Story

In most parts of the world most women will have experienced feeling unsafe as they walking down the street at some point. Several studies showed that almost 60% of women feeling unsafe in urban spaces. Harassment and abuse of women in urban areas is a rampant yet largely neglected issue.

Why we focus on safe cities for women? Violence against women due to their gender is the worst form of discrimination women face. This discrimination is a consequence of a patriarchal culture based on unequal relations of power between men and women. Women are harassed, in streets, in parks and plazas, in schools, in work places, and while using public transportation. This situation creates an assumption that women should always be afraid in public areas and this makes women victims of fear, as well as victims of violence. In unsafe cities women face not only danger of harm, also obstacles to reach educational, economic and political opportunities.

A study by the German branch of Plan International suggests that almost no women feel safe when traveling about the large German cities of Hamburg, Berlin, Cologne and Munich. Another study carried out by Plan International in New Delhi, Sydney, Lima and Madrid made similar findings, with most girls and women saying they feel unsafe in those cities. Maike Röttger, the director of Plan International in Germany, said that many boys and men still thought it was all right to harass women. Röttger called for action, saying that every girl and woman had a right to move about in her city freely and without fear.[1]

According to UN Women, a safe city for women is a city where women can enjoy public spaces and public life without fear of being assaulted.[2]

Women have right to a safe city. So, what is main strategies to achieve that?

Creating a Public Awareness: Public awareness occurs when nearly all of society agrees that the safety of women in the cities is an issue that is of great importance to all people. There are two main areas to focus on when raising awareness about safe cities for women. First, general public awareness; second, self-awareness. Widespread understanding and acknowledgement of the necessity of safe cities for women and women’s individual understanding of the safe cities and how it affects them personally.

Social Mobilization: It is very important to encourage community members to talk about safety of women in the cities and participate in the creation of safe cities and communities for women. The whole community itself is responsible for and affected by situations of safety of women. Putting the responsibility of safety of women in the cities in the hands of women obscure the responsibility of others.

Designing Safe Cities for Women: Designing cities for women means creating urban areas with features that enhance women’s safety and feelings of safety, and detract from features that cause women’s insecurity and feelings of insecurity. Planning and designing safe public spaces for women requires analyzing the various uses of public spaces, who uses them, when, and for how long. And this kind of planning and design also requires analyzing who doesn’t use a particular urban area, when, and why. This is because when certain groups, like women, do not use a space, it is usually an indication that the area feels insecure to members of that group.

How Safenue Deal with The Issue of Women Safety at Urban Spaces?

At first, what is Safenue? Safenue is a location-based woman-only anonymous social network available for Android, iOS operating systems and web, where women can tag areas or places anonymously as either a safe spot or unsafe spot and leave a review about a particular incident (photos, video included) and can live stream.

Identifying Safety Problems and Developing Effective Solutions

Each city is different, each has its own people, physical spaces, government structures, cultural values. Therefore, each city has its own particular safety problems. With classical approaches attempt to identifying factors that make women insecure in the city is a difficult task. Identifying safety problems is extremely important, because action in all areas including raising awareness, urban planning and design, transportation planning, and policy-making are directed towards finding solutions for each community’s priority issues. Safe cities for women started with having a clear vision of what safety issues exist.

Women are only experts on their own environment and safety. So, with Safenue women are enabled to identify, without any fear, the areas in their city where they feel safe or unsafe and interact-communicate with other women, share their stories. Instead of modifying their routines to avoid being harassed, women can talk about it, report it and change it. Homegrown context-specific solutions to current and future women safety issues.

Secondly providing this available anonymized data to researchers, policy makers, public transport operators, etc. gives problem solvers a clear vision of what safety issues exist and a better start for developing feasible and practical solutions.

Raising public awareness is about changing people’s hearts and minds. Safenue give an insight on how women experience the city to community members. Safenue send a message, get attention and open the door to people talking about women safety issues.

Safenue will subtly change our landscapes—on the streets, on the public transport, in restaurants, in stores, in museums to suit women's needs and lifestyles. Since being woman-friendly can make or break a business’s success, owners have become attuned to what how women feels/thinks, communicate, interact, socialize.

UI prototype design

Project Management - Roadmap

• Application Planning
  1. Product Summary
  2. Pre-planning
  3. Marketing planning
  4. Initial product analysis
• Project Set-up
  1. Development process coordination
  2. Project resource coordination
  3. Pre-study
• Application Needs
  1. Review of the user is a friendly application
  2. Coordination of various application platforms
• Application Design & Sociability
  1. Analysis of non-functional requirement
  2. Architecture definition
  3. Pattern management
• Application Development
  1. Selection of development platform
  2. Environment setup
  3. Development planning
  4. User-Experience Design
  5. User-Interface Design
  6. Technical Design
  7. Development
• Application Testing
  1. Functional Testing
  2. Usability Testing
  3. Performance Testing
  4. Fit and Finish Testing
  5. User Acceptance Testing
  6. Launching Test
• Application Security & Privacy
  1. Security & Privacy Test
• Extended Review
  1. Focus Groups
  2. Beta Testing
  3. Refinement
• Deployment
  1. Web API (Server)
  2. App Stores
• Monitoring
  1. Crash
  2. Analytics
  3. Performance
  4. App Store Management

Budget

Safenue relies on donations and grants to fund itself. Safenue don't sell any of your information to anyone to make profit. Safenue also follow a no-ads policy.  Specifically, our concerns are as follows:

• Privacy violation: If an ad-consolidator is used, Advertisers will may learn which services used by a given IP address; they can then correlate that information with other data they may have about that IP address.
• Neutrality of content: Companies which pay directly to advertise on Safenue may suggest changes to the content that is compatible with their message or layout changes which increase their click-through rates.
• Inappropriate ads: Despite strict oversight of ad placement, content, message, or mere presence of ads would may be highly inappropriate or contrary to the mission of the Safenue.

Budget Summary:

• Environment Setup: from 36 hours
• Design-Development: from 480 hours
• Back-end architecture development: from 160 hour
• QA: from 120 hours
• Testing-Bug Fix: from 100 hours
• Project Management: from 100 hours
• Project Documentation: from 40 hours

Total 1036 hours-30-140$ per hour

• 260$ for developers etc.
• 500$ for taxes-fees etc.
• 000$ other and equipment
• 500$ for long-term sustainability

Total: 88.260$

Risks

As mentioned before Safenue is a women only social network and there will be obvious concerns about authorizing users. To achieve that Safenue utilize social login feature, so users can sign on to Safenue by using existing information from a social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter or Google and then the obtained profile data will use to determine whether users are woman or not by human editors with help of AI.  

Safenue relies on donations and grants to fund itself and therefore the risk of insufficient revenue/funding will hang like the Sword of Damocles over the project.

[1] https://www.dw.com/en/womens-in-germany-feel-unsafe-in-large-cities-study-shows/a-54541135

[2] https://www.endvawnow.org/en/articles/237-what-are-safe-cities-and-communities-for-womens-and-girls-.html?next=238