About the Better Angels
Wiki ▸ About the Better Angels
"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."
—Abraham Lincoln, 1861
The Better Angels are a team of volunteer artists, writers, programmers, designers, political activists, social workers, legal support personnel, educators, and human rights defenders of various descriptions who are mostly based in several of the United States. Our work spans numerous issue areas ranging from alternative mental health/medical response, to domestic violence survivor support, to police/prison abolitionism.
Although we don’t all share the exact same politics, we’ve come together as one group because we all agree that more has to be done to support communities of people whom the current system fails, regardless of whether that failure is deliberate or not. In the spirit of software development as direct action, we set out to design and implement free software that has the maximum social impact with the minimum lines of code, as quickly as possible.
We believe that in situations where traditional emergency services are not available, reliable, trustworthy, or sufficient, communities can come together to aid each other in times of need. To this end, our flagship project is Buoy, a community-based crisis response system, designed to connect people in crisis with trusted friends, family, and other nearby allies who can help.
💡 Learn more about how we work, a process we call Direct Action Software Development, by watching this short video:
