martin Nonnecke, Shrestha Mohanty, Andrew S. Lee, Jonathan Lee, Sequoia Beckman, Justin Mi, Sanjay Krishnan, Rachel Edita Roxas, Nathaniel Oco, Camille Crittenden, Ken Y. Goldberg · 2017
We describe Malasakit 1.0 (meaning “sincere care” in Filipino), a customizable participatory assessment platform that collects and streamlines quantitative and qualitative analyses and insights of disaster risk reduction (DRR) strategies. While supervised classification approaches offer opportunity to understand qualitative textual suggestions, those methods break down in areas like the Philippines, home to 187 languages and nuances in varying socioeconomic contexts. Instead, Malasakit uses dimensionality reduction and peer-to-peer evaluation on qualitative textual suggestions to identify locally appropriate DRR strategies. We present results from 12 field tests conducted in eight distinct geographic locations in the Philippines. 998 participants provided 7,157 evaluations on flood and typhoon preparedness and 2,481 peer-to-peer ratings on 896 textual suggestions for how local government could improve DRR strategies. Results suggest that female participants are more confident than males in their community's ability to recover from a major typhoon. High-rated textual suggestions focus on issuing immediate early warnings and cleaning drainages to reduce flooding. Malasakit can be accessed at tiny.cc/malasakit.