Buoy

Buoy is a decentralized 9-1-1 alternative built for and by people who are not well served by existing emergency response services. Buoy makes it easy to tell your friends where you are and what you need. Buoy’s goal is a world where anyone in distress always has the option to turn to people they trust for support, rather than being forced to rely on people they don’t.

Buoy is not a traditional “app” that you can download in the app store, but rather a system for adding crisis response and emergency dispatch services to existing websites. With Buoy, community groups, activist organizations, and social support service providers can quickly connect people who need help with trusted friends, family members, advocates, and other allies who can help them. It is designed to be community owned and operated, so each instance of Buoy can be customized to the unique needs or the organization or community group that hosts it.

Whether you are a group of street medics coordinating with each other during an action, citizen journalists or copwatchers watching each other’s backs, domestic violence survivor support advocates, or even single parents picking each others’ kids up from school, Buoy helps you get and give peer-based mutual aid to your friends and comrades.

For service providers

Anyone with a WordPress-powered website or blog can add the Buoy software (a 1-click automatic install) to their website, enabling the site’s membership to provide peer-based mutual-aid to one another. Moreover, legal aid service providers, domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence prevention advocates, shelters, social groups, alternative medical and mental health collectives, and others can offer members of their community one-click emergency access to a network of trusted peers and/or on-call emergency responders.

For victims and survivors

Buoy makes it easy to tell your friends where you are and what you need, even in the most dangerous or frightening scenarios. Tapping a single button will immediately notify the people you trust most that you need their help, give them a map showing your exact location, and even helps them coordinate with one another to quickly figure out how to help you best. With Buoy and a smartphone, you are never more than one button press away from the people you trust most. (We are even working to support old-school flipfones!)

You do not need to download or install special software to use Buoy. Simply bookmark a page with your smartphone’s built-in Web browser to gain instant access to your personal emergency response team. Quickly send them your location with a pre-defined custom message, write a custom message, or schedule a timed alert (like a “safe call”) for some time in the future.

The people you select as your emergency contacts (“response team”) will get a notification showing them your location in the real world as well as the locations of any other responders to your call for help. If it’s safe for you to do so, you can now coordinate with all responders in a live chat room, or responders can coordinate amongst themselves about how best to help you if you are unresponsive.

See the screenshots for an example walkthrough of how Buoy works.

Find a Buoy-enabled web site.
If you like this plugin, please consider making a donation for your use of the plugin, purchasing one of Meitar’s web development books or, better yet, contributing directly to Meitar’s Cyberbusking fund. (Publishing royalties ain’t exactly the lucrative income it used to be, y’know?) Your support is appreciated!