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

TL;DR

This paper investigates how open innovation and shared governance can unite diverse stakeholders in youth online safety. Through 33 semi-structured interviews with industry professionals, youth service providers, and researchers, complemented by design probes (a Youth Risk Detection Dashboard and a community platform), the authors identify tensions among stakeholder groups and propose a path forward grounded in non-partisan leadership and lightweight, actionable collaboration. The study contributes a practical blueprint for establishing an Open Innovation with Shared Governance in youth online safety, including guidelines for governance, platforms, and steering committees to centralize outputs and open standards. By articulating how to harmonize divergent goals while preserving stakeholder incentives, the work aims to reduce fragmentation and accelerate the development of evidence-based, scalable protections for youth online experiences.

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.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: Session Flow of Design Probes and Community Tasks
• Figure 2: Youth risk detection dashboard showing overall risks and user modification of conversation and message risk flags.
• Figure 3: Mapping stakeholder tensions to identified solutions
• Figure 4: Multistakeholder steering committee framework