Dearbhla – Working together to encourage safety by design
Well done to Webwise youth panellists, Dearbhla and Dónal, who recently attended the Trust and Safety Forum in Lille, France on 1st April 2026. They participated in a full-day guided co-design jam with other young people from Greece and France and the COR Sandbox where they had the opportunity to experience how a regulatory sandbox works: learning and working collaboratively with fellow stakeholders toward the shared goal of improving online safety.
COR (the Children’s Online Redress Sandbox) is the first regulatory sandbox for the child online safety. It is unique in its focus on children’s rights, upholding them through young people’s involvement as full participants in the operation of this cross-sector, cross-border, cross-generation sandbox. Find out more about the sandbox here: https://www.corsandbox.org/
Dearbhla shared her perspective of the experience:
On the 31st of March, Myself and Dónal travelled to Lille, France. On the 1st of April we then attended the inCyber forum to work on the COR sandbox project.
The sandbox workshop ran from 9 until 3:30. I first worked together with other Youth members from Greece and France to work on the problem scenario. The scenario which we were working on was surrounding the safety of young children in regards to AI companionship bots and what guard rails and regulations that we felt needed to be put in place in order to make them safer.
Afterwards, we shared our thoughts on what the problems for us were and what we thought could be a good solution. There were numerous stakeholders, regulators and industry representatives there also working on the project. It was great because it really felt like our views were being heard and appreciated. In the afternoon, we were split up and everyone was a part of a mixed group with stakeholders, industry representatives, regulators and youth members, and we all worked together in order to come up with a finished solution for the scenario.
By the end we had come up with an idea for a much safer form of the AI that would be less dangerous for young people. The purpose of the workshop was to encourage co-creation, and to show that by having multiple perspectives, we could come together to create a better solution that worked for everybody. The main focus was on group collaboration to encourage safety by design. It was really interesting to see everybody’s viewpoints and the new ideas that they brought to the table.
It was a great opportunity to work together with others to try and come to an idea that had safety by design. The next day we returned home!
