Safeguarding 2.0

FutureGov has joined forces with the Local Government Information Unit (LGIU) to lead a project team that will find ways for social technology to contribute to keeping children safe. Others in the core project team include Think Public, Headshift and Barnardos. You can see how the project is progressing here and we encourage you to leave comments and ideas and generally get involved.

I am so happy to see this initiative and so grateful to Euan for flagging it up to me today! We talked about kids safety online yesterday really as a follow up to my discussions with attendees of Barcamp UAE, GVers and close friends (many of whom see the ‘whole social media thing’ through lenses of healthy scepticism – something I might find difficult to do sometimes). I find it really fascinating to see a new forum for discussions about actual organizations and projects working towards kids safety, and looking at way technology can improve our kid’s safety – online, off-line but also on the organizational level. Safeguarding 2.0 board member, Johnnie Moore flags up interesting notion of over-complicated procedures, but also generally not seeing clearly due to over-complicated processes. On the level of organized support, it is definitely the case – in many other areas of our life too. Could this modern tradition of bureaucracy contribute to our naive sense of security, but also the fact we turn a blind eye on many obvious issues – like lack of healthy relationships between family members, for instance? I would like to learn more about how child protection works in practice to find the answer to my own, slightly different question – why do we underestimate our children so much when we try to restrict their access to new technologies?