Pre-Conference Workshops - Monday 23rd March 2026

The UK's Online Safety Act (OSA) introduces significant new duties for platforms to protect users online, making robust risk assessments a legal and ethical imperative. This workshop will provide practical guidance on meeting these obligations, tackling challenges in identifying, quantifying, categorising, and mitigating harms across different user groups. We will examine Ofcom’s expectations for conducting risk assessments and equip attendees with the tools to demonstrate compliance and embed meaningful safety practices.

• Understanding the OSA’s requirements for risk assessments, including Children’s and Illegal Harms, but also wider content categories, risk profiles, and Ofcom’s four-stage assessment process.
• Applying effective methodologies for assessing different forms of harm (e.g. illegal content, primary priority content, and priority content) and translating findings into policy and product interventions.
• Reviewing assurance mechanisms - such as age assurance and verification - within the broader risk framework, and their role in preventing inappropriate access or harm.
• Navigating Ofcom’s role as regulator: how enforcement will be applied and expectations for demonstrating compliance.
• Embedding a continuous risk management cycle: monitoring the effectiveness of interventions, maintaining accurate records, and adapting strategies to address evolving threats in a dynamic online environment.

George Billinge

Founder
Illuminate Tech

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This interactive workshop will equip attendees with the practical strategies and insights needed to become powerful advocates for Trust & Safety within their organisations and across the industry. Rachel Kowert is a research psychologist, award winning author, and globally recognized leader facilitating global policy and product development focused on mental health and T&S in video games, Alice is a Trust & Safety leader with over 15 years of experience across the industry, known for building inclusive and robust T&S and Community functions from the ground up. Here they’ll delve into effective approaches for evangelizing T&S principles, fostering a culture of responsibility, and ensuring T&S is recognized as a fundamental component of product development and user experience.

• Evangelizing the T&S mandate: Learn how to effectively communicate the value and necessity of your work to leadership, cross-functional teams, and the wider organization.
• Explore the symbiotic relationship between Policy, Education, and Tooling. Discover how these three pillars can be strategically leveraged to build robust and scalable Trust & Safety programs.
• Scaling digital Leadership and understanding effective methods for providing education and training at scale, ensuring that digital leaders across all departments understand their role in upholding Trust & Safety standards.
• Promoting T&S as a core function to be recognized as a vital investment that drives user growth, brand reputation, and long-term business sustainability.
• Building cross-functional alliances: Discover best practices for collaborating with across the Trust & Safety ecosystem
• Have your voice heard: Examining how you can become a thought leader within the space and have your voice heard

Rachel Kowert

Former Strategic Policy Advisor
Psychgeist

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Alice Goguen Hunsberger

VP Trust & Safety
Musubi

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Trust and safety teams face constant pressure to do more with less, creating conditions ripe for what economists and social psychologists have termed the “scarcity mindset”. This workshop applies the scarcity mindset framework to trust and safety work, exploring how the perception of limited resources affects team behavior and decision-making. As resource constraints become the norm across the industry, mastering this framework will be essential for teams seeking to maintain effectiveness and mitigate burnout in an increasingly challenging landscape. In this interactive workshop, participants will:

• Learn to identify key scarcity behaviors (“tunneling”, “bargaining”, and “borrowing”) and how they show up in trust and safety contexts
• Understand how these behaviors, while often adaptive in the short term, reduce cognitive capacity and reinforce the “scarcity trap”
• Analyze real scenarios where scarcity thinking might be showing up in their own work environments through guided exercises and small group discussions
• • Develop personalized action plans for recognizing and mitigating scarcity patterns to foster greater creativity, resilience, and growth in their safety teams

Bri Riggio

Senior Manager Safety & Revenue Policy
Discord

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