ROOST’s First 100 Days: Building & Planning

Since our February launch at the Paris AI Action Summit, the ROOST team has been working hard to create an organization that can help transform the industry's approach to trust and safety.

We’re excited about building and distributing free, open, and accessible trust and safety-focused tools that will provide an immediate benefit for companies and non-profits that need to keep their users safe online. These open source tools will allow organizations of all sizes to focus on their missions without having to spend time and resources building redundant, expensive online safety tools. This approach also fosters greater transparency and accelerates innovation within the field, benefiting not only direct users but the wider ecosystem of industry, civil society, and policymakers.

As we mark our first 100 days, we wanted to share some of the progress we've made so far in building an open source ecosystem for digital safety infrastructure.

Building an Organization for Change

Thanks to an initial $28.5 million in funding and in-kind contributions from founding partners, we’ve been able to focus on building out the organization to have an immediate impact rather than spending time raising funds. Over these first three months, we've focused intensively on expanding our partner network and engaging with developers and potential users, from startups to established platforms, for our new open source trust and safety tools.

On GitHub, we published an Awesome Safety Tools curation of existing open source tools that can be used to improve online safety, including hash matching, classification systems, rules engines and red teaming for security testing. We’re adding to this curated list all the time, so please check it out and let us know if we’ve missed anything.

We’ve also made tangible progress on the organization's initial product roadmap, developing and releasing products that create infrastructure to support core safety functions.

The primary goal of ROOST’s child safety track is to put high-quality, end-to-end safety solutions back in the hands of developers, starting with Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) detection. Although some free and open source options exist, there is no complete system available for little or no cost, making it difficult for teams with fewer resources to ensure that their platform is free from this horrifying material. We couldn’t think of a better area to focus our attention and we’re hopeful our tools will soon help organizations combat this problem.

What’s Next

We’ll soon be launching our first set of open source tools, including a web console to help organizations review potential issues collected in a queue, as well as role-based access controls. As part of that effort, we’re working with a new partner to transition their proprietary software into tangible open source safety tools. We’ve already lined up a few pilot partners to implement these tools at their organizations and help us refine these tools to ensure that they’re meeting real-life challenges and are adaptable for a variety of organizations.

Our leadership team will also soon be expanding, with the addition of new faces that are steeped in the trust and safety and open source worlds and have experience in bringing products to market that can have immediate positive impacts towards improving online safety for users.

We’re also thrilled to launch our Technical Advisory Committee, which will bring together accomplished engineers to help us shape the engineering design, principles and philosophy that ROOST will operate under. Their practical experience will be invaluable in ensuring our tools address real operational needs. Stay tuned for more!

Finally, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be participating in upcoming conferences, including UN Open Source week in June, and at TrustCon 2025 this July, where we’ll be speaking on panels focused on open source collaboration and safety tooling. Juliet Shen, our Head of Product, will be moderating the panel “Open Source Software for T&S: Unlocking Collaboration and Innovation,” made up of leaders from some of our partner organizations. Additionally, we’ll be at the 2025 AI+ Expo in Washington, DC, leading a panel discussion on “Building Open Infrastructure for Online Safety,” with key representatives from OpenAI, Discord and Roblox.

ROOST’s board and staff are excited about the enthusiastic response we’ve received from the trust and safety and open source communities since our launch in February at the Paris AI Action Summit. It confirms what we believed when we worked to launch ROOST — collaborative, open approaches to safety infrastructure are long overdue. For those not yet involved, there's never been a better time to get started. Please visit ROOST.tools to explore implementation opportunities or contribute to our growing organization.