We’re excited to give you some updates on our 2021 annual plan. Back in February, we shared our plan for the first half of the year, and we’re here to report back on our progress and share our plans for the rest of the year.
In the first six months of 2021, we welcomed five new companies as annual corporate supporters: Depop, Discord, Eventbrite, Robinhood, and TikTok. It’s been wonderful to welcome members from these companies to our community events and working groups. Companies like these, along with our founding corporate supporters, are what make our programming possible; we are so grateful for their steadfast support.
We also onboarded members from three companies through a generous grant from Omidyar Network: Outschool, Somewhere Good, and Fiveable. These teams are working to make the world and the internet a fairer and better place, and we’ve loved working alongside them to support their goals.
In April, we hired Kaofeng Lee as our Director of Organizational Development. If you’ve been in touch with TSPA over the past few months, you’ve almost certainly heard from or met with Kaofeng; she is incredible to work with, and we are so lucky to have her!
We also launched a whole new TSPA website in April, including our Job Board and our Event Hub. We’ve listed over 200 T&S jobs since then, and have even heard from people who are now working in T&S thanks to a job they found on our Job Board — truly one of the best testimonials the Job Board could receive!
In June, our Curriculum Working Group launched the first installment of the Trust & Safety Curriculum. Along with chapters on Creating and Enforcing Policy and Transparency Reporting, the Curriculum also presents an industry glossary and a guide to common job titles and functions in T&S. The Curriculum is a critical component of the professional development and support that TSPA strives to provide to the field, and we’re pleased to be presenting it at no cost to the reader.
TSPA hosted seven events this half, including members-only wellness workshops hosted by our Wellness & Resilience Working Group, in-depth case study discussions, and a public panel about policy development. We also participated in over a dozen public panels and discussions hosted by governments, NGOs, and companies based across the US and Europe. In these interactions, we explained how online trust and safety really works and represented the complexities professionals face in our field.
We’ve taken preliminary steps towards establishing a research coalition housed within TSF. We’re still in the discussion phase with potential participants and hope to share more updates on this as the year progresses.
As we enter the second half of 2021, we’re focusing on the following goals:
Growing an inclusive organization:
- We’ll be rolling out an individual membership option. This will allow individual practitioners to benefit from membership without relying on an employer’s corporate support of TSPA. We’re committed to ensuring that cost is not a barrier for individual TSPA membership.
- We will continue to onboard corporate supporters, with a focus on bringing in professionals from companies based outside the US and across diverse product sectors and service models.
- Through the generosity of the Omidyar Network, we will continue to seek out members from companies that develop products, services, and tools that equalize access to opportunity or seek to improve human interactions online but have limited financial resources.
Programs and partnerships:
- We’ll be publishing the next set of chapters in our Trust & Safety Curriculum. The Curriculum Working Group is gearing up to start writing Operations and Content Moderation, Laws and Regulation, and T&S and Law Enforcement — and you can volunteer to join them if you’re a TSPA member!
- We are redeveloping our Resource Library to be more accessible. Our Resource Development Working Group is designing and implementing a classification system that will allow readers to easily find what they’re looking for. We’ll be making the Resource Library searchable and adding more audio and video resources, too.
- Our Wellness & Resilience Working Group will publish a guide to wellness for T&S teams; this guide will walk the reader through various considerations in hiring and managing T&S professionals, with ideas on task structure, wellness offerings, tools to reduce exposure to toxic content, and more.
Convening our community:
- We’ll be holding our first in-person member events. We’re taking a careful approach to these events, understanding that the pandemic is still very much with us. We’re hoping to host community networking events in San Francisco, New York, Dublin, and London, but we’re keeping a close eye on local COVID-19 restrictions and are staying flexible with our plans.
- We are beginning to plan our first annual conference in 2022. We’re looking forward to bringing our global community together once it’s safe and equitable to do so. In the meantime, we are partnering with Marketplace Risk to host a track at their Marketplace Risk Management Conference in September; we hope you can join us.
- We will debut a TSPA Slack workspace. We want to make it easy for T&S professionals to get the answers and support they need from each other, especially if we can’t all gather in person, and we’re looking forward to making this space available to our community.
As you can see, we’ve got a lot planned and we look forward to sharing our progress with you, as well as having you along with us during this journey. It’s been an amazing year so far, and we’re looking forward to the next six months of serving this professional community.
