Over both nights of Halloween parties in Madison last autumn, more than 200 revelers received periodic text messages updating them about crowd size, traffic conditions, and police directives on and around the ticketed Freakfest gathering on State Street. Named CRASH Madison, this texting system was created in less than two weeks downtown resident Phil Ejercito. Organizing it as a criticism of the city’s new gating policy in 2006, his goal was to provide timely information to partiers with more accuracy and detail than that received over loudspeakers, megaphones, and through the crowd grapevine.
This Halloween texting service also served as a small-scale example of how relatively new and widely adopted technologies can be used as an emergency alert system, a particularly trenchant question following the shootings at Virginia Tech on Apr. 16.