Cyber Life; Our Chance for a Safer Life ?
The virtual environment is offering us today a golden opportunity for achievement. With its new tools, channels and technologies, life on line is not a mere reflection of what we do anymore. It is becoming more and more our gateway to creativity, new thoughts, actions and unprecedented ambitions. If this is the case, and if our on line life is offering us a "second chance" to assert ourselves and to achieve what we might or might not have been capable of in real life, can we safeguard this new "virtual territory" from our own abuses and mishandling?
As a member of the Cyber Peace Initiative team in Egypt, i would like to share with you what we have been trying to do to achieve this objective.
The Cyber Peace Team in Egypt set up to work on this objective in September 2007. Our Initiative, the Cyber Peace Program, was launched as a civil society effort under The Suzanne Mubarak Women's International Peace Movement. The program is an effort by youth and for youth. To ensure its success, we have allied ourselves with major international organizations active in the field, with the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Egypt and with key private sector companies.
Track 6 of our Initiative that you could read on www.cyberpeaceinitiative.org aims at creating a youth interent safety focus group. The youth group will work to increase awareness about internet safety and the huge potential of ICT. The groups aims at offering kids and youth the chance to identify by themselves harmful content and decide on the best way to deal with that through a participatory approach.
The focus group will serve the community and will have to forge strong relations with it. Therefore, networking and survey research would have to be initial objectives of our work. We will need to to consider the paucity of Internet awareness among the majority of the parent population and that youth are the masters of the internet, with parents -unfortunately- lagging behind in both expertise and exposure in most cases.
We have started our first training for the youth focus group last week (photos attached)
But part of our plan too is to establish a parents focus group as well to support the youth team and act as ambassadors in different communities in Egypt and regionally. The first meeting of our parents group was held on the 6th of February.
We hope to work not only on the local level, but also regionally and internationally. Share with us your thoughts about our plans and how best to activate the group. We welcome new suggestions and creative ideas.
with my best wishes for a Safer Internet Day
Nevine Tewfik - The Cyber Peace Team
