Talks, panels & trainings

Children Online, Rights at Risk: A Child-Centered Framework on Technology-Facilitated GBV

Public launch webinar for the Save the Children report Understanding Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence: A Child-Centered Framework (Save the Children US, 2026), which I conceived, secured funding for, led, and co-authored (with Krista Bywater, Erin Leasure, and Connor Roth). The session presented the framework – drawn from research with children and experts across five countries (Colombia, Egypt, Kenya, the Philippines, and South Africa) – and convened a global expert panel on prevention and response. I moderated the 40-minute panel, directing questions across the four contextual factors in the framework (socialization, development, identity, and influential actors), gender and social norms, child participation, and the role of AI, followed by a Q&A.

Panel: Chioma Agwuegbo (TechHer, Nigeria); Cristina Escobar Correa (Red PaPaz, Colombia); Jennifer Kaberi (Mtoto News / Berkman Klein Center, Harvard); and Francesco Cecon (ECPAT International). | Other speakers: Rebecca Smith (opening remarks); Connor Roth and Erin Leasure (framework presentation); and Rahinatu Adamu Hussaini (welcome/host).

Seguridad Digital para Niñas, Niños y Adolescentes: perspectivas desde la sociedad civil (Digital Safety for Children and Adolescents: Civil Society Perspectives)

SHIELD the Future's second Spanish-language webinar on protecting children online in Latin America, convening civil society perspectives. Delivered entirely in Spanish. I grounded the session in Common Sense Media's Youth AI Safety Institute census of how young people use AI, and used its US findings to surface the measurement gap across Latin America, where no comparable evidence yet exists. I argued that the public swing between enthusiasm and alarm produces neither safe products nor protection for children; that the safeguards concentrated in a handful of frontier AI labs do not carry down to the thousands of downstream apps young people actually use; and that safety is not inherited: a safe base model does not make a safe product, so the question to ask a company is what it built on top of one.

Moderator: Nicolás Pietrasanta (SHIELD Advisory Board) | Other speaker(s): Marcela Czarny (Founder & Director, Chicos.net)

Kutunga / Mtoto News – ACODES Fellowship: AI and Child Protection Training Module

John developed and delivered a training module on applying AI and innovation to protect children for the ACODES Fellowship, a virtual training program run by Kutunga, a Mtoto News initiative. He led live, virtual sessions with fellows in May and June 2026.

FTLA Spring 2026 Meeting – Meeting the Moment: Cross-Sector Collaboration to Close the AI Governance Gap

A panel for foundation technology leaders on closing the AI governance gap as nonprofits adopt AI at an accelerating pace. Three organizations addressed different layers of the problem: NetHope on the evidence (an analysis of 53 global AI governance instruments, 91% of which say nothing about the funder-grantee relationship); NTEN on the practice (the tools nonprofits use to govern AI responsibly); and John on the safeguarding layer – the heightened and more severe technology risks when grantees serve vulnerable populations such as children, families in crisis, Indigenous communities, and communities of color, and the questions foundation CIOs should ask before approving a tool or a grant.

Moderator: Sarah Yates (VP/Head of Technology, W.K. Kellogg Foundation) | Panel: Michelle Parker (Director of AI, NetHope); Tristan Penn (Equity and Accountability Director, NTEN); John Zoltner (Founder & CEO, AIChildSafety.org)

Good Tech Summit 2026 – Workshop: AI vs. Childhood: Growing Up in an Algorithmic World

A 90-minute participatory workshop, held under the Chatham House rule, on growing up in an algorithmic world. John moderated a conversation on the dual nature of AI as both a threat to children and a tool for protecting them, the realities families and schools face, and the policy response.

Panel: John Penn II (Adobe); Karla Martin (Common Sense Media); Sherrie Bosisto (Global Emancipation Network)

Georgetown Tech and Society Week 2026 – Children, Technology, and AI

A 90-minute Georgetown Tech and Society Week session on children, technology, and AI, run as a sequence of short talks followed by a facilitated Q&A. After an introduction to how AI works and a talk on aligned and child-safe AI, John presented on how AI is reshaping children's development and what protective design and policy should look like. Mattito Watson facilitated the closing discussion.

Other speakers: Mattito Watson (facilitator); Andrew (Understanding AI); Dan Hipp (Aligned and Child-Safe AI)

Mobicip Safer Internet Day 2026 Series – AI Child Safety with John Zoltner

An eight-part interview series released for Safer Internet Day 2026, in which Anitha Swaminathan of Mobicip interviews John Zoltner on how AI affects children and what families, schools, and platforms can do about it. Each episode takes on a distinct facet of AI and child safety, from everyday risks to safety-by-design and the constructive potential of AI for learning.

Episode 1Episode 2Episode 3Episode 4Episode 5Episode 6Episode 7Episode 8

The Success Partner Podcast – Protecting Kids in the Age of AI

A wide-ranging conversation with host Virginie Coulloudon on how rapidly advancing AI is reshaping childhood – from endlessly adaptive streaming and recommendation systems to AI companions that can alter a child's development – and why the boundaries children need in order to grow are eroding. John traces his path from a career using technology for social good to founding AIChildSafety.org with no outside funding, and describes the global network and unfunded research fellowship it has mobilized to study how AI affects children's development. He also reflects on building influence and trust through authenticity, showing up, and helping others without expecting anything in return.

Virginie Coulloudon (host) | John Zoltner (guest)

World Leaders in Data and AI – 2025 WLDA Award, AI for Good Impact Category: Acceptance Remarks

John received the 2025 World Leaders in Data and AI Award in the AI for Good Impact category at the WLDA gala in New York City. In his acceptance remarks he delivered his standard talking points on the need for AIChildSafety.org and the Childhood & AI Lab Research Fellowship, which he was preparing to launch in early 2026. The award came the same week the Fellowship launched.

AI for Development and Impact (AI4D) 2025 – Lightning Talk: How AI Is Reshaping Child Development

A lightning talk arguing that AI is already changing children's brains, and that we cannot repeat the mistakes made with social media, where a failure to anticipate harm left us unprepared to prevent it. John presented current research on how AI reshapes child development across seven domains – from the erosion of core cognitive skills and the displacement of attention to the suppression of moral development and biased cognitive development that widens global divides – alongside what the evidence says about how AI, designed responsibly, can strengthen learning, creativity, curiosity, collaboration, and judgment.

Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund Convening (TSPA APAC Summit, Singapore) – Spotlight on Industry–Research Partnerships

At the Tech Coalition Safe Online Research Fund convening, held alongside the TSPA APAC Summit in Singapore, John presented Save the Children's online grooming study (with Western Sydney University) and its Tech Advisory Panel as a case study in industry–research partnerships: how the panel shaped project design and implementation while keeping the research independent. The session set this alongside two other partnership case studies and a moderated discussion on building trust, managing data access and safeguarding, and moving collaborations from one-off pilots to systemic approaches.

Other case studies: MSB × Aylo (data collection); University of Kent × Google (deterrence messaging)

World Vision Digital Safeguarding Event

A panel on digital safeguarding in which John discussed the red flags in digital initiatives (the absence of safety-by-design, opaque AI), how to balance speed of delivery with safeguarding, and the real-time tools available to protect children online.

How to Ruin Dinner Podcast – Pathologically Positive: Children, AI, and the Internet

The dinner-ruining moment of this conversation must be John Zoltner's unblinking assessment of AI and the internet's harm to children. Despite these sober considerations, John remains positive about what AI can do. In this episode, we discuss how to use AI without being controlled by it. In many ways, this task is a David and Goliath rematch wherein David lost his slingshot. But John doesn't let us get away with crying foul or claiming ignorance. He asserts that many educational and healthcare benefits accrue to children from engagement with AI and the internet, and we know what harm awaits our kids: low self-esteem, body shaming, inappropriate sexual content, financial scams, and grooming, to name the apparent problems. To address these issues, technology corporations, tech developers, educators, and parents must work together to protect our children and to do that well, we need to build a community of trust.

Mary McGovern Treyz and Hayden Heller, Religious Studies Department, University of North Florida

Safer Internet Day 2025 – AI & Child Safety: Building a Safe Digital Childhood

Part of the Safer Internet Day 2025 Youth Attitudes Towards AI webinar (Together for Better Internet), John's talk on AI and child safety, framed around Save the Children's Safe Digital Childhood initiative and its three pillars: participation, protection, and well-being. Building on Kay Chau's (Tech Coalition) presentation of the most serious online dangers, John focused on the AI risks that rarely make headlines but affect millions of children – misinformation, AI-driven scams, algorithmic bias, information bubbles, and an over-reliance on AI that erodes critical thinking – while also celebrating what children gain from AI in creativity, learning, and global connection. He closed on the policy decisions ahead: transparency about how AI systems work, accountability for harm, fairness and bias, and centering children's rights in AI development.

Other speakers: Rebecca Smith (Save the Children); Steve Miller (Save the Children); Kay Chau (Tech Coalition); Iain Drennan (WeProtect Global Alliance); Bryanna Mariñas (Global Youth-Led Movement on Ending Violence Against Children)

NetHope Global Summit 2024 – Innovations, Insights, and Impact: Early Successes and Lessons Learned in Applying Generative AI to Unlock Humanitarian Data

A panel sharing early successes and lessons from applying generative AI to unlock humanitarian data. DataKind opened with lessons from a year of researching and innovating with GenAI to extract, interpret, visualize, and draw insights from humanitarian data, and demonstrated the Humanitarian AI Assistant (HAIA). The panel weighed intentional design, ethical considerations, technical and cost implications, and the safety concerns of deploying new technology, with practitioners from Cisco Crisis Response, the Norwegian Refugee Council, Catholic Relief Services, and Save the Children.

Panel: Lauren Woodman (DataKind, introduction and lessons); Erin Connor (Director, Cisco Crisis Response); Zineb Bhaby (Data Solutions Lead, Norwegian Refugee Council); Nora Lindstrom (Senior Director for ICT4D, Catholic Relief Services); John Zoltner (Lead, Technology for Development and Innovation / Global Lead, Protection from Digital Harm, Save the Children)

Global Digital Development Forum 2024 – Towards Digital Equity: Safeguarding Youth Digital Rights and Well-being Against Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence

Technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV) poses a significant threat to children’s digital rights and well-being, yet understanding remains fragmented and often limited to specific harms such as online sexual abuse or cyberbullying. This session presents exploratory research to develop a global conceptual framework for understanding TFGBV involving children and adolescents. Building on the ICRW framework, the research draws on focus group discussions with children aged 9–17 across diverse cultural contexts and interviews with national and global stakeholders. Using an intersectional lens, the session examines forms and patterns of violence, perpetration, impacts, help-seeking behaviors, and differences associated with age, gender identity, and other characteristics. It also considers children’s evolving autonomy and digital rights and presents recommendations for activists, researchers, policymakers, and technology-sector stakeholders to strengthen the prevention, mitigation, and response to TFGBV.

ICT4D Conference 2024 – Big Discussion: Frontier Technologies for Humanitarian Impact and Disaster Management (Beyond Innovation: Responsible Tech for Humanitarian Impact with GenAI)

GenAI will either save the world or end it, depending on who you are listening to, but reality is probably somewhere in the middle. Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) holds promise; at the same time, real concerns exist. This session explores the intersection of social impact and cutting-edge innovation, the implications of GenAI on humanitarian response, development, health and climate, and the need to align tech solutions with specific challenges for lasting impact. It covers promising use cases, ethics and equity, the importance of partnerships, and experience in navigating this rapidly changing landscape.

Other speakers: John Zoltner (Global Lead, Protection from Digital Harm, Save the Children); Lauren Woodman (CEO, DataKind)

ICT4D Conference 2024 – Harnessing Tech and Data for Humanitarian Response

Nearly 350 million people need humanitarian assistance, 30 percent higher than in 2022. Rising costs of aid driven by war, food crises, and climate change mean that funding commitments cannot keep pace with demand. Making evidence-based decisions around prioritization is more important than ever, and technology can make a unique contribution by augmenting human capacities. In this session, tech, data and data-science leadership from leading organizations share their insights on how to operationalize tech innovations, with a spotlight on real LLM solutions poised to lower technical barriers and transform data insights for humanitarian action.

USAID Symposium 2024 – Americas Opening

The opening session of USAID's second biannual Protecting Children and Youth from Digital Harm Symposium, held on Safer Internet Day. It set up the day with a review of the state of the evidence on digital harm to children and a primer and roadmap on USAID's approach, anchored in perspectives from the Americas and youth voices from the USAID Digital Youth Council.

Speakers: Mattito Watson (Senior Technical Advisor, DDI Bureau, USAID); DAA Bama Athreya (Deputy Assistant Administrator, USAID); John Zoltner (Global Lead, Protection from Digital Harm, Save the Children); Ernie Allen (Chair, WeProtect Global Alliance); Matías Dodel (Associate Professor, Universidad Católica del Uruguay); Bryan Franco Sarasti, Bruna Vitória Ferreira Fernandes, and Steffon Lewis (USAID Digital Youth Council)

USAID Symposium 2024 – Getting Ahead of Harms: Integrating Child Protection into the Fabric of Emerging Technology Development

A panel on building child protection into emerging technologies from the start, rather than retrofitting safety after harm occurs. Panelists from INHOPE, Safe Online, the Tech Coalition, Aulas en Paz, and Save the Children discussed how developers, funders, and child-protection organizations can work together so that safety-by-design becomes the default in new technology development.

Panel: Abby Roberts (INHOPE); Natalie Shoup (Safe Online); John Zoltner (Save the Children); Kay Chau (Tech Coalition); Lina Saldarriaga (Aulas en Paz)

Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders’ Summit 2024 – Nonprofit Leaders Panel: Getting Ready for AI

The 2024 Microsoft Global Nonprofit Leaders’ Summit featured nonprofit leaders who are building robust, collective data to help the sector create and optimize patterns for new AI-inspired approaches. In this main-stage session, Shamina Singh, President of the Center for Inclusive Growth at Mastercard, interviews John Zoltner of Save the Children and Lauren Woodman of DataKind to help answer the question, “How can you get your nonprofit ready for AI?”

Other speakers: Shamina Singh (President, Center for Inclusive Growth, Mastercard – interviewer); Lauren Woodman (CEO, DataKind)

NetHope Global Summit 2023 – DataKind, Save the Children and Microsoft: A Partnership for Action on Humanitarian Response

John presented the Humanitarian Data Insights Platform, a partnership among DataKind, Save the Children, and Microsoft that uses machine learning and generative AI to share and analyze data across humanitarian actors. The session showed how cross-sector collaboration can turn fragmented humanitarian data into actionable insight for faster, better-targeted response.

Society for International Development (SID) 2023 – Impactful Digital Development: Practical Feedback Loops for Emerging Technologies

Effective digital development starts with designing for the end user, but two of the biggest barriers are the lack of feedback loops for localized user input and gatekeepers who keep marginalized voices from being heard. This SID session, presented with Bixal, explored how systematic Agile and human-centered design can ensure end users' voices and needs shape emerging-technology projects for local sustainability. John drew on examples including Nepal Digital Hangouts, safety-by-design, and a Darfur loudspeaker case to show how field feedback should shape technology design.

Panel: Carla Briceno (Bixal); Nandini Harihareswara (Consultant); Annah Ngaruro (ICF); Thom Sinclair (Bixal, moderator); John Zoltner (Save the Children US)

Global Digital Development Forum 2023 – Can Artificial Intelligence Protect Children from Digital Harm?

In the old days, and even now on some online platforms, human moderators kept discussion forums free of toxic people and harmful content. As platforms grew beyond a company's ability to moderate manually, companies, their partners, and NGOs turned to Artificial Intelligence and other advanced tools to do the job. Are those tools really effective at preventing harm to children and other vulnerable groups, and what can we expect in the future: will the risks children face online be resolved or exacerbated by AI? John designed and facilitated the session.

Panel: Jacqueline Beauchere (Global Head of Platform Safety, Snap); Liz Thomas (Director of Public Policy, Digital Safety, Microsoft); Remy Mallon (Vice President of Public Affairs and Chief Privacy Officer, Roblox)

Global Digital Development Forum 2023 – Corporate, Donor, Youth and NGO Coordination to Prevent and Reduce Digital Harm

A breakout session in the Protection from Digital Harm track on how corporate, donor, youth, and NGO actors can better coordinate to prevent and reduce online harm to children. It brought USAID, platform safety leadership, and youth voices together to examine where cross-sector coordination breaks down and how to strengthen it.

Speakers: Allana Welch (Digital Strategy Senior Advisor, USAID); John Zoltner (Senior Advisor, Technology for Development, Save the Children); Steffon Lewis (USAID Digital Youth Council); Jacqueline Beauchere (Global Head of Platform Safety, Snap); Sait Mboob (Foreign Service Officer, USAID)

Viral Interview by Nick Martin on TikTok

TechChange founder Nick Martin ran into John Zoltner by chance at the Mt. Pleasant farmers market in Washington, DC, and filmed a short, impromptu interview about John's work protecting children at Save the Children. The clip went viral on Nick's LinkedIn feed and TikTok channel.

NetHope Global Summit 2022 – Social Media Campaigns to Protect Children from Digital Harm

John presented Save the Children's online child protection campaigns, showing how mass-media and social-media campaigns can reduce online risks to children. He featured the Zambian Online Child Protection Campaign – four animated videos on cyberbullying, online grooming, strong passwords, and safe social media use, aired on Zambian television and as ads on free Wi-Fi hotspots, reaching more than a million impressions – and the #IAmDigital Pacific regional campaign, a Save the Children Australia and Facebook (Meta) partnership co-created with a youth advisory group across six Pacific nations (Papua New Guinea, Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, and Vanuatu), spanning online learning modules, videos, radio scripts, and offline school pilots.

Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice: Using Digital Tools to Improve Child Protection

On Friday, September 23rd at 11am ET, AfP hosted its new Digital Peacebuilding Community of Practice session for a presentation and discussion with John Zoltner, who describes himself as “obsessed with finding new ways to apply technology and innovation to protect children, respond to emergencies, and make the world a better place.” Then Save the Children’s Global Lead, Protection from Digital Harm, John shared his experience using digital tools to improve child protection in areas such as trafficking and sexual abuse. The discussion looked at where lessons can apply to peacebuilding, as well as the numerous dilemmas the field faces.

Global Digital Development Forum 2022 – Preventing and Responding to Technology-Facilitated Gender-Based Violence

Digital technologies provide opportunities for people of all sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions (SOGIE) to access information, healthcare, education, job opportunities and other resources that would otherwise be unobtainable. Those opportunities, however, are less available to girls and women: there is a persistent 20% gap in cellphone ownership between women and men in low-to-middle-income countries. When digital tools and resources are available, they often come at a higher cost to girls, women and anyone who operates outside traditional SOGIE roles, because they suffer the majority of harassment, exploitation and abuse. The session covers how the US government and its partners, such as the Global Partnership for Action on Gender-based Online Harassment and Abuse, are approaching the gender digital divide and the use of technology to harass, exploit and abuse girls, women and anyone who does not conform to traditional gender norms. It addresses USAID’s digital and gender strategies, White House efforts to inform gender policy, and concrete examples of how a global NGO designs interventions to prevent and respond to Technology-facilitated Gender-based Violence (TechGBV).

Session leads: Mattito Watson (Senior Technical Advisor, Children in Adversity, USAID); Chaitra Shenoy (Senior Gender-Based Violence Advisor & Team Lead, USAID); Cailin Crockett (Senior Advisor, Gender Policy Council, The White House); John Zoltner (Senior Advisor, Technology for Development and Innovation, Save the Children)

Global Digital Development Forum 2022 – Software That Saves Lives: Building Better Neglect and Abuse Reporting Tools

We can’t protect children if we don’t know they’re in danger. Often, the only indication of that danger is a report about suspected abuse submitted by a caring adult or friend. Reporting mechanisms have come a long way since volunteer-staffed call centers. Even in the recent past, child welfare agencies, suicide hotlines, rape crisis centers and other organizations that support people at their most vulnerable moments had no choice but to hire experts to set up hardware to route calls to crisis counselors. Today, “call centers” have morphed into cloud-based systems with web forms, chat services, interactive voice response, and WhatsApp, Facebook or SMS messages. This session covers the role of hotlines and helplines in child protection from digital harm, the challenges that reporting entails, and the technical solutions that improve reporting and response so counselors can support survivors rather than manage phone lines.

When Privacy & Security Isn't Enough: How to Design for Safety

An episode in the podcast's Address Privacy and Security mini-season examining why privacy and data security alone are not enough to protect children and other vulnerable groups in digital development. Claudine Lim spoke with John while he was at Save the Children US and child-protection consultant Priscilla Wahome Majani about designing for safety, strengthening user agency and digital literacy, collecting less data, and building safeguards into digital tools from the outset. John argued that international-development and humanitarian organizations should hold themselves to a higher standard and described safety-by-design approaches, including the use of AI to identify early signs of online grooming while maintaining human oversight. The discussion emphasized that responsibility for safety cannot be placed on children alone and requires coordinated action by technology companies, practitioners, educators, parents, and policymakers.

Host: Claudine Lim (Digital Impact Alliance) | Guests: John Zoltner (Save the Children US); Priscilla Wahome Majani (Development Consultant and Researcher, Child Protection Specialist)

USAID Symposium for Protecting Children and Youth from Digital Harm 2022

USAID's first Protecting Children and Youth from Digital Harm Symposium, a free, global, online learning event that John co-founded and helped design and lead. The symposium convened USAID, implementing partners, technology companies, and child-protection experts to share evidence and practical approaches for keeping children and youth safe online.

NetHope Global Summit 2021 – We All Must Come Together to Protect Children from Digital Harm

NetHope and its members are dedicated to digital transformation to make our organizations and the programs we design more efficient, effective and scalable, but we can’t forget that digital technologies have the potential to do harm to users as well as to protect them. One of the most insidious forms of digital harm is online child sexual abuse, a global problem that is growing exponentially and shows no signs of stopping. Learn from the latest research on the scale and characteristics of online child violence from the WeProtect Global Alliance, USAID’s new Strategy to Protect Children from Digital Harm, the safety-by-design principles and assessment tools that Australia’s eSafety Commissioner developed as part of its whole-of-government response to online violence, and the ways Save the Children has protected children from technology-facilitated violence for more than 20 years.

Global Digital Development Forum 2021

Digital Development practitioners are constantly working to connect the unconnected to provide access to information, education, entertainment and other opportunities, but digital environments have the potential to do harm to users as well as to better protect them. This session explores the forthcoming USAID strategy on Protecting Children from Digital Harm and innovative technologies from USAID implementing partners and stakeholders developing disruptive innovations to keep children safe online, including Thorn, Save the Children, and World Vision. Presenters demonstrate concrete tools, such as a child-search platform that law enforcement officers have used in more than 62,000 human trafficking cases (Thorn), an anti-grooming chatbot designed to identify groomers before they put children in danger (Save the Children), and AI technology to better identify violence in communities and effective interventions to prevent it (World Vision / JHU).

Demystifying AI

It feels like AI4Good is going to be the BlockChain4Good of 2021: lots of people talking about it, lots of hype and donor interest. But what does it mean for civil society really? Where is civil society already engaging? And if I were interested in leveraging AI, where would I begin?

Other speakers: John Zoltner (Global Lead, Protection from Digital Harm, Save the Children); Alice Piterova (Managing Director, AI for Good); Rudradeb Mitra (Founder & CEO, Omdena); Chris Worman (Vice President, Alliances and Program Development)

ICT4D Partnerships Conference 2021 – Multi-sector Partnerships to Protect Children Online

The displacement of more than 1.5 billion children around the world from their schools during the global COVID-19 pandemic exposed children to far greater threats of online violence. In this webinar organized by TechSoup Global, John Zoltner of Save the Children and Guneet Singh Kohli of Omdena describe how they teamed up to build a prototype classifier and chatbot to detect online “grooming” by adults during chats with children, based on a training set of known grooming chat conversations.

Other speakers: John Zoltner (Senior Advisor, Technology for Development & Innovation, Save the Children); Laura Clark Murray (COO, Omdena); Guneet Singh Kohli (Lead Machine Learning Engineer, Omdena)

NetHope Global Summit 2020 – Technology Isn’t Always ‘For Good’: Taking Collective Action to Reduce Internet Harms

A session urging the humanitarian technology community to recognize that digital tools can do harm as well as good, and to take collective action to reduce online harms to the people and communities they serve.

John Zoltner of Save the Children Talks Call for Code

John Zoltner, Senior Advisor of Technology for Development and Innovation at Save the Children, caught up with the Call for Code team to talk about his perspectives on Call for Code. Save the Children CEO Janti Soeripto served as a judge for Call for Code solutions in 2020. John talks about the importance of collaboration, diverse expertise, global action, and more.

Global Digital Development Forum 2020 – How Can We Protect and Safeguard Children in the Digital Environment?

This session discussed online harm to children and youth in the wider digital environment, especially where access is unguided or there is a lack of awareness of the potential for harm and abuse.

Speakers: Khwezi Magwaza (Independent Consultant); John Zoltner (Senior Director for Technology and Innovation, Save the Children); Marija Manojlovic (Strategy & Innovation Advisor, Global Partnership to End Violence against Children)

Global Digital Development Forum 2020 – Can New Technologies Radically Improve Reporting on Human Rights Abuses, Violence Against Children and Other Harms?

Helplines and hotlines for reporting human rights abuses, child sexual abuse, or other harms require a strong communications platform to process reports. Save the Children, Child Helpline International, Tech Matters, INHOPE, and the Internet Watch Foundation explored new technologies that radically expand the ability to receive, process, and visualize reports – integrating chat, interactive voice response, and WhatsApp, Facebook, or SMS so users can choose the most convenient reporting channel – along with the unique challenges these platforms face, such as the need for anonymity and the illegality of the child sexual abuse material that is sometimes reported.

Speakers: Richard Ombono (Senior Program Manager, Child Helpline International, Cameroon); John Zoltner (Senior Advisor, Technology for Development and Innovation, Save the Children US); Nick Hurlburt (Director of Engineering, Tech Matters); Jenny Thornton (International Development Manager, Internet Watch Foundation)

Youth IGF Indonesia – Child and Youth Protection in Digital Spaces

A live conversation, held early in the COVID-19 lockdowns, on keeping children safe online. With schools closed and families confined at home, children and young people were spending far more time online than usual – a vital way to learn, play, and stay connected with friends, but one that also carries real risks. John Zoltner, Senior Director of Technology for Development and Innovation at Save the Children, joined Youth IGF Indonesia's Instagram Live to discuss how parents and young people can protect children in digital spaces.

John Zoltner – Senior Director of Technology for Development and Innovation, Save the Children | Hosted by Youth IGF Indonesia (Agita Pasaribu)

EVAC Webinar – Online Child Safeguarding

A webinar on online child safeguarding in which John presented on embedding safeguarding into organizational policy, protecting children's data, and integrating online harms into child protection systems strengthening.

Technology Salon New York – Safeguarding Children in the Digital Environment

A Technology Salon roundtable on the duty of care of international agencies that put digital devices and apps into children's hands. As then Senior Director for Technology and Innovation at Save the Children, John was a lead discussant alongside representatives from UNICEF and the Global Partnership to End Violence Against Children.

NetHope Webinar – ICT for Safeguarding

The ever-growing digital world is constantly creating new risks of exploitation, abuse and harassment of people and children, but also offering many new opportunities for organizations to improve their safeguarding efforts and practices. This webinar, part of a monthly series, discusses how digital technology can support the protection of children, vulnerable people and staff. Focusing on tools and practical advice, digital innovation and safeguarding experts share their guidelines and good practice for securing and maintaining a robust safeguarding culture and leveraging digital platforms to create safe networks and engagement channels with their program partners. Themes discussed include: Developing good safeguarding guidance: how an organization creates a culture and good guidance of safeguarding to protect program partners, especially children, when using digital tools as part of its programming. Building safeguarding leadership through mentoring and collaboration: how to ensure that the wide variety of partner organizations and government departments you work with also safeguard your program partners and protect their data. How organizations can better leverage digital platforms (e.g. Facebook) as a means to build safe networks and interact with youth in their work.

Gaming for Development Webinar (Save the Children Technology for Development series)

The first in Save the Children's Technology for Development webinar series, held during Innovation Week, on the use of digital games for humanitarian and development work. John hosted and gave the overview, joined by game designers Marguerite Dibble (GameTheory) and Mariam Nusrat (GRID).

Guest speakers: Marguerite Dibble (GameTheory); Mariam Nusrat (GRID)

AIDF Global Summit 2019 – Advances in ICT for Disaster Risk and Response

A panel at the AIDF Global Summit on recent advances in ICT and their impact on managing disaster risk and response. As Senior Director of Technology for Development and Innovation at Save the Children US, John discussed machine learning for damage analysis, private-sector partnership, and the identity and data risks that come with humanitarian technology.