As we move into Q3 of 2024, my team reminded me that it’s time to post our mid-year update for the community – and wow, 2024 is moving fast! This year has been one of remarkable resilience and growth for the trust and safety community, and I am continually inspired by the unwavering commitment each member of our community brings to our shared mission. I want to share a few of the significant milestones we’ve achieved in the past seven months across TSPA and TSF:
Our Membership Manager, Ileah Vazquez, has been busier than ever! Over the past seven months, we’ve welcomed over 400 new members, expanding our network to include professionals from 55 countries. We’ve also gained six new corporate supporters, whose support allows our team to develop and run the year-round programs and initiatives TSPA is known for. It is such a privilege to foster this space for our community to celebrate their successes, navigate shared challenges, and chart a course forward together.
In addition to our membership growing, the first few months of 2024 were filled with exciting opportunities for our community to connect in person. We hosted our first-ever community event in Hyderabad, India, thanks to the efforts of two dedicated community members, Harsha and Marlyn. In March, we had a successful meetup in Austin during SXSW, drawing in a lively crowd of festival goers. In May, we hosted 300 people at our second EMEA Summit in Dublin, Ireland; we successfully trialed roundtable discussions as a new session format, and we’re excited to try it again in Singapore in October. This year’s EMEA Summit theme was the power of collaboration – and our Director of Community Maggie Kerr really embodied that theme, partnering not only with an incredible Programme Committee, but also with airline staff and consulates and visa agents across the region to get our speakers and attendees to Dublin on time!
Our Coffee Chats program continues to thrive. This half, the top locations for chats came from the U.S., Spain, Singapore, and Zimbabwe. We’re excited to see the global nature of this program, and continue to seek hosts outside of the U.S. to support the community globally. An average of 60 participants monthly use this program at least once, many two or three times! (And who’s our newest host? None other than TSPA’s newest board member, Del Harvey!)
“This is an incredibly valuable program. I never knew about it. I scheduled two chats to discuss the recent developments in AI, and my hosts were very insightful. Thank you to TSPA for creating this program.”
Many of you know that TSPA’s Senior Program Manager, Kristy Kosak, manages our Coffee Chats program – but you may not know that she’s also the team member behind the TSPA Job Board! Kristy redesigned the Job Board earlier this year to make it easier to filter by region and to remove expired links more quickly. We’re now posting around 100 new jobs a month!
In January, TSF added a new team member: Maia Levy Daniel! Maia joined the Trust & Safety Foundation as a Senior Program Manager, bringing her extensive tech policy expertise and experience working with civil society organizations and academic centers in the U.S. and Latin America. She currently supports new and existing programming, including TSF’s first-ever roundtable hosted in May (stay tuned for a report to be published soon!), an edited volume about T&S past, present, and future, and the Trust & Safety Research Coalition’s newest research committee: the Global Majority Research Committee (GMRC).
Over the past 6 months, TSF has been working hard to bring together relevant stakeholder groups to discuss pressing T&S issues. We hosted an elections roundtable in May, and another one last week about content moderation, language support, and the use of AI tools. Our next roundtable will be on T&S and human rights. The TSF team continues to build relationships with various members of the T&S ecosystem, including T&S practitioners, academic and industry researchers, civil society members, and content moderators. We’ve also been in conversations with potential partner organizations who will be key to growing the reach of our work and building out new collaborations.
And one final note on all things TSF: our Research and Program Director Amanda Menking completed the very last interview for our History of Trust & Safety project last month! We’re excited to get into the analysis stage and hope to share our findings next year.
Most recently, of course, our entire team hosted TrustCon 2024. We’ll be publishing a full lookback post about TrustCon soon, but I want to congratulate our Events and Communications Manager Kristelyn Berry, in particular, for all of her work coordinating with the conference venue and vendors to ensure that our attendees had a seamlessly enjoyable week. I also want to acknowledge our Director of Organizational Development, Kaofeng Lee, for taking point on all of this year’s sponsorships – sponsor coordination is a LOT of work, and we owe Kaofeng a lot of gratitude for making this year’s event possible!
Though this has been a busy year for our organization and T&S in general, we are thrilled to bring more events, conferences, and opportunities for you to get involved for the rest of 2024! Shameless plug—join us at the APAC Summit in Singapore on 7 October!
If you’ve read this far, consider yourself a real TSPA and TSF superfan. Thank you for being such an integral piece of our journey. I can’t wait to see what we’ll build together next.
All my gratitude,
Charlotte Willner
