Turns out they used twitter because that's where the users were.
So, the requirements are more than a website, but also not a private 3rd party platform w/o service guarantees, and preferably something that doesn't have municipality, department or agency rolling their own solutions, duplicating effort, etc.
In the US the traditional systems are Emergency Alert & WEA but those don't encompass all the public awareness & notification needs that drive organizations to use something like Twitter. I'm not sure if the right answer is to expand those or creating something similar for scenarios currently outside their scope, but we could do worse than starting the conversation with that question.
The online strategy so far, has to be where the people are, so most governments have multiple social media accounts, like Facebook and Twitter, and also websites and RSS. I’ve also seen, depending on the government, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.
You're evacuating, driving along a highway, and during the course of your trip the available evacuation routes change. A website is useless here.
The context of the conversation is emergency situations, that has to be taken into account when thinking about the required public notification infrastructure.
A government agency governing what is acceptable speech is a bad idea.
Platforms that censor are going to win in the marketplace, because that’s what most people want in a discussion platform.
Child alert systems find about 50 or 60 kids a year (US). Turning them off is a pretty shit move for the ~dozen per year that come through.
> if you miss one for any of the many reasons that could occur in an emergency(
"It's not perfect so why bother?" Is an odd attitude. Per the above, I keep on emergency weather alerts even though I might miss some.
>I wouldn't know where to go to seek out those alerts.*
You can fix that. I know where to go for such things during adverse weather events, and when an AMBER alert has been issue for a kid I'm often curious enough to see if it's been called off a few hours later.
For example in Ontario, every alert is sent out at this authority.
