Syndesy is an app for the mobile phone which facilitates healthy connections in both the private and professional space; importantly, it also provides a means to seek help on a moment’s notice.
Syndesy Connections
The Syndesy Connections feature facilitates responsible social connections. There are plenty of apps that arrange hook-ups, but there are no apps that provide the critical means to connect safely and in the myriad ways that humans connect– personal, professional, academic, and athletic to name a few. Syndesy’s Connections feature focuses on safety, mutuality, communication, and transparency. This is how it encourages healthy human connection for anyone dating, anyone working with other people, anyone attending school or college, and pretty much anyone navigating personal or professional relationships with other humans.
If everyone used Syndesy, society would be more open, honest, understanding, transparent and secure.
The Emergency Button
Safety on both an individual level and a community level is the principal mandate of Syndesy. With the press of the Emergency Button on the Home Page, the Syndesy user can send a cry for help to all emergency contacts. Accepted a connection invite only to find your friend in a suicidal state? On a bad date and feeling trapped? Can’t get rid of a belligerent customer? Lured to a modelling audition by an alleged photographer who wants to take you, not your photo? Think your drink has been spiked? Fell down and can’t get up? Showing a real estate listing to a client who turns out to want you and not the house? In any of these cases and many, many more, you would press the Syndesy Emergency Button to send an alert to your Emergency Contacts. The alert will inform your appointed contacts where you are and that you need their help. If you have an emergency plan in place, your emergency contacts will know whether to come in person or call 911 or both.
Syndesy provides users with the ability to seek emergency assistance from their trusted contacts and law enforcement during a crisis.
Furthermore, Syndesy’s Check-In feature aids in tracking exposure to natural disasters, man-made disasters and contagions. For more on this see the Check-Ins section below.
Journals
Relationships can be complicated. Initial connections can be downright baffling. Unintended connections can be mystifying if not daunting. Designed to foster healthy connections between individuals, Syndesy provides users with a Journal feature. Key to this feature it that it is hosted within the app, and thus Journal Entries all have a time-, date- and geo-stamp. Is your co-worker a close-talker who seems to be perennially encroaching on your personal space? Does your coach expect an unwelcome hug at the top of every practice? Did your friend’s husband really just proposition you, or was it some kind of tasteless joke? Did your pastor just comment on your sex appeal?
Use Syndesy’s Journal feature in the moment to diary an account of what you experienced, how it made you feel, what confused you, what offended you, what intimidated you, what scared you. Write it down in the journal which will store it with a time-, date- and geo-stamp. (If or when you go back to review your thinking at the time, the entry will let you know exactly where you were and when.) Clearly if you are in danger, get away if you can or call for help, press the Emergency button to summon help. But sometimes we experience things that are ambiguous or that we just can’t evaluate in the moment. Don’t pretend it didn’t happen. Journal it. Keep a record. If you never experience that kind of behavior again from that person, no harm done. Your journal is your own private record. But if the behavior of the individual in question escalates, and you need to report it to management or to law enforcement, you now have a record of the one time or the many times you took notes on the continued conduct. This gives you agency; this gives you credibility; this reminds you of any details you might have otherwise forgotten; this allows you to effectively report a documented pattern of behavior.
Call within the journal.
Syndesy offers another corroborating and thus empowering tool for emergencies—the ability to call within the Journal feature of the app. When you enter the journal module to record an entry, the app offers you the ability to make a call to any one of your emergency contacts with the press of a button or, if you want to call someone else, you can do that too. The beauty of this is that the fact of this call is registered by the app. If, at some later date, the person you called is called upon to corroborate a complaint, the fact that you called that person is established within the app. Let’s say you are a date that goes really bad. You get yourself away from the situation, press the journal icon and as you are typing up a description of the encounter, you call your sister for guidance and for solace. If you ever need to corroborate your account of the date, not only do you have your journal entry but you have the account of your sister. The fact that you called her in the moment you were journaling is verified in Syndesy. Your sister’s supporting account is legitimized.
Reports
Users can generate Connections Reports, Journal Reports, and Check-Ins Reports via the Reports feature of the app. All entries on the reports exhibit geo-, date-, and time-stamps. Reports will thus enable the user to:
1. List all Connections requested, accepted, withdrawn and denied to any selected contact.
2. List any or all Journals made about any individual.
3. List all Check-Ins logged.
Resources
In a time of need or a time of questioning, Syndesy provides suggestions of other resources that you might want to consult. These are merely suggestions you might want to explore. Syndesy has no affiliation with any of these resources, nor does Syndesy formally sanction or endorse their operations.
Check-Ins…
In the current global health crisis, Syndesy has a tool that can help with containment. This is because Syndesy also has a feature called “Check-Ins” that lets users store their geo-location with a date- and time-stamp. This app feature also lets users generate a report that lists each place they have been over a selected period of time. “Check-Ins” is a vital tool right now for users who have been infected to let others know exactly where they have been and when. By generating a Check-Ins report, users can provide friends, loved ones, and their communities with information to protect themselves and others, helping to contain the spiral of infection. If we all ‘check-in,’ we can work together at a time when the crisis demands we keep physically apart.
Freedom… Information… Exposure tracing…
In more autocratic countries where citizens enjoy far less, if any, civil liberties and rights to privacy, governments have instituted national contact tracing. These governments are tracking the movements of their citizens and can thus trace the path of contagions once an infected person is diagnosed. In the United States, where we, the people, enjoy more democratic freedoms and where the right to privacy is sacrosanct, this kind of big brother contact tracing would contradict our most fundamental and constitutional rights. It is thus up to us, as individuals, to adopt responsible behaviors and to work together, voluntarily and pro-actively. Syndesy can help. If American citizens around the country download this app, and if they use the Check-Ins feature to trace their movements once they leave their chosen place of self-quarantine for whatever essential tasks they must take care of, that would give Americans access to voluntary and community-wide, if not country-wide, exposure tracing. Moreover, if American citizens utilize the Syndesy report to inform others where they were and when they were there, other Syndesy users could compare that to their own Check-Ins to figure out if they themselves were exposed.
We are in this together.
After being diagnosed with the Coronavirus, CNN’s Cuomo Prime Time host Chris Cuomo said, “Together as ever as one. That is our remedy.” This statement pointedly encapsulates the mission of Syndesy. We Americans, as individuals and as a collective, are endowed, by the laws of our nation, with the privilege of inherent and inalienable liberties and freedoms not experienced by many other nations. Along with such privilege comes the individual’s responsibility to the greater community of people. This is not a responsibility mandated by law; it is a responsibility mandated by ethics, morality and human compassion which the ethos of our country presumes to be innate. Syndesy is a tool that speaks directly to that innate compassionate, moral and ethical fabric of mankind; it was designed to promote a cooperative, interconnected society of communicators and its tools can now be used, voluntarily, freely, and compassionately to share information that can track and help to arrest the spread of a terrifying virus. To quote Chris Cuomo: “We are our best and only defense.”
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