On behalf of the N2 team, thanks for this post, Partha:

http://www.netsquared.org/comment/reply/5074#comment-form

I think we're all feeling a mixture of elation at the wealth of great ideas being unleashed here, and frustration as the impossibility of selecting 20 that are clearly superior. The criteria are very open but the flip side of that is that they are very susceptible to interpretation. Add that to 152 projects and it's kind of overwhelming.Inevitably, wonderful projects will not get chosen this year and it will be both unfair and, for this year at least, not really preventable.

I think we are finding out two things. The first is that there really is a large 'field' of web-based social enterprises that aspire to high social impact and believe they can sustain their efforts over time. I certainly think of these 152 entries as representative of the field, not encompassing it. I know of many projects that didn't enter that very well could have, and there are certainly many beyond that I'm unaware of.

The second discovery is happening during the voting. We will discover which of the three parameters--technology, sustainability, impact--matter the most to the kind of people who pay attention to this field. Or maybe I should say: which combination of parameters matter the most.

I would expect that next year we would move to subcategories to enable more apple:apple type comparisons.

But it's this year and I haven't even voted yet! Thank goodness for the extension.