Idea: A Distributed Autonomous Alert system

Like a programmatic phone tree.

People opt-in to be a part of the alert system. They can volunteer different levels of willingness to receive notifications.

The system programmatically distributes the alerts to the top of the chain, and at each step the participants can indicate whether the message should be passed along, e.g. escalated, to the next threshold.

This way earlier participants can help judge for later participants whether the message is important / urgent enough.

The system is designed to maximize signal / noise ratio, and respect everyone’s willingness and level of attention.