2008 YCI Forum Reflection Overall I feel the forum was successful. In the two weeks prior to the event I felt a bit overwhelmed at times with all the details of planning the event, but it was worth it. Despite some minor hiccups the forum went great. I felt like the youth who attended were engaged and by the end were ready to start doing more. The Friday evening event was ok, kids would've been more excited to be sharing their own presentations, and I think that this might be a good format change for next time. Neto's class project video and the poem that Jay performed were the highlight for me. I'd like to see every group attending have something to show and talk about during the media festival. If each GA is at a site regularly throughout the coming year, students will have more opportunities to develop core literacies with multimedia hardware and software. I would love to see youth engaging issues in their own communities using these tools. But to get there, we really need to be there regularly to both develop mentoring relationships with the students and help them develop core literacies. Timnah mentioned in her reflection the need to have clearly identified which groups (sites) were present and who would get the "giveaways". I agree that this is an important thing to note. This will certainly go smoother next time, but adding groups or individuals at the last minute was difficult to balance. Planning was a nightmare at times to be blunt. Not having the IRB approval until we did forced a bunch of limitations on us. Mike Adams and the East St. Louis group had less than one week to gauge interest and get people committed before the housing deadline. This also limited several others from spending the night in the dorm who wanted to. We should have had our training done sooner so that the pre-conference signup materials could go out. All in all it was a great conference and I'm pleased that it went well. Thanks to everyone who helped out and I'm looking forward to doing it again.