Panic Button: Lessons for the Tech-for-Good Sector

This was a design-by-committee project that didn't have a clear singular problem it was trying to solve. Reading their goals they intentionally mixed the simple aspect of a "911" for human rights workers with a mishmash engagement-type soft goals.

Just looks like a recipe for failure regardless of funding.

Another way to look at it, it was a success if measured in terms of raising awareness of the problem.

"Despite our best efforts, we have not been able to secure any substantial external funding for the project since being awarded £100,000 as runners-up in the Google Global Impact Award in June 2013. In part, this is due to what in hindsight was a short-lived boom in funding and excitement around “tech 4 good.”"

There's a lesson here somewhere for those who are optimistic about changing the world.

I really appreciate it when people produce thoughtful looks at project failure like this. If I had Too Much Money, I'd definitely fund an annual prize for the best startup-ish project failure reports. There's no better source for information on advancing the state of the field, but so much is lost when companies just quietly shut down.

Open source : https://github.com/PanicInitiative/PanicButton

Donc si c'est vraiment utile, ca ne disparaitra peut etre pas

Also to note is that organisations like Amnesty are incredibly inefficient and big money wasters. Paying mid level employees 5000k net + 2000 for rent is not exceptional. So I'm skeptic when they need "more money".

When it said:

> help us use technology to prevent unlawful detentions

I thought they were talking about the Firefox Extension called Panic Button from ~10 years ago that we used in school to hide games and show an education site 'Preventing detentions'!

I don't get it. The reasons they give are:

1) Only had £100,000

2) Would need more money to make the app deal with false alerts.

3) Would need more money to "keep up [...] our engagement with users."

What does this mean?

The followup article has much more useful detail: https://www.theengineroom.org/panic-button-lessons-learned/