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Journal

Notes on getting everybody home.

Writing on pilgrim safety, crowd behaviour, heat physiology and group logistics. No invented statistics: where a number appears, its source and year are in the text so you can check it.

Latest · Product

What We Will Not Build

A location product used during worship needs limits stated in advance, in public, before there is commercial pressure to cross them.

· 6 min read

Field Notes

Umrah Is Not a Smaller Hajj

Year-round, smaller groups, no fixed schedule, and a completely different risk profile. Why operators should not simply scale their Hajj plan down.

· 7 min read

Product

Designing for a Wearer Who Cannot Read the Interface

When your user may not share a language with your product, the correct amount of interface is none. What that constraint forces you to get right instead.

· 7 min read

Product

Is a Wearable Permissible in Ihram? How We Designed Around the Question

The first question every operator asks. We are not a religious authority, but we did design the hardware so the ruling is as straightforward as possible.

· 6 min read

Operators

What a Hajj Operator Is Actually Accountable For

Group safety is usually discussed as a duty of care. For an operator it is also a licence condition, a commercial asset and a documentation problem.

· 8 min read

Field Notes

The First Two Minutes of a Separation Decide Everything

A pilgrim out of contact for two minutes is nearby. The same pilgrim at the evening headcount is a search across a city of two million. The variable is when you found out.

· 8 min read

Health

Heat Illness at Hajj: The Warning Window Nobody Is Watching

Heat exhaustion is not sudden. It escalates through a stage where the pilgrim is still walking and still talking, and that stage is where intervention works.

· 10 min read

Field Notes

Why Phones Fail During Hajj, and What That Means for Group Safety

Every phone-based safety plan rests on four assumptions. Hajj breaks all four at once, and it breaks them hardest for the pilgrims least able to cope.

· 9 min read