Briefing

It's an exciting stage in the development of GoSafer.Online CIC. With a pilot project underway in Hounslow, we're establishing partnerships with community organisations. From now on, finding volunteers will be essential to our success, so this is a priority. We need to make sure that our volunteers enjoy working with us, and that we treat them properly, so there's a lot of work to support that.

We're shortly going to look for funding for the next pilot project. Each project helps us to improve our management and reporting. Once we've executed our second pilot project we may be ready to pitch for more transformational funding for work on a bigger scale.

Questions about our political views won’t normally come up, as there is nothing political about helping people to stay safe and healthy online. Our Board has no political position. Nobody is interested in what we think about politics so it would be a waste of time developing one.

We deeply appreciate volunteers giving their time freely. We are certain that in a conversation about “How Things Should Be Done”, many of our volunteers would have different ideas to ours. We have no intention of causing division or hurt feelings among our volunteers by expecting them to sign up to any political view.

The selections made for our website could sometimes raise questions about whether the Company has an undeclared political position. We want to include news stories on our site to keep it fresh and relevant, but we are not a news site.

So for example, “Country A has launched a cyber-attack on Country B” tells our users nothing useful and doesn’t belong. Another story, “Country A has unofficially launched a cyber attack on Android users in the United Kingdom, and users need to do xyz” should be included, whether or not some of us have a degree of sympathy with Country A.

We do want to influence people’s attitude towards technology. This may be a tricky area, as we want to persuade the public that big technology companies generally put profit ahead of any worries about the effects of their products on users.

Some may think this makes us anti-capitalist, but as an organisation we are neither pro- nor anti-capitalist, regardless of our individual views. It’s too early to know whether political neutrality will be a significant issue for us. For now, we’ll put a statement on the “About...” page of our site. If necessary, we can add a “controversial” tag for content in addition to the existing “offensive”, “drug use”, and other tags.

I had the idea of starting GoSafer.Online while sitting on the Parents Council at my son's school. Because of my I.T. background, the Safeguarding Lead asked me to help with a PSHE (Personal, Social, Health, and Economic) education curriculum she was developing. I was shocked to hear some of the issues teachers and children face.

There was an obvious need for parents and children to learn about the online world, but it seems hard to break into such a complex subject, and there are lots of words that are unknown to "normal" people.

I decided to form a "community interest company" in 2019. It's a good choice for someone with a business background because charity law is complex, while a CIC non-profit has rules more like a normal company than a charity. I asked a friend, Peter Lewis, to join as chairman because I'd sat with him on a committee and noticed his strong commitment to running organisations properly.

I wanted a "two-pronged" approach, paralleling the website with work in the community. For this we needed a website. One of the web site frameworks (Wix, etc.) would be natural choice for building the site, but as an IT professional, that would be a bit less fun than being strapped into a straight jacket. I built it from the ground up. Covid 19 arrived shortly afterward, which stopped the community work, but gave me time to build in as much quality as I could.

The web site is no more "complete" than any other site in the world, but it's mature. I've also made some architectural changes to keep monthly costs down. We have proven processes for managing changes, testing and releases.

We've recently begun recruiting volunteers, starting with another board director and a "compliance adviser" who can help us to stay on the right side of the regulations. Our business model depends on finding volunteers. We've had success recruiting university students as online content reviewers, and we're about to intensify our search for volunteers in the field.