My name is Brian Greene. I make technology work for a living. I live in Baldoyle Dublin 13 with the rest of the family. As a father of 3 school going children I am concerned by the media reports of bullying in Ireland today. Either we are amid an epidemic of bullying or the media are pursuing a moral panic on the topic. Either way we have a problem that is growing.
Often the medium for the bullying is the internet via “social media” sites. Cyber bullying is a reality but should we blame the messenger or in the case the medium? Technology has been getting a bad rap when it comes to bullying. Whereas the underlying problem is the lack of updated etiquette for children and adults alike in modern online media. I love technology and have been working in computing for the past 23 years. If technology can be seen as the problem, could it also be a solution to bullying?
Wanting to create a safer space for my children and a better use on technology to actually challenge bullying (online and offline) I stumbled upon the idea that has become Tuairisc (the Irish word for report).
What if every school website had a form where it is cool to report bullying? Where schools that are open to hearing about incidents of bullying can easily receive alerts about bullying that is occurring in the school environment.
Well I thought about 4,000 schools, making 4,000 forms of varying detail and complexity. Then I looked and some of those 4,000 school websites and it struck me that one form tailored to 4,000 schools would do the job even better.
So I built Tuairisc.me. Secure, confidential, centrally upgraded, highly available, cloud hosted and EASY to install. I needed it to be easy to install on every type of website. So it works with Weebly, WordPress. Joomla!, static HTML and various other sites. A simple one line of unique HTML code is placed on each school site and you are ready to go. If a school has no website, no problem. We provide a link to your own form that can be mentioned in notes sent home in the mála scoile (schoolbag).
Then I hope the forms are not used. There, like insurance, for when bad things happen. But when they do (and they will happen) there will be a friendly accessible form to make a bullying report with.
And what price point should this service cost? after swift consideration I decided that the ‘form to email’ service should be FREE for all schools in Ireland.
That is the story of Tuairisc so far. The service goes live on February 1st 2013.
How can you help? Tell
Tell a school about Tuairisc
Tell your teachers about Tuairisc
Tell parents about Tuairisc
Tell me what you think about Tuairisc version 1.0
Thank you for you interest in this project