Buoy is a crisis response platform that connects families, friends, and teams during emergency situations.
Buoy is a free tool designed to quickly alert and communicate with a prescribed group of people when assistance is needed.
Buoy allows users to create customized networks of trusted friends and allies and to plan responses for emergency situations. In the case of an emergency, the user’s Response Team can be alerted with one touch. The alert creates a real-time map of each team member’s location, a live chat, video streaming, audio, and photo sharing capabilities, which members can use to coordinate a response.
Buoy is open source, decentralized technology that’s designed to be community owned and operated. The tool has an unlimited range of potential uses—Buoy is useful for everything from organizing a team of street medics during an action, copwatching, or facilating domestic violence victim support, to a local group of single parents coordinating rides for each others’ kids from school or family checking in after a natural disaster. Buoy is responsive to the unique needs of the organization or community group that uses it.
In order to make this useful tool as accessible as possible to admins and developers of various skill levels, Buoy is implemented as a WordPress plugin. The platform integrates with other free software projects and services such as mapping with OpenStreetMap, video conferencing through Jitsi Meet, and offers advanced real-time location tracking and push notifications via HTML5 APIs.
We are dedicated to free and open source software principles and believe in the importance of technically-implemented decentralization in order to equitably distribute power. We have an explicitly anti-capitalist, anti-oppression, prison abolitionist, pro-community agenda and are commited to incorporating those values into everything we do.
