Emergency Alerts

We’ve gotten a few emails over the last couple days asking us if loopnote can be used for emergencies like the Virginia Tech Shootings. A lot of people have commented that a lot of people could have been saved if there had been a way to alert students and staff at Virginia Tech that there was a shooter on campus. This article on BoingBoing talks about the issue of alerting people in these kinds of situations. Loopnote can definitely be used for emergencies like this - but it’s important that things be setup by the emergency alert coordinator in an opt-out vs. opt-in manner.

One of the things we’re working on is a way to make it easier for “loop” owners to manually subscribe people to their loops. That’s relevant because for an Emergency alert service you’d really want all the students to be subscribed but not have to depend on them to manually subscribe themselves. We initially thought that all subscriptions would need to be initiated by the subscriber because that was the least intrusive way to do things. We didn’t want people to start getting spammed by loop owners. So we created loops and said that if anyone wanted to subscribe, they had to come to the site, find the loop, and then register before signing up.

Later we realized that this wasn’t necessarily the easiest way to do things and that in most cases subscribers would be happy if someone else (friends, family, their school) signed them for some type of alert - as long as they had the option to unsubscribe. So we’ve come up with a middle ground which I think works really well. A loop owner can subscribe others to their loop via email, im, or sms. Each subscriber will get a message asking them to confirm their subscription. This opt-out model works best because it has a low barrier to entry for subscribers but still gives people the control to stop spam and other abuses.

If you work for a school or other organization and would like to setup a loop for emergency alerting then feel free to email me at info@loopnote.com and I’d be happy to walk you through how to set it up.