Youth-Driven Social Media Design: Safe, Inclusive, and Publicly-Owned Social Media

Expected Impact:

The developed solutions should demonstrate their potential in concrete terms through the execution of a first roll-out stage during the project life-cycle, with a strong uptake strategy guiding their future adoption after the end of the project. The sustainability of the results and their continued benefits to users is a key ambition of this call for proposals.

The project is furthermore expected to make a strong impact for the wider ecosystem of European decentralised social media. The insights gained on youth needs and desires on mental-health and inclusivity friendly social media should benefit the wider community of stakeholders in this space, and wherever possible developed technology should contribute to the software stacks of the ActivityPub and ATProtocol communities.

Finally, the project should generate insights on the opportunities and challenges for decentralised social media as a genuine and widely used alternative to non-decentralised services, and contribute to the understanding of the key factors that would allow EU tech start-ups in the space to scale and succeed. Through the specific focus on youth audiences, the project may also provide use cases for how an alternative business and platform development model may contribute to maximising benefits for youth from the use of digital tools whilst also reducing risks, providing insights for societal debates on youth social media usage.

Objective:

This call for proposal seeks to fund a project that achieves the following general objective:

Trimmed here, the full scope, expected outcomes and award criteria are on the official topic page ↗.