Opening the doors to communication.

I have 2 projects in the works (well, none of them are started yet but it should only be a matter of weeks at the most) and they consist of giving tools to people to communicate. So far so good. But as we all know, some people (*cough* teenagers *cough*) sometime tend to abuse of their communication channels. I`m all for free speech and I`m not fond of censorship but sometimes, some comments or things said are just not having any positive or constructive consequences.
The first project is simply a pen pal one. I want some of my Japanese students to write a letter in English to a student in Canada. I`m convinced that my Japanese students` letters will pretty much all go like ; ``Hi! My name is JD and I like candies. Do you like candies?``. The only worry I had was about the letters coming back from Canada... As you probably know, Canadian teenagers tend to be a bit more... hmm...``knowledgeable`` about birds and bees, funny cigarettes and these kind of things.But I`m probably just paranoid; the students taking part in this exchange will probably know how to behave and won`t try to corrupt the nice and  innocent Japanese students. So no big deal.

The second project tho is a bit more ambitious. While discussing with a parent which also happens to be involved in the school`s publishing committee and the PTA (I think), we agreed that there would be a need for an online tool that would allow students, teachers, parents, alumni and everybody involved with the school to communicate about various subject. At the same time, that tool would promote the use of English in school related discussions.
Part of the solution is an online forum where all these people can exchange knowledge. When we say forum, we also say ``threads`` and ``posts``. All this usually involves moderators...
I have no problem being a moderator and making sure that the forum is not used in any bad ways (attacking someone`s reputation, cheating...) but I can only do it for posts that are written in English (or French, but that won`t happen). I`m pretty sure that most of the posts will be in Japanese because it will naturally be more efficient for most of the users even if we try to promote English communication.
I`m pretty sure that everyone will behave and use the forum for positive sharing of ideas and building a better community but all we need is one person with bad intentions and everything could turn into a  PR nightmare. We would be hoping for the official school`s webpage to link to our forum. Even if it would not be managed by the school itself, any drama happening on the forum would have consequences for the school. So we need to be very careful.
We need to think and discuss more to figure out what level of security we really need and if the whole thing is a good idea or not. I think the possibilities of a tool like that could be amazing and it would be a shame to take it away from this community even before it comes to life because we are scared of what one individual could do.
To be continued...