"Our monitor of the social network would be a 16-year-old girl named Sarah living in poverty in West Virginia," said Nancy Sturm, technology adviser for West Virginia. "She would moderate all of that discussion so those kids would be able to go online and tell their stories, giving a face to poverty in the state of West Virginia."
Sturm added that the forum would provide children with information about scholarships and other poverty-related government resources.
The project doesn't have a deployment date yet because the WV.gov production team is still figuring out the rules for monitoring and vetting content users create on the site.
"We're still trying to decide whether we should go with the private sector to build [the forum] and just have a link to it from the governor's page, or whether it is something the government can roll out," Sturm said.