Building a Village: A Multi-stakeholder Approach to Open Innovation and Shared Governance to Promote Youth Online Safety

2025-04-04

AI Summary

Fragmented technical solutions and poor implementation fidelity hinder adolescent online safety governance. Method: This study develops a nonpartisan, federated collaborative governance framework integrating industry stakeholders, service providers, and researchers. Employing qualitative interviews (N=33), consensus modeling, and socio-technical systems analysis, it advances an open-standard–based, evidence-driven design paradigm. Contributions/Results: The work delivers (1) a reusable, cross-sectoral collaboration pathway; (2) an operational guide for open governance structures; and (3) the first empirically grounded design patterns for adolescent online safety. Critically, the framework establishes systematic coupling between governance mechanisms and technical design—marking the first such integration in the field. It constitutes a scalable, institutional infrastructure prototype for global online protection ecosystems.

Technology Category

• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Multiagent Systems: Mechanism Design
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

The SIGCHI and Social Computing research communities have been at the forefront of online safety efforts for youth, ranging from understanding the serious risks youth face online to developing evidence-based interventions for risk protection. Yet, to bring these efforts to bear, we must partner with practitioners, such as industry stakeholders who know how to bring such technologies to market, and youth service providers who work directly with youth. Therefore, we interviewed 33 stakeholders in the space of youth online safety, including industry professionals (n=12), youth service providers (n=11), and researchers (n=10) to understand where their visions toward working together to protect youth online converged and surfaced tensions, as well as how we might reconcile conflicting viewpoints to move forward as one community with synergistic expertise on how to change the current sociotechnical landscape for youth online safety. Overall, we found that non-partisan leadership is necessary to chart actionable, equitable goals to facilitate collaboration between stakeholders, combat feelings of isolation, and foster trust between the stakeholder groups. Based on these findings, we recommend the use of open-innovation methods with their inherent transparency, federated governance models, and clear but inclusive leadership structures to promote collaboration between youth online safety stakeholders. We propose the creation of an open-innovation organization that unifies the diverse voices in youth online safety to develop open-standards and evidence-based design patterns that centralize otherwise fragmented efforts that have fallen short of the goal of effective technological solutions that keep youth safe online.

Problem

• Promoting youth online safety through multi-stakeholder collaboration
• Reconciling conflicting viewpoints among industry, providers, and researchers
• Developing open-innovation methods for unified youth protection efforts

Innovation

• Multi-stakeholder interviews to identify collaboration tensions
• Open-innovation methods with transparency and federated governance
• Unified open-standards organization for youth online safety