September 24-26 the Global Alliance for ICT and Development (GAID), and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) will host the Global Forum on Youth and ICT for Development: Youth and ICT as Agents of Change in Geneva, Switzerland. TakingITGlobal, one of the Featured Projects at the Net2 Conference, is one of 25+ partners supporting the event.

GAID recently launched a website for the event which includes a blog. According to an article on the Digital Opportunity Channel, a blog was included to encourage discussion among the youth and to get their feedback:

"The blog will allow young people to discuss the use of ICT in these fields and address specific cases, lessons learned, protagonists and policies," said Mr.Khan. "Experts from various sectors will moderate the blog and will be raising difficult questions or highlight controversial issues in order to engage readers and provoke them to respond with their positions and to ask further questions".

"We believe young people will value this opportunity to interact with an expert, and will give us useful feedback while we organize panels and workshops for the Forum and kick-start the exchange of ideas."

It will be interesting to see how young people interact with an adult expert. I hope that they have youth experts blogging too. The couple of times I have been an adult mentor on a youth blogging project, I felt like the young people were more comfortable commenting on other young people's blogs rather than on the adults' posts.