The Genesis Group Joins Waze Connected Citizens Program

Designed as a two-way data share of traffic accidents, traffic congestion, and road closures, the Connected Citizens Program promotes greater efficiency, increased situational awareness for emergency personnel, deeper insights and safer roads for citizens in communities where the Genesis PULSE software is in use. This is the first integration worldwide for Waze into a public safety communications product.

The mission of Waze Connected Citizens Program is to help users of the app (called “Wazers”), as well as cities and citizens collaborate to improve their community and answer the question “What’s happening on our roads right now, and where?”

The program promotes more efficient traffic monitoring by sharing crowdsourced incident reports from Waze drivers. Established as a two-way data share, Waze receives partner input such as feeds from road sensors, adds publicly available incident and road closure reports from the Waze traffic platform and returns one of the most succinct, thorough overviews of current road conditions today.

“We are very excited to partner with Waze to allow emergency call center personnel to quickly see and locate traffic events within their response area,” said Chad Richey, PULSE Product Manager for The Genesis Group. “With the Waze partnership, our customers will now have the ability to historically view traffic congestion and road closures an emergency responder may have encountered along their route. This brings a completely unique tool to the public safety industry with the entire design behind this partnership intended to decrease response times for emergency personnel and increase public trust, Richey said.”

The Genesis PULSE software is a decision-support and situational awareness tool for emergency call centers and optimizes response times, helping first responders meet and exceed established standards, cut costs, and most importantly, save lives and property.

“We are inspired by the way the Genesis team is making it possible to decipher and channel the data from our Waze platform with the goal to reduce emergency response times and save people’s lives,” said Paige Fitzgerald, Connected Citizens Program Manager at Waze. “We value this partnership and believe the Genesis PULSE product will help drive our mission to enable and empower communities in the same way we do with our drivers.”

Deep technical knowledge is not required to be selected as a partner of the Connected Citizens Program. It is critical that prospective partners prove their dedication to citizen engagement and commit to use Waze data to improve city efficiency. Partners are also expected to measure and share their findings with other municipal organizations, developing case studies that serve as keys to a global set of improvements which can be made for collective mobility.