ROOST Welcomes Three New Members to Its Board of Directors
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ROOST Welcomes Three New Members to Its Board of Directors
Today we're delighted to welcome three new board members: Maria Ressa, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Columbia Professor and CEO of Rappler; Jason Kwon, Chief Strategy Officer, OpenAI; and Karen Courington, Vice President of Consumer Trust and Safety, Google.
Robust Open Online Safety Tools (ROOST) is a nonprofit organization building and maintaining free, open source tools for online safety, such as the Coop content review console, the Osprey investigation and rules enforcement engine, and a suite of open source licensed detection models and safeguards built with AI partners. ROOST believes everyone deserves online safety, and that means organizations and platforms of every size – from nonprofit community groups to middle tech – need access to the technical solutions that protect their users.
Maria, Jason, and Karen join at a moment where ROOST tools are protecting more than 370 million monthly active users across platforms, the ROOST organization has doubled in size and established a community of contributors and collaborators, and scientific efforts with partners like Mila are finding new ways to safeguard the most vulnerable.
But these board members also join at a time when AI-enabled harms – such as generative AI child sexual abuse material (CSAM) and non-consensual intimate imagery (NCII), and AI-powered fraud and scams – are escalating. In the middle of this escalation are a new class of builders, creating applications for the first time with the help of AI, and learning that egregious harms don’t discriminate between platform size.
Every organization having safety by default and access to advanced safety tooling has never been more critical. We’re proud to welcome these three new board members to guide the next stage of ROOST’s journey.
Meet the New Board Members
Maria Ressa is a journalist, professor, and Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Maria’s journalism work has covered Asia for over 40 years. In 2011 Maria co-founded Rappler, the top digital-only news organization in the Philippines. At a moment of increased consolidation and concentration in the AI industry, Maria sees an open commons of safety tools as key for power redistribution. She brings her expertise in investigative journalism, information integrity and the intersection of tech and democracy to ROOST.
Jason Kwon’s tech career has spanned engineering, product, and law. He previously served as General Counsel of Y Combinator Continuity, and today is the Chief Strategy Officer of OpenAI. With the increased concerns around AI harms, both immediate harms and those on the horizon, Jason sees open source and collaboratively maintained safety infrastructure as the path towards resilience in AI safety.
Karen Courington brings her experience in government, security and tech, and consumer safety to ROOST, including perspectives from her current role as Vice President of Consumer Trust and Safety at Google. At a moment where consumer fraud and scam attempts are rising in volume and sophistication, Karen sees greater access to the advanced safety technologies as the path to a safer technology future for all.
They join other ROOST board members Angela Lungati, Audrey Tang, Megan Smith, Niki Christoff, Camille Francois, Clint Smith, Eli Sugarman, Jamil Jaffer and Mark Surman.
We are honored to have Maria, Jason, and Karen join us in this mission.
Members of the ROOST Board and leadership team gathered in New York to welcome the three new board members.