Apply HN: Wildfire – Waze for Safety
When breaking news happens around you, how do you hear about it? Whether it's a mugging, fire, or a shooting nearby, there aren't effective ways of notifying the immediate community in real time.
Wildfire is a safety app where users report crimes and safety related incidents in their area. They also receive push notifications in real time when a situation occurs nearby - like Waze for safety.
App video: https://youtu.be/U7aeZ2a2o2s
App homepage: http://www.wildfireapp.io/
Huffington Post article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rawan-abushaban/wildfire-app-alerts-users_b_9287408.html
8 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 30.0 ms ] threadI think its cool. How are you going to get people to use this?
We're initially targetting college campuses, starting with UC Berkeley. In urban college towns, rampant crime exists, and there's already a community around safety. Our primary way to get users on the app is by partnering with student governments and campus police for advertising.
In one month, we've gained nearly 1k active users in Berkeley. Our biggest growth factor is word-of-mouth: whenever users receive Wildfire alerts, they tell their friends, so we average 20 new downloads with each notification sent.
I'm assuming the school finds out about these incidents via campus police, who may get info from students. Is your application trying to speed up that process, or provide the ability to report more types of incidents?
What protections to you envision to prevent fake/prank reports? A police officer is easily able to vet a claim and report on its truthfulness.
Do you see your app as a peer-to-peer tool, or as a way for authorities to be able to learn about incidents quicker?
Our app is hoping to bridge the time between an incident happening and people who are in the vicinity of the event hearing about it. We see our app as a peer-to-peer tool and what makes our emergency notification system better is that it is a two-way form of communication. Not only can people view incidents, but they can also report them based on what they see, comment, add pictures, and view live updates in a social way.
So to use our app, users have to log-in with facebook, after which their profile picture, first name, and mutual friends will be attached to anything they post. With Facebook authentication, we’ve noticed that trolling isn’t as prevalent in our current locations.
Calling the police should be your top priority when witnessing a crime, how can you tap in to that mindshare?
How will you deal with critics that say you're actually making the area less safe by redirecting attention to your app instead of the police?
What would incentivize someone to report a crime via your app?
Do you know if notifying everyone in the area of a crime would actually make people safer, or feel safer? I think in cities most people benefit from ignorance of the number of crimes happening around them.
> Have you considered using police databases or radios to mine incidents? Yeah, we’re currently mining online police databases and Twitter feeds and posting (and citing) these alerts in Wildfire.
> Calling the police should be your top priority when witnessing a crime, how can you tap in to that mindshare? In Berkeley, our beta launch site, police are monitoring Wildfire.So if an event occurred that the police hadn’t heard about (or hasn’t happened yet), they’re going to be able to reach out to the poster and collect more details.
> How will you deal with critics that say you're actually making the area less safe by redirecting attention to your app instead of the police? What we’ve realized is that often times when an emergency situation happens those nearby aren’t aware. This is what we’re trying to solve.
> What would incentivize someone to report a crime via your app? We’re trying to impose positive reinforcement on our app just as reddit and yik yak might do with upvotes. Additionally, through our app, we’re hoping to create a local community through which users will feel responsible to say something if they see something.
Also, because we are scraping crime and safety related information, we don’t face a network effect that most social apps face. Regardless of whether or not users nearby are posting, information is constantly being being mined from local news organizations, the police, and social media.
> Do you know if notifying everyone in the area of a crime would actually make people safer, or feel safer? I think in cities most people benefit from ignorance of the number of crimes happening around them. Ignorance and apathy result in less informed people about situations happening around them. Our goal is to share safety related information in real-time so that anyone walking home late at night can use it to help them navigate home safely.
We have two mechanisms to try and mitigate false alerts: (1) accountability via Facebook login. The poster's name and face is associated with every post to Wildfire, which helps reduce anonymous trolling seen on platforms like YikYak. (2) alerts are always displayed in the feed by default, but notifications are only sent if they meet our community guidelines [a]. Right now, our team is manually verifying authenticity [b] of posts with eye-witnesses and news sources, and deciding what merits a real-time alert, but in the future we hope to crowdsource this moderation process.
[a]: https://medium.com/@Wildfire.App/community-guidelines-46bbf2...
[b]: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html