Events

Event Description

December 2022 marks the end of the KID_ACTIONS project which is why we are organising the second edition of KID_ACTIONS EU Policy, Research and Practitioners Forum.

The second Forum will take place on 22 November 2022 in a hybrid format. The event aims at accommodating the participation of stakeholders present onsite at the Representation of the European Region Tyrol – South Tyrol – Trentino in Brussels (Belgium) or participating online.

The second edition of the forum will bring together key policy makers, researchers, industry partners and practitioners working on securing a safer and more empowering digital environment for children and young people. The forum will take a dialogic form in which key outcomes, findings and tools of the project will be presented. Participants will have the opportunity to engage in interactive sessions during which they will be able to provide input and share best practices.

We aim to engage with youth representatives, policy makers from the European, national and local level, civil society, education experts, and industry representatives. The Forum serves as the final event of the KID_ACTIONS project and will provide opportunities to a variety of stakeholders to learn about the project’s findings and key outcomes.

Agenda

All timings are in Central European Time (CET).

22 November 2022

9:30-10:00 Arrival and registration 
10:00 -10:20 

Welcome words

  • Gabriele Pedrini, Representation of the European Region Trentino
  • Sara Tonelli, KID_ACTIONS project coordinator, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)
    10:20 -11:00

    Opening presentation by a European helpline: Cyberbullying cases and counselling

    Within the European network of Safer Internet Centres, helplines provide information, advice and assistance to children, young people and parents on how to deal with harmful content, harmful contact (such as grooming) and harmful conduct such as (cyberbullying or sexting). Presentation of the helpline’s work with a specific focus on cyberbullying cases and counselling. 

    Deborah Vassallo, Service Area Leader at BeSmartOnline!/ Maltese helpline

    11:00 -11:30 Coffee break
    11:30 -13:00


    The KID_ACTIONS Digital Education Platform and Educational Toolkit
    Presentation by Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) and Gareth Cort, European Schoolnet (EUN)

    Followed by a panel discussion

    Chair:  Francesca Cesarotti, Amnesty Italy (AMN)

    Panellists:

    • Nika Brdar, Youth representative Slovenia/ MC BIT Črnomelj
    • Valbona Makovci, Youth worker and trainer
    • Enrico Maria Piras, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)
    • Igor Jojkic, Trainer at Youth for Exchange and Understanding (YEU), Serbia
    • Clara Spagnoletta, Teacher, Italy
    • Luca, Student, Italy
    13:00-14:00 Lunch break
    14:00 -15:30


    The KID_ACTIONS policy recommendations
    Presentation by Veronica Donoso, European Schoolnet (EUN)

    Followed by a panel discussion

    Chair: Veronica Donoso, European Schoolnet (EUN)

    Panellists:

    • João Pedro Martins, BIK Youth Ambassador Portugal/KA Lab member
    • Celina Sørensen, Digital Child Safety Manager, LEGO Group
    • Bill Howe, StopHate UK/ KID_ACTIONS Lab member
    • Charalambos Papacharalambous, EVS YEU Cyprus
    • David Ressegotti, School High school Lorenzo Guetti of Tione
    15:30-16:00 Coffee break
    16:00-16:45

    The future of cyberbullying: Lessons learned from the KID_ACTIONS project

    Chair: Alessia Torre, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)

    Panellists:

    • Sara Tonelli, Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)
    • Cinzia Largher, Autonomous Province of Trento (PAT)
    • Rita Marques, Youth for Exchange and Understanding (YEU)
    • Francesca Cesarotti, Amnesty Italy (AMN)
    • Sabrina Vorbau, European Schoolnet (EUN)
    16:45-17:00 Closing and farewell

     

    Speakers

    Information on speakers, panellists and other contributors is being updated.

     

    Keynote speaker

    Deborah Vassalo, Project coordinator at BeSmartOnline! Malta

    Deborah Vassallo graduated in Social Work in the year 2000. She has worked in the addiction field for four years with Aġenzija Sedqa. In 2011, she started working with Aġenzija Appogg as a Hotline/Helpline administrator within the Besmartonline! project. In 2019 she graduated with a Masters in Criminology at the University of Malta and her research focused on Child Sexual Abuse Material and prevention programmes addressing those who view illegal content online. In 2020 she was promoted to the project coordinator of the Maltese Safer Internet Centre.

    Forum contributors and panelists

    Nika Brdar, youth, participant of the KID_ACTIONS co-creation sessions

    Nika comes from a small town in Slovenia called Metlika, she studies sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences in Ljubljana and in her ‘free’ time she works with different local societies and organisations, such as MC BIT Črnomelj, through which she received a chance to participate in the KID_ACTIONS co-creation sessions.

    Francesca Cesarotti, the Senior Head of the Human Rights Education and Training Unit at Amnesty International Italy.

    Francesca is an experienced Senior Manager with a history of work in international organisations and non-profit sector, a human rights educator and facilitator with more than twenty years of experience and – most of all – a Human Rights activist.

    Gareth Cort, an in-house online safety consultant for European Schoolnet (EUN)

    Gareth works on a number of projects as part of the Digital Citizenship team, including the development of the KidActions educational toolkit. He also provides consultancy for the UK Safer Internet Centre, as well as delivering education and awareness sessions to youth and adults on safe, healthy and positive internet use. Gareth holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology and is a qualified primary school teacher.

    Verónica Donoso, PhD in Social Sciences, Research Associate at the Institute for Media Studies (IMS), University of Leuven (KU Leuven)

    Verónica is an independent consultant specialised in digital literacy, online safety and education with more than 18 years of experience on research and policy work and has written several pieces which have served to inform practitioners, researchers, and policymakers both in the EU and worldwide. Through her career Verónica has advised several organisations including the United Nations, the European Commission, The European Advertising Standards Alliance, The World Federation of Advertisers, London School of Economics, University of Leicester and European Schoolnet, among others., Before becoming an independent consultant, Verónica was INHOPE’s Executive Director. INHOPE is the leading global network combatting online Child Sexual Abuse Material.

    Igor Jojkic, freelance consultant in learning and development projects

    Igor Jojkic has extensive experience of more than 15 years in providing and designing technical and mentor support to youth organizations, networks and other CSOs in the field of non-violent communication, social inclusion and human rights protection through various non-formal approaches. Currently, as a freelance consultant supports various civil platforms and business entities in their learning and development projects. Igor holds M.A. in Media and Communication.

    Bill Howe, Stop Hate UK

    Bill has had a long career in the delivery, development and management of specialist advice and support services in a variety of statutory and third sector settings. After joining Stop Hate UK in 2015, Bill has been extensively engaged, both in the delivery of front-line services and, over the last 7  years, has had the privilege of taking a lead role in the development and delivery of a number of projects largely concerned with understanding and responding to manifestations of ‘online hate’.  This has now become the primary focus of Bill’s role within Stop Hate UK.

    Valbona Makovci, NGO "e'du: Dedicated to Education"

    Valbona Makovci holds a BA Degree with first-grade honours in International Relations and Diplomacy from the American College of Thessaloniki and is currently pursuing her Master degree in International Education Management at the University of Ludwigsburg Germany and Helwan University in Cairo. Previously she has worked in the development and civil society sector with a focus on education in numerous organizations and international development agencies operating in Kosovo some of which include the Deutsche Gesellschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ), Save the Children, OSCE Kosovo, USAID and Peer Educators Network (PEN) local NGO which focuses on youth empowerment and social inclusion of marginalized groups in Kosovo. Having quite an extensive experience in international projects and collaboration, she has established the NGO “e’du: Dedicated to Education”; whereas, at the moment she is doing a job-shadowing at the German Federal Institute for Vocational Education and Training (BiBB) as part of her studies.

     

    Rita Marques, Projects and Policy Officer at YEU International

    Rita is a Projects and Policy Officer at YEU International. Originally from Portugal, Rita studied International Relations in Lisbon and did her MSSc in International Security and Law, at the University of Southern Denmark. Driven by a passion for international law, human rights, equality, social inclusion and justice, Rita also researches human rights violations in Africa Rita has been working in YEU since March 2021, and has been involved in the KID_ACTIONS Project since the start of her journey in the organisation.

    Enrico Maria Piras, PhD in Information Systems and Organization, professor at University of Verona, senior researcher at Fondazione Bruno Kessler

    Enrico’s research focuses on the design and evaluation of remote monitoring technologies and applications. His main research interests are related to the organizational and interpersonal adjustment related to the adoption of ICTs in the medical practice, with particular regard to patient-provider interactions. His research spans over a decade resulting in over 60 publications in international journals and conferences.

    He has coordinated the requirement gathering phase in European projects aiming at exploiting AI tools to support prevention 1) for elderly people with mild frailty (WellCo, H2020) 2) negative effects of cyberbullying among teenagers (CREEP, EIT Digital).

    João Martins, data scientist at Jumia

    João holds a Master’s in Informatics Engineering from the University of Coimbra, specialising in Intelligent Systems. He has an active role in online safety, digital literacy discussions, and best practices, being a Better Internet for Kids Youth Ambassador since 2012.  João collaborates at the national and international levels to roll out initiatives and resources that contribute to a better internet. He is an active member of several youth groups in the Internet Governance field like the Youth IGF Movement and EURid Youth Committee and participates in youth programs of CoE, ICANN, and ITU. 

    Charalambos Papacharalambous, youth worker & independent researcher on topics of gender-based violence and femi(ni)cides

    In 2014 after finishing two years of obligatory military service, he started his studies at the University of Cyprus in the department of Educational Sciences. His primary school teacher training focused on the inclusion of children with disabilities, art and self-expression, and on Environmental Sciences. In 2018 after graduating as a primary school teacher, he enrolled in the interdisciplinary program MA in Gender studies at the same department and University. His Master’s thesis investigates media discourses and silences around the first case of serial femi(ni)cides in Cyprus and the community of migrant female workers. Since August 2022, Charalambos is the ESC officer at YEU CYPRUS and the director of the ESC project Cap the Gap which aims to cover the gap of under-representation of marginalized youth in society.

    Alessio Palmero Aprosio, Adjunct professor of Advanced Web Programming at the Department of Cognitive Science, University of Trento

    Alessio works on the text simplification and hate speech recognition. Previously he used to work as a freelance programmer, when he learnt to program in big web projects. After the PhD dissertation, Alessio worked for Machine Linking, an innovative startup in Trento. His research focuses on Semantic Web and Big Data.

    David Ressegotti, humanities teacher, Istituto Superiore Guetti, Tione di Trento

    David works as a teacher since 2012, acquiring experience with students of a broad range of ages, from 11 to 19 years old. During these years, he has often been appointed as the school’s referent for Technological Innovation, Civics, and/or School Orientation. He holds a Master’s in Italianistics and Literary Criticism (University of Trento).

    Celina Sieg Sørensen, Digital Child Safety Manager, LEGO Group

    Celina Sieg Sørensen has spent her entire career working in the intersection between technology and policy with a focus on online safety, rights and wellbeing. In her current role at the LEGO Group her work is to create policies that align with LEGO’s values, business objectives, new legislative requirements and industry best practise. She creates policies that serve to strengthen the LEGO groups position as an industry leader on online safety issues, liberate employees to drive innovation and most importantly keep children playing, safe and well. Her career started at META where she worked on complex issues around user safety, moderation at scale and content policy implementation.

    Sara Tonelli, the head of the Digital Humanities research group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, the scientific coordinator of the KID ACTIONS project

    Sara holds a PhD in Language Sciences from Università Ca’ Foscari in Venice. She has been involved in several national and European projects dealing with historical archives, event and temporal information extraction and political stance detection and, more recently, with social media monitoring and hate speech detection. Her research interests are highly interdisciplinary, trying to apply and adapt advanced text analysis approaches to social sciences and historical investigation.

    Sabrina Vorbau Project Manager, Digital Citizenship Team, European Schoolnet

    Sabrina Vorbau is Project Manager at European Schoolnet and has been a member of its Digital Citizenship Team since 2014. She manages a number of European Commission (EC) funded projects in the area of online safety and media literacy, such as CO:RE – Children Online: Research and Evidence, KID_ACTIONS, and Facts4All – Schools as community hubs against disinformation and the European Film Factory. In addition, Sabrina coordinates the youth activities and annual pan-European Youth Panel as part of the Better Internet for Kids (BIK) project. As part of her work in the Digital Citizenship Team, Sabrina also represents the team in expert meetings and international conferences in the field of children’s rights and internet governance. Prior to joining EUN, she worked at the European Agency for Fundamental Rights in Vienna.

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