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lthough he may not be familiar with designing an application, Bunga Sari Dewi Yudhany, a 16-year-old student from high school SMA Negeri 38, tried his hardest to develop an app for disaster mitigation.

“We live in a disaster-prone country, so I am really interested in creating a new application that can change the way we respond,” she said.

Bunga was one of dozens of students who contested the NASA International Space Apps Challenge, a program which wrapped up on Sunday.

During the two-day global event, software developers competed to create new technological solutions for space exploration and social needs.

In Jakarta, the competition was jointly organized by the United States Embassy, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the Indonesian National Aeronautics and Outer Space Institute (LAPAN) and the American cultural center @america.

Jakarta was one of nine spots chosen to hold the competition. The other spots are Cape Town, London, McMurdo Ground Station in Antarctica, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Sydney (Australia), and Tokyo. Astronauts from the International Space Station also joined with the competition.

The Space Apps Challenge is being developed by NASA as one of the US commitments to the Open Government Partnership. The initiative was part of the Comprehensive Partnership established by President Barack Obama and President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in November 2010.

“It is about expanding the way people in societies understand how their government works and involving them in the activities of their government,” said US Deputy Chief of Mission Ted Osius.

In the challenge, he said, young Indonesian developers had the chance to figure out practical technological solutions to approach real problems. The Space Apps Challenge focuses on developing applications, in the form of software, hardware, or data visualization.

During the competition, the participants could use the data and the knowledge that NASA had to develop applications.

Overall, 60 challenges were posted on the website spaceappschallenge.org.

Many of those challenges ask participants to organize data and to connect with sources and interpret the data, for example, to tackle climate and environmental issues.

In Jakarta, the contest offered eight challenges, which included HTML5 App for Earth Observation, Preliminary Design for Open Data API, Aurora Layer for Google Earth, Mobile Environment Mapping, Hazard Map/Scrapping Social Media and Predict the Sky. Participants had a full 24 hours to complete each application.

“This is a chance for young application developers in Indonesia to prove something and to show that they can design applications where they can post particular information on, for example, disaster or environmental challenges which will further help communities to take action to cope with the problem,” Rama Mamuaya, an application developer from Indonesian tech start-up media Daily Social, told The Jakarta Post.

Open Government was the very first item that President Obama signed when he came into office, saying that transparency, participation and collaboration would make the government better for its citizens.

Under the program, the US develops an international collaboration called Open Government Partnership in which Indonesia is one of 55 participant countries.

“We all believe that openness make government better for all of us,” said Alicia Llewellyn, who works in NASA headquarters in Houston and is also active in representing Open Government Partnership.

She said NASA was currently being transparent with its data and processes by making it available for the public. “We say this is the information from space and how can we in Indonesia can use the data that NASA earned. That is what we believe about open government; that we can share our publicly available data for everyone’s good,” Llewellyn added.