No one likes a bully. In cooperation with the United Nations’ World Summit on the Information Society, The World Summit Award for Inclusion and Empowerment goes to Community HUB in Mexico.

Developed on Visionect epaper technology, the Community HUB integrates cognitive computing with an electronic paper touchscreen in a solar-powered kiosk installed in schools, allowing students to report violence anonymously and safely.

According to the American Psychological Association, 40% to 80% of all school-age children will experience abusive behavior from their peers at some point during their school careers.

There's a pattern of extreme violence in Mexican schools. As much as 44% of the country’s students have been victims of violent incidents and 25% reported to have been threatened. That same year the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranked Mexico number one when it came to cases of abusive behavior in middle schools.

So this interactive signage project has worldwide relevance, and the UN award signifies that other communities with school bullying have a technology model that can help.

The Community HUB by PARE360 allows students to report violence anonymously and safely, by answering a few simple questions on a robust and easy-to-read Visionect epaper screen.

“Community HUB is, for all intents and purposes, a black box of violence prevention,” explains Alfonso Flores, the founder of PARE360 and the force behind the concept. “The system has been developed from scratch to detect risk factors among youth and develop policies to prevent and combat school violence through reporting and community engagement.”

The report generated by the Community HUB is transmitted in real time to the school director for immediate action, as well as to a mapping software. This allows for qualitative and quantitative analysis of the data gathered, assessing the safety of a school and shaping preventative policies, as well as enabling a deeper understanding of a child’s needs and values.

Strengthening the social inclusion of individuals, the reporting and alerting system was hailed as unique “because it mixes psychological factors with technological innovation and community participation that perfectly integrate the protective and predictive factors against crime.”

As electronic paper becomes ever more present in everyday life, Visionect says the Community HUB marks just the beginning of socially-conscious projects that can be made possible by epaper technology, from wayfinding to alert systems and real-time notification screens installable everywhere.

Let's call it "safety signage." Visionect's power-saving technology shows that digital signage isn't always about commercials and branding.

Go UN Award for Anti-Bullying Project with Visionect Signage