simsbox.net blog

I attended Barcamp Atlanta last weekend, an ad-hoc sleepover conference with free (as in beer) beer!  I got to learn and talk about a variety of things amongst people who are passionate about technology.  The main point of Barcamp is that the attendees are also the presenters.  Everyone who attends has to signup for a time slot to talk about something, even if it involves liquid nitrogen .  I chose to talk about the COPPA rules of all things.  I know, sounds boring, but at least it's not about twitter (nothing against presentations about twitter, it's just that there is always a lot of them).

I am no expert, but I did look into the details of COPPA when I created the digibutter.nerr forum.  It's something many site owners don't know about, but can get you into a lot of trouble .  Here are my ugly slides:

For my forum, I concluded that allowing kids under 13 was not worth the effort.  In the near future, after a site redesign, I would love to be able to allow them somehow.  So if I have to deal with all this COPPA crap for my site... why not help out other sites with the same problem?  That led me to the idea of providing an OpenID for kids.  A service that handles all the COPPA stuff, so individual websites who target children don't have a staff to answer phones and check faxes.  It also gives parents a way to easily provide consent and monitor their kid's privacy.  Everyone at Barcamp thought it was great, and suggested that I submit it for the upcoming Startup Weekend.  I find it really hard to let others in on my projects.  I feel like I need to protect them, like they are my babies, even though I should probably let them grow up.

photos by lanceweatherby