A Perspective of Community at Flood Prone Zone on ICT for Flood Risks Communication

This article aims to take account community perspective on the use of ICT in flood risk communication, particularly for public awareness that may encourage community to take any action for flood prevention to minimize the potential occurrence of flood and the loss. There are three research question addressed in this paper. First, what are the existing knowledge on flood risk and how to deal with that risk owned by community?; Second, in what extent community have access to ICT; and the last, with the existing knowledge owned by community and degree of access to ICT?, will community access ICT to seek additional information for flood risk communication? This study points out some findings as follows. Community mainly rely on their tacit knowledge in recognizing the likely occurrence of flooding, the characteristics of flooding and the area covered and not covered with flooding, which is gained from yearly experience on flooding event. However, the communities do not have sufficient knowledge on how to minimize the likely occurrence of inundation and flood, both sourced from tacit knowledge and explicit one. The extent of community in accessing ICT are measured through Smartphone ownership, regularity in purchasing internet and internet based platform accessed by community. The ownership of Smartphone, which achieves 80% of community, is followed with regularity in purchasing internet, mainly for accessing social media platform. Among these three variables, only knowledge variable does not have significant correlation with willingness to access ICT based flood risk communication. Regarding to its benefits, ICT based flood risk communication should be taken account as one of strategy in developing flood preparedness of the city. However, the application of this approach in areas that are new to / are developing ICT systems for this purpose requires an understanding of the community perspectives and practices in using ICT as media in delivering information and communication, which may determine community willingness to access ICT based flood risk communication.