We launched the project at our first stakeholder event in Canberra on 28th November where we provided an overview of the project. If you missed it, you can watch it back here.
Since then, the project team has been putting in place the foundations for the project.
We have published our Project Plan and an Initial Impartiality Report
We have established a Stakeholder Advisory Board which held its first meeting before Christmas and will meet next at the start of February. We will publish its membership on our website shortly, and the terms of reference and minutes of the first meeting will also be posted (after approval at their second meeting).
We are now formally issuing a Call for Participation, which involves collecting details from age assurance providers, relying parties and intermediaries who would like their approach to be considered by the trial in a more formal and structured manner. We hope to consider age verification, age estimation, age inference, parental controls and parental consent, as well as solutions located across the technical stack e.g. app stores, device-level, operating systems and Internet Service Providers.
We would be grateful if any organisation interested in being part of the trial could complete this Expression of Interest form by the 20th January 2025 at the latest. It should only take 10-15 minutes to complete at most. The trial’s technical team will then review the applications and confirm if your method(s) will be provisionally accepted for the trial – we aim to confirm this within 7 days of a submission. We will of course explain why any offer is not taken forward, for example, if we have a lot of almost identical methods. Some methods may not be sufficiently developed to be practically tested (falling below what is defined as “Technical Readiness Level 4”), but they can still be submitted for a static (theoretical) assessment and we strongly encourage this as we are looking at innovative ideas as well as more broadly deployed technologies. Organisations are welcome to make multiple submissions covering different methods (“successive” systems which combine multiple methods should be covered in a single form).
The next step in the trial process will be to complete a more extensive Practice Statement which is the basis for the detailed design of the trial process for each method being considered. There will be a straightforward Participation Agreement, setting out the terms and conditions for joining the trial and we will also schedule an informal introductory discussion with our technical team and a formal Vendor Interview with one of our auditors.
Our full project website is due to go live in the week of 20th January and will have responses to frequently asked questions we have already received and some we anticipate. Feel free to use the contact us form on our website to submit any questions you may have, so we can try to answer them on our website.
We will be hosting our second Stakeholder Event in Sydney (and online) at 2pm, Thursday February 6th.
Please register and learn more about the agenda here.
Thank you again for your interest in this landmark trial.
