As Australia’s youth-driven movement against (cyber)bullying, PROJECT ROCKIT is committed to elevating young people’s voices to those in a direct position to engineer a kinder online world. We believe that genuine and effective youth consultations are a vital ingredient in the creation of an inclusive and safe metaverse. As such, this project is all about centering and valuing young people’s contributions – their experiences, opinions and insights on how we can proactively build a safe, kind and inclusive metaverse.
PROJECT ROCKIT is a member of Meta’s global safety advisory board, having worked with Facebook and Instagram for over a decade, delivering high impact cybersafety education to over 25,000 Australian students. Meta is being proactive about engaging young people from the outset and not as an afterthought, and our team at PROJECT ROCKIT are proud to be undertaking the first Australian youth consultation about the metaverse.
PROJECT ROCKIT will lead a series of youth consultations to understand young people’s perspectives about what to consider when building the metaverse and spark the foundations for what will be needed to build for the future of youth-centric online social communities.
Commencing Friday 8 April through to July 2022, PROJECT ROCKIT will convene 35 youth leaders in a series of four online roundtables. The program has been developed in consultation with youth advisors nominated by community partners from leading organisations in youth, mental health, and technology from across Australia including headspace, ReachOut, Centre for Multicultural Youth (CMY), UNICEF, Minus18, Orygen and Indigital. We are grateful to these organisations for their collaboration, vision and insight.
PROJECT ROCKIT understands that there are many different sub-cohorts that make up our youth and as part of this project we want to make sure that we all have a voice. This is why we will have representation from people across these communities. These include Indigenous Australians, LGBTQIA+ folk, people with a lived experience, people with disabilities, people with neurodiversity, and more.
Through the consultation, PROJECT ROCKIT aims to understand young peoples’ new and unique perspectives about what the metaverse can offer young people; make informed decisions about how we can foster young people’s digital literacy and embed safety and wellbeing into emerging metaverse technologies; and strengthen community collaboration in the youth sector to inform industry technology development.