SMOYI Playgrounds
Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 by adminFor about 6 months now we have been providing a unique type of web service to the new wave of Internet users. Our children. This is a very fast paced world out here on the Internet. A lot of things can go un noticed and with our children now using the internet for things such as gathering information for school, playing games, talking with friends and so on we have now end up with a playground of a whole new kind only it has no playground attendants or monitors. This is a very scary thing if you think about it.
Even though the Internet is such a useful day-to-day tool for us and provides us with so many great things there are very dark sides to it as well. You can think of all the scams you have come across online and possibly even a few of you have experienced threats and harassment online. Our children are subject to all of these things as well but on a far greater scale because of their undeveloped minds and their constant sense of security from not knowing.
What we been doing for the past 6 months has been running a beta of this service to see how it works out and so far results have been spectacular. We have very specific rules for the website and any others that are created like it. Each website is monitored on various levels. We call this Safe Monitored Online Youth Interaction (SMOYI) Playground.
What this means is that each site has at least one Adult monitor. This can be the site Authors parent or one can be hired and appointed to monitor the SMOYI Playground.
Each must have at least one Author or Editor. The author(s) or Editor(s) have slightly different rolls. An Editor has the ability to create and edit pages, blog posts, links and comments as well as approving comments. This is for more mature children. Authors can only write blog posts that must be processed by the playground monitor(s). All comments to posts are treated the same way. Page creation, categories and sidebar links are not allowed for an author.
There are ban word filters in effect for all content that is posted including the shout box posts. The shout box is a place where viewers can leave a real time publicly viewable note that is also filtered. No links are allowed in the shout box to prevent abuse. Words in the ban list are replaced with *** in the output for the entire site but are stored in their raw form in the database for investigation by the monitor(s)
All content that is added to any of these sites should always be monitored by an Adult to insure that there are no links to questionable content. Any content that is found that is of an adult nature or otherwise inappropriate should be removed as soon as it is found. If someone has found content matching this description it should be reported immediately to the monitor. This is a 0 tolerance playground.
What we have found in our test run is that the users of the test site have followed the guidelines that have been laid out completely. The Editor started out as an Author and progressed to an Editor over the past 6 months. The rules were explained. The reasons for the rules are the key to this as with communication. This has been an experiment really and the results have been phenomenal. The way this started was that my child had absolutely no responsibilities and any she had previously had (mice, hermit crabs, etc) did not work out very well. She had taken an interest in what I do for work but at her age surely cannot jump in that far so I decided to give her Author rights on one of my own sites, Asylum-ET. Very quickly I decided that the mash in content that would create was not so hot and so I gave her a sub domain and her own site on it. She took to the idea of being able to write and express her self very quickly.
Since then it has become an automatic thing that she comes home from school, does her homework, goes online to her website, checks comments, makes post(s) and so on. While she sits in a #php help channel on irc. I do not recommend the irc portion to anyone for their child unless they are monitoring it as I do. I am an operator in the help channel and she is restricted to only this channel. Not by anything other than her own conviction. I monitor all network traffic on my home network. Connections that are made from her laptop report to me live. That is all together another story though but it is more evidence that this playground works.
With this she has acquired a great deal of knowledge and has been given many skills that can only grow, she has the ability to be creative with the world to see. She has shown powerful concern for some serious issues as with basic html, she is reading, writing and even calculating. But most of all she is being responsible. All things we want for our children. The thing that is most amazing to me is that of the friends that have visited, they all have enjoyed their stay followed the rules and return. They also expressed some of the darnedest things that make you know that everything is going to be all right. The more time they spend in our playground is less time they spend in other places online.
Places like Myspace are scary. The way it is setup there is no possible way to have a safe and clean environment. The way this works is on a much more personal basis. I know the majority of the registered members parents in one way or another. As simple as a phone call to authorize their use, a note or whatever have you. Just an acknowledgement that the child can come to the playground is what I have decided is sufficient at this time since the users are all local.
Eventually we want to provide games in these playgrounds so we can start to eliminate some of the advertising we have had to run to levy some of the costs of providing this service. So far this has been 100% out of pocket expense that has to this point had absolutely no income whatsoever. We do need to have a form of income to continue to provide such a service and if it grows the cost will be greater so for lack of a better idea for that yet we have advertising 
What may be an option here is as I mentioned before a paid monitor, volunteers would be great, game token purchase (rather not) or the latest idea I have is maybe a small monthly subscription to the playgrounds. That way everything is internal and we can eliminate advertising altogether.