Being able to receive weather and public emergency warnings can save lives, and we don't want people using FOSS to be at a disadvantage compared to proprietary platforms when it comes to that.

Cell broadcast covers some of this, but it's only part of the puzzle. It's typically only used for the most severe and urgent cases, is limited in the amount of data it can transmit, and doesn't allow monitoring of other areas. Public alerting is, therefore, often augmented by additional channels, including mobile apps. Despite being funded by public money, those are usually limited to proprietary platforms. So, as usual, we have to build this ourselves.

The foundation for this is OASIS' Common Alerting Protocol (CAP), which has been in widespread use for many years all over the world, and UnifiedPush as a free alternative for proprietary push notifications. On top of that, we currently have an aggregation server for alerts from about 100 countries, which notifies clients about incidents in their respective areas of interest.

In this talk, we'll show how this works and how alerts can be integrated into applications.