The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI) brings stakeholders in the internet industry together to ensure an enjoyable online experience for children and families, whether at home or on their mobile handset. Few people would not consider themselves a stakeholder in this issue in some way or another: internet companies, educators, government officers and politicians, law-enforcement officials, charities and, of course, parents and children.
FOSI creates a unique and international space for open discussion amongst these stakeholders, exploring the challenge of how to keep children away from images, words and sites that their parents do not want them to see and from behaving in ways that expose them to unnecessary dangers, without restricting wider online freedom.
There are many innovative filtering solutions on the market, and one aspect of the organization’s work is to support such technological approaches. However, filters are only a partial solution. The Institute advocates parental involvement and empowerment, promoting a more balanced approach where families, educators, children and their peers recognize their shared responsibility. This is increasingly the case as ever-younger children have access to their own mobile devices and use them away from adult supervision. A younger teenager or child needs to understand that anything that happens offline can also happen online and that they can be in danger. It should be instinctive for a child to share with an older person that there was something on their screen that made them feel uncomfortable, or something that they didn’t like when in a chatroom situation.
FOSI and its members believe that comprehensive industry self-regulation, coupled with reasonable government oversight and support, creates an ideal environment in which thought leaders can exchange information, develop ideas and refine solutions. Through its events, public policy and education activities, FOSI continues to address the challenge of family online safety.
Some specific examples of our work are sketched below.
The State of the Online Safety Report
This annual report provides a snapshot of online safety thinking and practice across government, industry and non-profit sectors in many parts of the world. The areas we look at include:
- Existing and pending legislation and regulatory regimes
- The safety implications of existing and emerging technology
- Education initiatives
The State of Online Safety report is presented at FOSIs Annual Conference and Exhibition each November or December. Contributions are always welcome.
Technology-based activities
The Institute incorporates the work and mission of ICRA, the internet’s leading content labelling system.
Through a variety of services, FOSI collects, organizes and publishes data that describes online content using the ICRA vocabulary. This is a set of descriptors that reflects parental concerns around the world and that can be applied to all digital content in a manner that, as far as possible, is neutral and objective. The data is therefore interoperable between different cultures and opinions. The vocabulary is reviewed regularly, so that it remains relevant to a broad audience.
The ICRA data is at the heart of FOSI’s wider efforts to make trusted and verifiable metadata an integral part of the Web. Furthermore, by participating in the development of new technological standards, notably at the World Wide Web Consortium, FOSI is able to ensure that safety concerns are addressed.
The Projects page includes details of all past and current technological activities, including:
- Chairing the W3C Protocol for Web Description Resources (POWDER) Working Group
- The QUATRO Plus Project: making trustmarks machine readable and machine-verifiable
- W3C Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, particularly focusing on the mobileOK trustmark
- W3C Social Web Incubator Group
The Online Safety Education Research Project – US
As mentioned above, FOSI and many experts in this field, believe that in addition to filtering technology, we need more online safety education to reach parents and children alike. What is also acknowledged is that there is a wide range of approaches, messages, curricula and safety tips available, with little or no evaluation of their effectiveness or relevance in our Web 2.0 world. This project, the first of its kind to be undertaken by the Family Online Safety Institute, will do a stock-take of what currently exists, what impact these programmes and messages actually have, and synthesize the very best messages and approaches and present these at our next annual conference.
With the onset of convergence and the explosion of new types of digital content devices and new meeting places online, such as social-networking-sites, the need for a new kind of approach to the issue of online safety is essential.
This project will address the growing concerns of parents and teachers alike about the harmful content and harmful contact that children are increasingly exposed to online. It is our hope that with a combination of tools and rules, children will be both better protected and made more aware of the many potential dangers on the internet.
Links
A good place to start looking for up to date information is the diary, but there are also dedicated pages concerning FOSI’s projects and forthcoming events.
A full colour leaflet summarizing FOSI’s mission is also available (PDF format, 3MB, formatted for US-Letter size).