FOSS Warn

The FOSS Public Alert Server lets clients receive Push Notification (via UnifiedPush) about official emergency alerts worldwide. Besides infrastructure like sirens, radio, and Cell-Broadcast, CAP (Common Alerting Protocol) alerts are another way of alerting the public. CAP alerts are used for a wide variety of emergencies. From alerts about extreme weather to alerts about contaminated drinking water to pandemics. Our server bundles over 280 official CAP alert publishers worldwide and can easily extend to more sources. This project aims to bundle the underlying alerting infrastructure into a single trustworthy source of information, not to replace it.

Having a shared global public source of information reduces the user's dependency on local emergency apps - which are often only available for the two largest mobile platforms. Furthermore such a converged effort makes it much simpler to develop clients for devices other than cell phones (like desktop PCs or smart speakers). Thirdly it can make traveling safer. Finding and installing the right local emergency apps to receive emergency alerts when traveling is quite the hurdle. With our solution, it would suffice to install one app for the world. One such app is FOSS Warn, an Android app that for now receives alerts for Germany and Switzerland. Within this project, FOSS Warn will be extended to work worldwide with the new server infrastructure.