A Community Empowerment Model using ICT for Safety and Security in a Local Village

Nowadays, criminalities and incidents in any form happen every day. Added to that, are the different natural disasters that threaten the safety of the community. The role of the people in the local community is vital in maintaining safety and security in our country. This study focuses on incorporating ICT in empowering the community by allowing the community to do their part in the local village by reporting incidents, disasters and any events in their respective area. After initial data gathering, it was found out that the most feasible technology that can be used by the community in Barangay Old Sagay, Sagay City is a cell phone with SMS technology. A system was developed that is capable of receiving messages via SMS, analyze the message received, and perform necessary matching for specific action that the system will perform. After which the system provides the necessary information to a specific office for immediate action. Added to that, the system stores all the reported incidents for processing to provide decision support for the local village personnel. After thorough evaluation using the 8 characteristics from ISO 25010 (Software Quality Model) and the 5 characteristics of Quality in Use of ISO 25010, the developed system was found to be useful and of good quality. Further, it was recommended that GIS technology might be used to generate a map of occurring incidents to further enhance decision support capabilities.

Keywords: community empowerment, message parsing and analysis, security and safety.