An open, reusable model for community-organised emergency response, built by
and for small villages. Born in Bercianos del Real Camino, León — two hundred
residents, most of them well past sixty — and designed to be adopted and adapted
by any village or group.
The full model lives at escudo.red — philosophy,
protocols, worldwide examples, the technology, and every piece of artwork, in
Spanish and English. This repository is its source: the website, the alert
software, and the canonical graphics library.
The first ten minutes
Someone falls in the kitchen and can't reach the phone. A field catches in
August. A man in a hi-vis vest talks his way into a house, saying he's come to
read the meter.
The health centre is eleven kilometres away, the hospital forty-seven, and one
Guardia Civil post covers dozens of villages. They will come, and they are
always called first — but somebody arrives before them, and that somebody is a
neighbour. Escudo is how a village responds on purpose rather than by luck.
It is four things:
- The Red Escudo — the people. Neighbours who said yes in advance: yes,
wake me; yes, I'll go.
- The button — one button that reaches all of them at once. A phone for
those who have one; a wall button or a pendant for those who can't work one.
- The Protocol — observe and report, 062 or 112 first, behaviour and
vehicles never origins, and never intervene, pursue or detain.
- The signage — a sign at the entrance, a plaque on a wall, a sticker in a
window. Free to download and adapt.
And three things it is not: not a patrol (citizen patrols have no legal
cover in Spain — every serious scheme in the world is eyes, ears and hands),
not a replacement for 062 and 112 (every alert carries both numbers), and
not a register of the vulnerable (a name and a way to reach it, nothing
more).
The alert layer
A Telegram bot gives every neighbour a personal Botón Escudo: four alarm
categories that wake the village, one quiet tier that doesn't, dedupe for
panic-pressing, location sharing, an incident log with GDPR retention. Free, no
app to install. It ran as a pilot in Bercianos from July to October 2026.
Adopting it for your village is one YAML file and two environment
variables — village name, language, your
national emergency numbers, your buttons. No code changes.
What's in this repository
| Directory | What it is |
|---|
website/ | The escudo.red site (Hugo, ES + EN). The site is the model: philosophy, how it works, protocols, evidence, runbooks. |
tech-implementation/bot/ | The Telegram alert bot (Deno, MIT). Plus the device bridge for pendants and dumb phones, and the admin panel. |
graphics/ | The canonical artwork library: crest, signage, stickers, Telegram icons, diagrams — all generated from scripts, all reusable. |
research/ | The commissioned landscape survey: worldwide schemes, the honest evidence, Spanish legal ground. |
The three rules that aren't negotiable
Everything else is a village's to change. These aren't, because they are what
keeps a Red Escudo legal and worth belonging to:
- Call 062 or 112 first. Escudo supplements the authorities, never
replaces or bypasses them.
- Observe, report, help — never intervene, pursue or detain.
- Behaviour and vehicles, never ethnicity or origin. No photographs of
people, ever.
Licensing
Languages
English is the source of truth; Spanish is the version Bercianos reads. Every
page of the site exists in both. To add a language to the bot, translate one
file — how.
Started in Bercianos del Real Camino. Take what works, change the rest.
