This writeup concerns the incident that occured several days ago involving a member of E2 experiencing a medical emergency.  I am going to be extremely careful in what I say and how I say it here because I do not fully understand what went on in response to this emergency, or what is considered appropriate on E2 for discussing such things.

While, as far as I am aware, the involved noders quickly and inventively manged to alert the correct police force to the emergency and helped contain a potentially dangerous situation, it seems that it could have gone smoother and been accomplished more quickly.  (NOTE: This is not a snipe at those involved.  I think you all did a marvelous job, but there are ways it could have been improved.)  Since, apparently, similar situations occured previous to this incident, I think that we should not rule out the possibility that such incidents involving any E2 user might happen again.  I am therefore suggesting for your consideration the possibility of instituting some sort of standard procedure, which E2 as a community creates, for dealing with future emergency situations.

Despite my relative ignorance both with E2 and Internet technology, it seems to me that there were several key problems that involved noders ran into consistently:

1) Involved noders had different opinions on what was appropriate and what might be dangerous to say in the catbox.  This led to a lot of argument which both wasted time and cluttered the catbox, making it difficult for others to accomplish other important tasks.  We should collectively decide on what topics should be publicly discussed and what should be avoided during an emergency.  This prevents potentially damaging information from being revealed and allows everyone to focus on more important things.

2) The catbox is insufficient for keeping all involved parties informed in an emergency.  Conversations overlap, information is missed, updates are lost in the crowd, and just-arriving noders interrupt important discussions to ask what is going on.  While a solution to this is far beyond my technical knowledge, the following may be workable: we keep an "emergency page" either supported by E2 or some other platform where people can post updates and explanations.  Late arrivals would be immediately directed to this page, where they could learn about the situation without disrupting important correspondence.  In addition, this prevents updates from getting lost amid the chatter.

3) If there was a single, coherent strategy, I couldn't follow it by looking at the catbox archives.  Many people were trying things at once, and it did work, but there was a significant amount of understandable confusion throughout.  This could possibly be prevented in the future by creating some sort of standard procedure for locating the person in question and notifying the relevant police forces.  By having one or more set strategies, I think we may be able to respond to future situations faster and more effectively than this time.

This writeup is meant to encourage discussion on what I think is an important topic that deserves our attention.  If it is for any reason inappropriate or unnecessary, message me and I'll remove it.

Once again, I am not trying to accuse anyone involved of doing anything wrong.  I think everyone did an excellent job, but if we decide to be the kind of community that's active in helping each other out of dangerous situations, then we better try to learn from what we did so we can provide faster, more effective help next time.

If you disagree, please message me or add your own writeup instead of just downvoting!  I'm trying to start a discussion, not get rep for myself.

I'd like to thank everyone for their input. It seems like my suggestion isn't practical; in any case, I'm glad people at least considered it and told me why it wouldn't work.