As I think about it, there's likely E911 (in the USA) organizations (standards bodies, coordinating mutual aid people...) who either are talking about this or already have. I imagine an app which is smart enough to "burst off to all possible channels of communication, whatever your emergency response network is able to absorb" (text, voice, GPS text SMS of decimal lat-lon...) because this is an app I downloaded in case I needed to send my location to emergency rescue-type agencies via this smart phone, and I'm clicking on the app (and confirming to "send my location to emergency authorities?" now). Such apps usually revise and get smarter and more coordinated / localizable / extensible / smarter as time goes on, anyway.
Again, this doesn't seem too difficult to get coordinated and build an app and develop the syntax and functionality so it is localizable and flexible enough to "do the right thing(s) in context" (of whatever country or G3, G4, G5, 911, 999, whatever..) tech / country / system / network / whatever. Not a no-brainer, but it seems like if humanity doesn't have this app (and people downloading / installing it by 2020), we might be lagging a little bit. Let's sew up the loose edges here and maybe OSM discussing amongst ourselves on talk turns into (by 2021) stories of "we saved the lost family in the desert...", too. It's not farfetched. Really, a lot of good ideas and "W3W inspires OSM to standardize a 'plain vanilla' version of this" (and maybe OSM has something to do with a sort of "generic, install on your phone as a good idea," maybe not) here. SteveA _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
