There are wildfire checklists for your house. Good ones. Use them. CIVIC is the layer underneath — the plan, the people, and the record on every phone in town. So when the smoke comes up over the ridge, no one is left waiting in the dark.
GNOSIS means knowledge. CIVIC is built on two things every checklist forgets: prevention that lives where you live, and accountability that lasts after the smoke clears.
of Newfoundland and Labrador municipalities have an emergency plan.
Auditor General · April 2026 · the gap CIVIC closes
How CIVIC is different
Plenty of tools will tell you to clear your gutters. Fewer will tell your town who hasn’t checked in. None of them stay with you, and your council, after the smoke clears. CIVIC is built to do all three.
One tap from every phone: I’m safe, I need help, or I’m not home. Your town’s coordinator watches the dots fill in across the map. The empty dots are where help goes first.
Your evacuation route, your muster point, your medications, your animals — written straight onto the phone. Open it with zero bars; everything is still there. Built for the half of the coast where the signal vanishes on a calm Tuesday afternoon.
Quietly matches the people who said they could help with the people who said they’d need it — by lane, by postal code, by who actually lives close enough to walk over. When the order comes, no one is waiting for a stranger.
Horses. Cattle. The barn full of cats. CIVIC matches households with animals to nearby households with trailers and acres. Set the relationship before fire season — not during it.
Every decision your municipality makes during an emergency — the order to evacuate, the call to open the warming centre, the moment the road was closed — recorded with the time, the person, and the reason. So next year’s fire learns from last year’s.
Alerts go out by app, but also by text and a voice phone call to whoever in your house needs them. Grandma’s flip phone gets reached. The landline rings. Nobody is left out because of their tech.
See how many households in your community have signed up. Use the number to ask your council to formally adopt CIVIC. The more households, the louder the ask.
Seven things no checklist will do for your community. We’re building every one of them — with the first Newfoundland and Labrador households on now to shape what ships.
Why this exists, in one number
The other ninety-one percent — most of the towns we live in — will go into the next fire season, the next storm, the next evacuation with nothing on paper. No call list. No mutual-aid arrangement. No record, after the fact, of who decided what when the smoke rolled in.
Summer 2026 is weeks away. We are not waiting for the next one.
Source · Office of the Auditor General of Newfoundland and Labrador · April 2026
Summer 2025 · what we already lived through
Last summer, communities across this province lived with smoke, evacuation alerts, and the question of where to go next. The plan that mattered was the one already on the wall — and most towns did not have one. The smoke is not a memory. It is a forecast.
We are building this so Newfoundland and Labrador never has to live through last summer’s fear again.
Last summer · the information vacuum
Last summer, the way most of us found out our road was in an evacuation zone was a neighbour's Facebook post. The way we learned a notice had changed was a screenshot in a community group. The way we knew the wind had turned was someone calling down the bay.
Officials held a news conference about once a day. Between them, the information moved on word of mouth and a Facebook page that was never built for emergencies. People drove home from work not knowing if their own house was inside the line.
Residents shouldn’t have to wait for the next news conference, scroll three community groups, or hope a cousin saw the update before they did.
CIVIC by GNOSIS is designed to put the evacuation zones, the notices, and the changes on the phone of every household they apply to — the moment they go live, on the road they live on. No press lag. No Facebook lottery. No “did you hear?”
It’s not just fire
Two decades of weather have already taught us what to expect. The next emergency in your community might not look like the one on the phone below.
CIVIC isn’t a wildfire app. It’s the prevention, communications, and risk-record layer that holds when the next thing arrives — whatever the next thing turns out to be. The fire-season demo below is one example. The infrastructure underneath is for all of them.
For the woman at the end of the road
This is Madeline’s phone. Madeline Power is eighty-two. She lives alone on the west side of Random Island, where the gravel runs out and the cell signal vanishes by the cove. She heats with a wood stove and a propane tank out by the shed. Her son Cliff is in Fort McMurray. Her daughter Ella is in St. John’s with kids of her own.
When the smoke comes, here is what changes. One tap on her phone tells the neighbour she’s safe. If she doesn’t tap, the neighbour comes up the lane. If the neighbour can’t get up the lane, the Emergency Operations Centre knows her by name, by address, by what she needs — the oxygen, the mobility, the propane tank that shouldn’t be near a fire. And in the same heartbeat, Ella gets a notification in St. John’s and Cliff gets one in Fort McMurray. The one thing they could never get from a thousand kilometres away — the knowing that their mother is okay — is now in their pocket.
Tap through her phone. Watch what CIVIC will know about Madeline — so the people who love her, and the people who serve her town, will know too.
Status
Active alert, one-tap “I’m Safe”, the daily buddy check, evacuation centres open tonight.
Map
Fire perimeter, evacuation route, muster points — cached on your phone, no signal needed.
Plan
Madeline’s offline household plan. Heat, water, meds, mobility, the cat, documents, go-bag, shutoff valves — and the town plan in plain English.
Family
Group safety check. Ella in St. John’s, Cliff in Fort Mac. One tap pings them both, their replies show up here. So nobody’s waiting in the dark.
Me
Madeline’s risk record. So when decisions get made, she’s not invisible.
How offline works · because half the coast already has no service
You don’t need a wildfire to lose signal in Newfoundland and Labrador. Heart’s Delight, Bay d’Espoir, half the south coast, much of the Big Land — there are coves and ridges in this province where the bars vanish on a calm Tuesday afternoon. Add a serious fire on top — power cuts, backhaul burns, the tower folds — and even towns with normally full coverage go dark. CIVIC is built for both. Here’s how it’s possible.
Tap each to expand · three things to know
Why the map can be trusted · because last summer’s couldn’t
Last summer, the maps were the breaking point. Government dashboards wouldn’t load on rural data. Two agencies showed different fire perimeters. Facebook screenshots from three days ago got passed around as “current.” People in central Newfoundland sat in their kitchens not sure if their road was inside the evacuation zone or not. CIVIC’s map is built to answer the four questions last year’s couldn’t.
Tap each to expand · four questions answered
Live preview · Coming to Newfoundland and Labrador towns 2026
Newfoundland & Labrador
Wildfire Alert · Evac standby
Active fire 8 km northwest. Wind shifting south at 25 km/h. Mayor has issued evacuation standby for Britannia Road and the north-west cabins. Pack a bag.
Posted 22 min ago
Ella & Cliff notified. Your family knows you got the alert.
Your check-in buddy
DailyChecked in 2 h ago
One tap a day · auto when you walk
Annie Tucker · across the cove
Hasn’t checked in today
Prevention · Guidance · Risk Record
Three things to expect from CIVIC — before the next one hits.
Prevention
A council clerk can put together a province-ready emergency plan in a single sitting — not a six-month consultant engagement. Hazards. Contacts. Mutual aid. The households that need looking after first. Done.
Guidance
When something happens, the plan goes live. Mayor, fire chief, public works, RCMP — on the same page on their phones. Decisions captured as they're made. Residents reached on the channels they actually use.
Risk record
By morning, there is a defensible record of who knew what, when, and what was done about it. For council. For the press. For the Auditor General. And — when it matters most — for the family asking why.
For the people, by the people
The biggest gap in any emergency response is not the binder at town hall. It is the door no one knew to knock on. CIVIC by GNOSIS closes that gap by putting the lightest, plainest tool in the hands of every household — free, on iPhone, iPad, Android, or any web browser, when your municipality comes online.
Register the family who would need help first — an older parent, someone on oxygen, a young child, a neighbour who lives alone. So the people responding know whose door to knock on, and in what order.
Alerts shouldn't go off when the warning is on the other side of the bay. Hyperlocal by postal code. Quiet when it can be. Loud when it has to be.
When your municipality goes online with CIVIC by GNOSIS, the plan is yours to read. No binder on a shelf at town hall. On your phone, in language a fourteen-year-old can follow.
No smartphone? You are not left out.
Around the bay, plenty of people don't carry a smartphone. That is fine. CIVIC by GNOSIS works on iPhone, iPad, Android, or any web browser — just sign in. And when your community comes online, the same alerts CIVIC sends to phones will go out by text message and voice phone call too, so the warning reaches your house however you stay reachable — your landline, your basic cell, or a neighbour's phone listed for you.
Why it has to be us
It assumes a signal. It assumes a sidewalk. It assumes you live within shouting distance of a hospital. We don’t.
We live at the end of a road that the grader hasn’t been down since November. Half the houses on the lane heat with a wood stove. The boreal forest comes right up to the back fence. The cell tower is a half-hour drive away. A tool for this place has to start from this place.
Offline-first because we have to be. Plain English because the binder on the shelf wasn’t. Free because the people who live here should not have to pay to be looked after.
Two halves, one platform
For the council
Plan builder, live operations, decision capture. Built for the clerk and the council — not the consultant. Council-ready in a single sitting.
For you
A free app on your phone. Register your household. Get hyperlocal alerts. Read your town's plan. Mark “I'm okay” — or “I need help.”
Same engine. Same record. So when the smoke comes, you're both reading from the same page.
Sovereignty
CIVIC is operated by a Newfoundland and Labrador company. Your household details, your town's plan, and every decision the council makes are visible only to you and your community's verified coordinator. Not sold to third parties. (Pilot infrastructure may include U.S. regions; Canadian-region hosting is on the roadmap before general availability — see our privacy policy.)
Register your household
The first households on will shape what CIVIC does on your road. Your postal code, your weather, your way of life — CIVIC gets built around real households like yours, before fire season. Sign on now and you'll be the first when CIVIC goes live in your community.
Run by a Newfoundland and Labrador company. Not sold to third parties.
CIVIC is being built for fire season 2026. The first households are signing on now; while CIVIC is in active development, it is not yet a live emergency-alert service — for an active emergency, always follow your municipality’s official channels.
For ministers, mayors, and clerks
Write to us directly. We will send the institutional brief by close of business and arrange a twenty-minute walk-through with your team — in person in St. John's, or by phone, whichever suits.
info@gnosisethical.comGNOSIS Ethical Intelligence is built in Atlantic Canada — for the people, the councils, and the communities who live with the weather we live with.
