Halfway

Building in public. Eight weeks in, eight to go.

Halfway. This fortnight was about making Socialheads work for more than one person at a time, and about turning the safeguarding promise into screens you can actually use.

What shipped

• Group chats on both apps. The right people in one conversation, on the computer or on the phone.
• Compliance you can see. Supervisors and org admins get their first reports, and compliance and safeguarding leads each get a live dashboard built for the responsibility they carry. The platform should not just be safe, it should show its working. Now it does.
• Safeguarding built in. Anyone can raise a message for review, and every action leaves a trail. Small but absolutely vital for services with important safeguarding duties.
• Assigned workers. A service can be set up so every service user has a named worker. When that worker changes, the conversation follows, and the old thread is kept read-only for the record. Handovers are where information usually gets lost. Not here.
• A polish pass across the mobile app: a smoother chat experience, a new You section, hints on your first sign-in, unread badges and calmer motion.
• One-click demos. We can hand someone a safe, throwaway copy of the platform, with realistic personas, behind a rotating password. Seeing it beats describing it.
• Sign-in is maturing: every organisation now gets its own space with enterprise-grade sign-in behind it, the groundwork for single sign-on with larger organisations.

Challenges

It was far from plain sailing. Nursery germs are undefeated. I caught a proper viral flu and it took me down for the first week. The sprint still closed at 121 points, our second biggest yet. It’s amazing progress.

Compliance and safeguarding remain a big piece of work. That is exactly as it should be. It is the heart of the product, and it gets the time it needs rather than the time that is convenient.

And file and media handling is genuinely complex. Photos and documents in a safeguarding context carry a lot of security thinking: what is allowed in, how it is checked, where it lives, who can see it, and how it is disposed of when it should be. We have a solid plan, and now we build it.

What’s next

Eight weeks to go. The next sprint we’re tackling:

• File and media handling, done the safe way.
• The internationalisation and localisation foundation, so every service can speak to people in its own words.
• Accessibility improvements, because Socialheads should work for as many people as possible.
• The road to alpha testing on phones.
• Compliance monitoring, so Socialheads stays continuously aligned with regulators and governing bodies.