Public Announcement - Digital Accountability & Responsible Engagement

From the Waitaki App team

Community connection & community service

Waitaki App is all about community connection. Every part of the business is designed to support our community. 

We provide relevant local news - free. No paywall. 

We provide a free What’s on Guide so anyone can share any kind of event from a garage sale to a circus coming to town! Is there a circus coming to town? If so, let us know.

We also provide a free community groups and clubs directory for any club or group in the district to share their information with us all. 

We charge businesses to advertise - that’s what pays our local, hardworking team, and we give those businesses outstanding value for money with affordable rates and an invested local audience.

We share because we care

As an app, we don’t have a comments section (although you’re welcome to write us a note to the editor, just as you would for any publisher).

We share content to our Facebook page, because we want people to see what this amazing app is all about. 

We want you to check it out, and make it even better for all of us by getting involved - sharing your events, your groups, your businesses, your news.

But… and here’s a big but… it’s free and it’s there to be shared but if our content is used to stoke division and nastiness in our community via social media - it totally undermines our reason for being. 

The way we see it, we have a duty of care to the people who tell us their stories or who share their points of view on our platform. 

That doesn’t mean leaving them hung out to dry if another platform shares our content and they are vilified, abused or subjected to antisocial, online behaviour. 

Taking a stand against online abuse

Just like the ODT or any other publisher, we own that content - we are the publisher.

So we’re daring to take a stand on our content in the interests of protecting our contributors from abuse, and our wider community from having to witness that abuse. 

That’s why we’ve created the Digital Accountability & Responsible Engagement (DARE) initiative.

This is a principled initiative for Waitaki App. And we’re inviting any digital publishing platform (from private pages to community groups) to sign up.  

It’s super simple. Anyone signing up basically agrees to be a decent online platform. You’ll know if they are because you’ll see the little green olive branch umbrella, showing their intentions to help protect our community from online abuse. 

Every platform can make their own rules and if they’re a DARE Initiative member, you’ll find those rules clearly and prominently displayed… and enforced. 

We all recognise that there’s been increased normalisation of poor behaviour on social media. 

It’s not fair to ask individuals to fight their own battles when, as publishers, we have complete power over the content on our platforms. 

So it’s up to us, the publishers, to dare and stand up to the small numbers of people who engage in or condone online abuse.

Today, we are taking a stand. We hope you’ll join us and DARE to sign up.  

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WAITAKI APP - HOW WE APPLY DARE

We are founding signatories to DARE because we want online platforms to be safe places for everyone. 

On our platforms, we ask people to behave with decency. That means we don't tolerate hate-speech, abuse or personal attacks. In disagreements we encourage you to focus on the topic, not the person.

If you see anything that makes you uncomfortable on our platform, you can tag us or send us a link to that content and expect us to assess it and take appropriate action.

People may share our content on the following conditions;

1. Sharing our content means you consent to abide by the principles of the DARE initiative.
2. If you are unable to commit to those principles, you may not share our content.
3. If we see or are notified that our content is being shared in breach of these principles, we will contact the platform owner to remind them of their responsibilities in sharing our content.
4. If the platform owner(s) or administrators are not willing to moderate, we will ask them to delete our content. Failure to comply could result in the platform page and / or owner being banned from our social media pages.

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To sign up to the DARE initiative fill out this form with a copy of your logo and we’ll create your DARE logo to accompany your rules for your platform. You choose how you display it, so long as it’s prominently displayed (in agreement with the DARE principles).

We hope everyone will sign up. Please share and join this movement to reclaim online platforms as safe spaces for everyone.