Parry Aftab serves as one of five members of Facebook’s
international Safety Advisory Board. During a meeting with Facebook senior
executives at Facebook headquarters in March 2010, Facebook indicated that they
had recently added new features to pages that could be used to target regional
members of Facebook. They thought it might have law enforcement and safety
applications and mentioned Amber Alert possibilities.
Parry turned to Allan McCullough, who was seated at her side
(and has been her husband for the last three years J), asking if he could help get
the Canadian provincial Amber Alert teams involved. (Allan had been directly
involved in bringing Amber Alert to New Brunswick, where he was living at the time.)
He asked if Facebook would be willing to roll this out first in Canada, before
the US or UK. They agreed.
While creating “official” Facebook pages was easy for
Facebook (an “official” Facebook page is created by Facebook itself and its
name is protected by Facebook on the network), these pages, given the subject
matter, should not have 3rd party advertisements and should not
permit users to post on the Amber Alert pages’ walls. Facebook, for the first
time in the world, customized the page templates to remove 3rd party
advertisements and user-post capabilities to meet our needs.
Allan (and Parry) championed this project with Facebook,
which committed several of its senior policy people to help develop the pages
and support the initiative. Allan himself built each of the pages for the
provinces, donating his time to help make Amber Alert on Facebook a reality.
Parry has lent her media and policy expertise to help publicize the initiative
and support the stakeholders to help this succeed. She has also provided
content of her charity, WiredSafety.org, to be used on the Amber Alert pages,
as has Allan from his non-profit, the Child Safety Research and Innovation
Center.
The first public launch of Amber Alerton Facebook in the world occurred on #PEI, at Allan's insistence. (He is an Islander!)