Trustguide continued the dialogue began with the Foresight Cyber Trust and Crime Prevention project into building a safer cyber world and sought to establish clear guidelines for the research, development and delivery of trustworthy ICT and to identify where the responsibilities lie in making our future ICT-enabled world a safe one. The Royal Society's Science in Society programme extended the cyber trust debate to include the public.

Opinions differ as to how responsibilities should be divided between: those that regulate ICT ("illegal downloading should be prosecuted"), those that produce the technology ("software companies should be liable for any security defects"), those that use the technology to deliver services ("ISPs and banks should do more to protect consumers from phishing scams") and those that consume the services ("consumers should maintain firewalls and anti-virus software on their PCs").

By engaging those that shape our ICT future with a wider community we believe we can build a world where future ICT systems are more trustworthy and citizens can confidently lead an online life.

The project sought to produce clear guidelines for the research, development and delivery of trustworthy ICT through workshops that brought together particular research projects, those interested in formulating trust enhancing guidelines and the public.

Over the 15 months, ending October 2006, we hosted several workshops across the UK.  Each workshop focused on a range of trust issues that arise through the development and deployment of new technologies.

The goal of the workshops was to develop guidelines for those engaged in the researching, development and delivery of ICT as to how cyber trust might be enhanced.  We champion these guidelines and establish a dialogue between those that shape the technology, other interested participants, and the wider public, in order to enhance the existing cyber trust community so that it is capable of addressing complex and subtle issues as they arise.

By taking the outputs of Foresight as the starting point, each workshop sought to refine a living document that built into an appropriate set of guidelines.

We believe that by engaging members of the public with current ICT research projects, we can refine the suggestions from Foresight as to how cyber trust might be enhanced into simple checkbox guidelines that could be used as research, development and delivery project health checks. In short, we aimed to bridge the gap between general comments on trustworthiness ("everything should be open source") and today's specific advice on how to produce secure code ("avoid buffer overflow"). We believe these guidelines can form the basis of subsequent discussion between government, universities and industry.