“I Love Your Guys” - submitted on behalf of a friend
The last contact he had with his daughter was via a text message saying I love you guys sent to both his wife and his own cell phone. His daughter was being held captive by an armed gunman who eventually turned the gun on himself but only after killing the girl.
And then his life changed. I mean, here was a very successful developer who lieterally dropped EVERYTHING and immediately started to try and come up with a way to make sure this never happens again. Knowing that being able to universally protect our children was virtually imposible, he set to do the next best thing - make implementing an emergency response system for any and all schools to better manage/protect the children in case of crisis. RIght now he’s got it in over 150 schools, by next year he’ll have his system installed in over 270. The phone lines are the first to go out in any type of emergency, especially pbx based land-line systems that most school are setup with. What doesn’t go down is the internet + SMS. While he’s already managed to create an entire robust centralized backend where each school has their own ‘crisis-page’ that pulls from it (his server + backup cloud system in case it should ever go down in time of need).
I met him actually by pure chance. I volunteered to be a project manager in an event held here in boulder, co to help out local non-profits that had technical or strategy questions, concerns, needs, etc.. with the local tech community. The passion he’s be able to put towards this project - focusing on educating teachers + institutions on how easy it it is to setup and maintain a simple emergency plan that could ultimately protect the children they’re in charge of has been pretty intense. He turned his sadness into passion. That’s the best way I can put it. Right now i’ve been (even though the even is long over) in talks with various sms + voip services so that we can implement another aspect of the platform which is a click to call emergency as well as sms-call-list that would notify parents and teachers of impending threats/crisis situations as well as what to do. I’ve so far been getting great advice, as well as ways around most system limitations (including the standard policy that voip services refuse to allow you the ability to call 911 services through web-based interfaces…and the best part is most was shared by those who were developers/even senior management level types at each of these companies. Even with the promised donation of any outgoing calls/sms fees by certain companies, there still would be a large cost in any actual emergency by using any system of this type. That $10k would make sure that the school not only wouldn’t have to pay any of the fees (as they currently don’t pay for any of the I Love You Guys foundations’ services), but would make sure one situation doesn’t take down their foundation. Please, just see what I mean by even just emailing him.. He has no idea that I’m posting this. johnmichael@iloveuguys.org
[Note: this is one of the Cube Grenade entries. Share your story for a chance to win a commissioned piece of art.]
