Safehood production site: http://safehood.heroku.com Safehood open source code repository: http://github.com/hackforchange/Safehood Safehood OSI approved license - MIT Safehood bridges the digital divide and helps empower residents of dangerous neighborhoods communicate safely. Using Safehood, residents can tackle hyperlocal issues of crime and personal safety via collaboration through anonymous text messages. In some neighborhoods, where crime is significant, a neighborhood watch program may not be in effect, or neighbors may not know each other well enough to discuss in-person suspicious events in real-time. A neighbor witnessing a suspicious event may not bother to call the police since the suspicious event may have ended by the time the police arrive. Safehood helps serve hyper-local data (communications) for neighborhood registrants as well as serving local crime data from Oakland Police. For residents of Oakland, CA, Safehood provides the command #crime which will report to the user via text message, a summary crime report for crimes in the area of the address provided. The crime data comes from the Oakland Crimespotting API. Safehood can be extended to include and push out via txt message crime data from other communities, provided that a community has an API for their crime data. Safehood offers web, text based, and voice based accessibility. Safehood allows anyone with just a feature phone to register their address (or an intersection nearby if they don't want to enter their address), and then be registered to a group of neighbors within 1 kilometer (0.62 miles) of their submitted address. Anytime a suspicious event is witnessed, or communication with other registered neighbors is desired, a registered Safehood user only has to text message the Safehood number with the message they want sent to their neighbors, and Safehood will do an anonymous broadcast of the message to all registered neighbors within 1 mile. Any replies to the broadcasted message are also kept anonymous, so neighbors share important safety information, and no personal information - not even a phone number, unless they want to. If neighbors want to share personal information with each other, they can enter this information into the body of their text message.For neighbors who are visually impaired, and have difficulties entering text messages, the same Safehood number can be called, and after the prompt, a neighbor can speak their message to the system, and hangup. Safehood will automatically transcribe the message, and anonymously send out the transcribed text message to all registered neighbors near by.Safehood website is available in Spanish and English. You can also register to Safehood through the Safehood website (http://safehood.heroku.com), which is written in both Spanish and English. The website can help users learn more about Safehood and how to interact with Safehood. Because Safehood is written in the Ruby on Rails framework, it supports internationalization, and can be extended to support any foreign language.Still further, there is a list of commands, accessible through the website, that you can issue to Safehood via text message to set preferences for your Safehood registration. One of these commands is #crime, as described above. Further, another command is #num which will inform you how many people are "listening" or registered to your safehood group.In all, Safehood provides a way for neighbors to be able to improve their community through safe, anonymous collaborative communication, and provides the first steps towards empowering neighbors to develop more formal neighborhood safety infrastructure such as neighborhood watch. 

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