About
This service provides communication to friends and families. People in difficult situations, such as people on the move and refugees, may happen to be in situations where they do not have the means to contact the important people in their life. With WeAreOkay, people can inform their worried friends and family members that they are okay and in a safe environment.
Because of possible legal challenges or complications, the service limits communication to this extent only, meaning the person will later have to find other ways of communication to elaborate and/or to have a full conversation. WeAreOkay is intended for emergency situations and only used to relieve people from imminent fears and worries.
WeAreOkay has been developed in the context of civil sea rescue in the Mediterranean. It comes as a response to a problem identified on rescue ships where there is a huge gap in access to communication for rescued people, which is the source of a lot of distress and worry. Many do not have access to any communication networks like phone reception or wifi. With this service, people have the possibility to inform their families that they survived their journey and that they will contact them again when they reach land. This is a relief for both sides, the families and friends are reassured and in the knowledge that their loved one is safe, while the person sending the message feels more comfortable having alleviate these worries.
How
WeAreOkay allows a person (the sender) to provide the following information: recipient's number and their relationship to the sender, their name and their gender. The name is optional as the gender is. This is only used to have the proper grammatical referral he/him or she/her. Genderneutral language is not easy in every supported language but might be improved in the future.
With these information a text message is generated that is sent to the recipient, as shown in the picture. The message itself, the look and feel of the app is under constant development and may differ.
Clicking on the submit button will send these information to a WeAreOkay server in Germany which will then arrange the further steps. Essentially, an online service that provides SMS/Whatsapp delivery is used to send the message. The result is then feedbacked back to the app, allowing the administrator to later see if the message was successfully transmitted.
In order to ensure the proper transmission of the data from app to server, WeAreOkay provides an additional relay service that might be important for ships or situations where the internet connection is unstable at times. This relay service can be installed in the ships IT infrastructure so that the app only communicates within the local network. When the internet connection is better, this relay service can send all the information to the server. This will also help with battery weaknesses of the devices involved and other technical problems.
After having sent the messages, the server deletes all the personal data used in the process.
Try it
You can try the service at the demo page. The API key installed there is intended for testing purposes only. This will limit the amout of message you can send and has certain limitations to avoid misuse. For instance, a message like 'This is a test' is added to the beginning of the message to maintain the credibility of the service provision.
The apk android package to install on your phone is available here: Download app
Translations
This service provides message in various different languages. Most of them come from professional supporters of this project. Some are less perfect and include mistakes. If you spot some, please let us know. Also, everyone is welcome to add another language that we could need.
So far, we are grateful for the support from:
Contact
Contact us via email at info@weareokay.org
Managing login is here.
This webservice is provide by weareokay, a small organization in Germany. For more information contact us under the given email address.
This website is not using cookies and not interested in any user data for marketing or any other reasons. The webserver stores, as any other commonly used webserver, logfiles with access times, browser information and the IP address of the visiting user. This is deleted regularly and not used to check on any private or personal information.
The demo/app is a full working sms messaging tool. Providing information and clicking the send button will result in submitting the text input to the API server of this website. This is then forwarded to the sms provider sms77.io or twilio.com which sends an actual SMS to the provided phone number. Furthermore is the provider saving this information according to their rules and we are not in control of this. We try to delete all the personal data as fast as possible and have no other interest in them than providing this messaging service. The app is using the local browser storage to save the API key and saves a few persistent but purely technical information.
For further information send us an email.