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West Virginia Social Networking Portal Will Serve Needy Children

Online social networking forums are now the default source of community information for many Americans. A forthcoming social networking application on the West Virginia state Web portal could provide a template for cities and counties to imitate.

Online social networking forums are now the default source of community information for many Americans as Web 2.0 technologies permeate the culture. Local governments should keep an eye on a forthcoming social networking application on the West Virginia state Web portal that will serve poor children. If the project succeeds, it could provide a template for cities and counties to imitate.

"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.

Andy Opsahl is a former staff writer and features editor for Government Technology magazine.