Elemental Foundation
The Elemental Foundation (in Dutch: "Stichting Elemental") is a non-profit aiming to help society be more resilient. We do this by creating specialised software and resilient digital infrastructure.
Zerocomms
Crisis organisations rely heavily on centralised (and often US-based) cloud systems, even during incidents. When those fail (through outages, cyberattacks, or power cuts), everything stops.
Zerocomms is a backup for your information architecture. It keeps plans, maps, procedures, and contacts available locally, shares them over a local Wi-Fi hotspot (no app or account needed), and provides point-to-point communication if an uplink is available, without the need for a third party like Microsoft or Google.
Infolite
Often during disaster scenarios there is still some Internet connectivity, but it will be spotty and unreliable. Think 2G, not 5G. Official websites are often not made for these situations and will try to load large images and even videos, making them unusable for people in disaster areas.
Infolite is a service that mirrors important news and announcements, but strips out all images, videos and stylesheets, so that the website loads much faster. Organisations like Safety Regions and municipalities can use this service to have an automated low-bandwidth version of their websites.
Why a foundation?
We think that society might be more resilient if critical services were run by non-profits.
Food, water, shelter, (digital) infrastructure, health and education don't require a for-profit organisation to thrive. On the contrary, the drive for year-over-year growth and profit seems to result in services that get worse over time.
Instead, these critical services might be better served by non-profit organisations, where the employees are well compensated to provide a solid service in a fulfilling manner.
That's the idea (and hypothesis) underlying Elemental. But our execution is much narrower in scope. Our background is in software, cybersecurity and digital infrastructure, so that's what we focus on.
Contact
Feel free to send us an email any time at: inbox@elementalfoundation.eu