The One Map initiative in Indonesia began under the previous government with the ambition of bringing together land use, land tenure and other spatial data into a singular incorporate database for Indonesia. The project is being completed in collaboration with the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and US Forest Service International Programs. Presently the different levels of government (National, Provincial and District) often have maps showing conflicting data as well as private sector shows different data alignments. The initiative is ambitious and goes to the heart of land ownership, land tenure and land rights in Indonesia, which makes the project very sensitive at all levels of government and society.

The SIG team support to this initiative has been twofold. Firstly we were requested by the Government to assist the National Geospatial Agency (Badan Informasi Geospasial, BIG) to examine the geospatial architecture, systems and national processes that could facilitate the right mix of technical alignment along within the national federation and geospatial databases already in place within Indonesia. The successful collaboration of our team and BIG created a national architecture and flow to enable this to occur.

Secondly we created Indonesia’s first participatory mapping portal that enables specific datasets to be openly shared by any user who desires to download the data, as well as is a place where a user can “create” a map layer that incorporates elements of interest to themselves, ie customary land ownership, or cultural sites significant to the indigenous population. These data can remain accessible to the installer, as well as be viewed for use by others and if the data is verified by BIG it can be incorporated into aspects of national datasets that become a part of the official datasets.