Beacon is a community alert system for the place you care about - your neighborhood, campus, festival, lake, residence, or team.
Most days, that's ordinary citizen reporting: a moose on the road, litter at the campsite, a broken dock, trouble at the boat launch, a glorious sunset, a lost dog, a stolen bike, beautiful flowers worth sharing. When the internet works, Beacon is how people see what's happening around them and pass it on - without another app store download or a complicated signup.
That's deliberate. Emergency tools fail when they're only opened once a year. Beacon has to matter on a Tuesday - wildlife, maintenance, lost-and-found, little nuisances - so your neighbors actually have it open when the storm hits or the wildfire smoke rolls in. Regular use builds the habit, the contacts, and the trust that make alerts real when they matter.
| Everyday (when things are normal) | When things go wrong |
|---|---|
| Wildlife, weather, scenery | Storms, outages, evacuations |
| Lost pets, found items | Urgent local warnings |
| Broken infrastructure, litter, noise | Off-grid reach when cell fails |
| "Heads up" for your lake or block | Safety Net backup paths (see below) |
We're not asking you to pick a camp. Lake associations don't live in crisis mode - and resilience builders shouldn't have to pretend lost cats don't matter. Beacon is the same link for both: community intelligence first, safety net when you need it.
Our north star is still anyone joins instantly - link or QR code, optional install as a PWA. No firmware flash. No mesh networking PhD. Most members will never own a LoRa radio; they should still get sunset photos and storm warnings from the same place their association already uses.
Safety Net - the resilient backup layer - is what this roadmap is mostly about: how we extend that same simple experience when towers fail or the uplink dies. It builds on an app people already use, not a separate "emergency only" product nobody opens until it's too late.
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This guide is our public roadmap. We share it because we want to build Beacon with communities - place admins, lake associations, mesh builders, and anyone who cares where their data lives - not just for them.
Try Beacon: onbeacon.ca/activate
Safety Net in the app: onbeacon.ca/safety-net