This week, we received official notification that our proposal was not successful. There were over 230 proposals to be considered, and I believe ours was a strong candidate, but these things don’t always go your way.

While we are a little disappointed, the idea itself is not dead, and we are starting to think about how we can get some funding elsewhere to conduct the study.

I’ll keep this blog up to date once we have decided on our next move.

On a separate note, I have other ideas for research, and I’d like to keep those published here as a kind of register and reminder to help me move ahead with them. Keep a eye on this blog for further information.

I wanted to expand upon our thoughts on the research question for our proposal at the Stanford Internet Observation Center.

To recap, the research question is:

What key factors constrain the development of online safety skills in the Caribbean? Does uneven technology adoption in the Caribbean affect the vulnerability to online harms, what role does early education have in mitigating them, and do current multistakeholder collaboration initiatives have a significant effect?

Of course, we know that that is not strictly one question. However, it is a central question with three sub-questions directly related to the central question.

So when we’re asking what the key factors constrain the development of online safety skills are, we need to consider the context in the Caribbean, which is often quite different from the context we find in countries and regions like the USA, UK, or Europe and in doing so, we needed to think about the region’s specifics. One of the first things that came up during our brainstorming and our previous research is just how fractured the development of technology adoption is throughout the various islands and countries that make up the Caribbean. Some are way ahead of the curve, and others still need work done to get up-to-speed, as it were.

That implies that any initiative that wishes to develop internet adoption, use, cybersecurity capacity-building, or other digital tool-based systems needs to understand that we have essentially a 100 m race being run by many countries, each starting at a different starting point. Some starting at 80 m while others starting at -20 m!

In subsequent sessions, whilst thinking about this research, we looked at the region’s education system and curriculum(s). We tried to get a quick overview of what they were doing with respect to Online Safety. I’ll leave our initial conclusions to the results of the desk research’s first and second passes; however, it suffices to say that it was a mixed bag. But, in our view, it is primordial to investigate further to try to see the links (or not) between the education systems and how people comport themselves on the Internet. Is there a relation? Is it anecdotal? Does it pass statistical scrutiny? These are all the lines of investigation and sub-sub questions we hope to answer in the research. There are and will be other questions developed throughout the research.

Lastly, the third part of the sub-question refers to some of the initiatives we have seen in the Caribbean to help capacity-build knowledge about online safety on the internet. The question is, what was done? Was it effective? How much of the population was targeted, included and trained? Since we know of some of these projects and some that have subsequently halted, we wanted to get a better understanding of their lasting legacy. Did they change anything, and if so, did the effects last?

Virtually the last thing we did was name our proposal. The title we landed on is: “The Online Safety Digital Divide: Exploring Constraints in Online Safety Skills Development in the Caribbean”.

Following on from the announcement we made relating to the research proposal, the next bit of news is that we have submitted our final proposal.🙌🥳

Proposals of this type are actually more challenging to write than you think. They often come with constraints, and this one was no exception. We had only two pages of plain text in a traditional font like Times New Roman, at size 12. That turns out to be around 800 or so words. Not a lot to express your research in detail. So, it requires a decent amount of restraint and a lot of editing!

I said I’d document the process in brief, so this is the aim of this post.

To start the project, we agreed to work together, and the first thing I did was start a new team on Microsoft Teams. This was used as the central document repository, collaboration space for writing and project management. Despite being rudimentary, one of the functionalities in Teams that helps manage a small project like this is the Tasks by Planner tool.s It is a simple Kanban-style tool that allows you to set up and manage the progress of tasks in a project and assign them to individuals or multiple team members. You get a simplified dashboard and —too many for my tastes— reminder emails for tasks nearing completion, late, due, etc.

The completed list of tasks

The next task was to outline a plan with associated tasks (see image above), assign them to people and add dates to ensure we could finish before the deadline. Once this was complete, we wrote a brief outline for the submission and created a requirements document to ensure we complied with all the requirements. This took a little time as we needed to ensure we understood all the aspects required for the submission.

The process after this is quite simple, in that we just had to write the document. Using the co-editing tools of Word through the Teams document library ensured we could optimise our work and work on documents as and when we saw fit. The other indispensable feature was the Track Changes tool that helped us monitor changes, suggestions and comments.

Once we got past each stage, I ticked off the tasks as being done, which is why it looks like I did everything, which is definitely not the case. 🤣

We signed off the final draft last night and pushed the submission button the same evening.

We worked on the proposal together really well, putting a lot of effort into getting it done. Done well and on time. I’m proud of our submission and hope we get selected, as I think the research will be valuable in the region.

I’ll write a little more about the research, our motivation and what we hope to achieve in a few days.

I’m pleased to announce that I have been working with Michele Marius on a call for proposals from the Stanford Internet Observatory. Late last year, the SIO requested proposals titled Expanding Online Trust & Safety Research. Fairly quickly, I proposed to Michele to see if she would be interested in participating as a fellow researcher, which she graciously accepted.

We have written our proposal so far, and it is in its final stages before submission. I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to start a blog dedicated to the research to provide insight into a project like this and serve as an open discussion on the research we’re hoping to do. This will either be a one-post blog —in the case that our proposal is rejected— or it will be an ongoing journal of the work we’re conducting over the coming year.

What is the research question?

What key factors constrain the development of online safety skills in the Caribbean? Does uneven technology adoption in the Caribbean affect the vulnerability to online harms, what role does early education have in mitigating them, and do current multistakeholder collaboration initiatives have a significant effect?

We hope to expand the limited research carried out to date in the Caribbean concerning online safety and cybersecurity education in civil society and business.

We’ve all seen or even been affected by some of the high-profile cybersecurity incidents over the past couple of years, but have we all had formal or informal training or education on how to comport oneself on the internet? That is what we’re hoping to answer and analyse to provide qualitative research and recommendations on enhancing this area in the region.

You can follow along using this URL: https://matthewcowen.org/categories/research/

— Matthew Cowen