I'd be a hypocrite to post my favorite projects with a praiseworthy sentence or two and leave it at that. I owe you an explanation of exactly what process and criteria I used to whittle down the field … because my own project is about transparency, and transparency means more than honesty – it means making it easy for you to see WHY I say what I say. So first I'll give my top 6, and then I'll explain where I’m coming from so you can decide how useful this is to you. It's all in order of big-picture to details, so read as little or as much as you have time for.

1. GiveWell: The World's First Transparent Grantmaker. My project. If I didn't honestly believe this to be the most promising opportunity in existence to help the world, I wouldn't be leaving a great job for it. I know exactly how strong a claim that is and I hope you'll give me a chance to justify it, whether by reading our short proposal or the full business plan prominently available on our website.

2. Farmer2Farmer learning. This idea is just so simple and makes so much sense. It doesn't have the problem, common to most "social sharing" tools, of being a framework whose entire usefulness depends on whether people happen to come use it. There is an appropriate division of labor: the project leaders collect and share information that is clearly available and clearly useful, and the translation into a better world is direct.

3. A light on money and politics: MAPLight. I know I like this project because I want this expanded to the national level so I can use it myself. MAPLight isn't just making information available or getting people together; it's doing the work for me to make information USEFUL (i.e., being able to see whether a senator's votes have aligned with special interests). That said, I totally disagree with the stated expansion plan for this project. I want to see it taken to more parts of govt; I want to be able to click on a rep and see what actual bills they've supported (not currently available) and slice that info different ways … I want these things so much more than widgets. Who cares about widgets updated in real-time? A link to a dynamic page is good enough when there are bigger fish to fry.

4. Records Quest. Basic premise: not all public records are online and in standard format. We should get them online and in standard format. …Yes. Simple, doable, and capable of empowering so many more people to find and comment on information. Great.

5. H.E.L.P./Disaster Logistics - I think telemedicine has great potential to improve the efficiency of aid projects helping the people in the most need.  I hesitated on this project because I feel like I've seen this technique before and I'm not sure how "new/innovative" it is - but ultimately I would like to see them make their case at the conference, and what they're doing is so directly beneficial to people in need (as well as being at least on the innovative side) that I decided to add them.

6. Grant Wrangler. This is a pretty well-designed and usable tool, which is saying a lot. Helping buyers find sellers in what looks like a large and important market.

7. Freecycle. I love the idea, but why is this an email list? What a pain, especially for anyone who wants free stuff, to have to get a trillion emails. And it seems to put an inherent cap on how much this can grow and stay useful. Why not a website where I can customize what I do and don't get alerted about? Why isn't the possibility even mentioned?

OK, now for how I decided. The trickiest thing about this whole exercise is the idea of awarding ideas. Ideas are cheap, and execution is everything. On the plus side, this observation allowed me to be lazy to a large degree, eliminating the lion's share of proposals based on a skim of their project summary/vision statement. Because even though I may have missed some amazing ideas that just weren't well expressed … someone who has truly thought through an idea and has true passion and intelligence behind it will find a way to express it simply and in a way that's immediately understandable and compelling – that produces an immediate "click." What I'm saying is that proposal quality counts for a lot and is a totally valid reason to knock out an otherwise good idea.

So, I did 3 rounds of evaluation: one just by skimming every summary and vision statement, another by reading through the entire proposal, and a final round involving checking out projects' actual website and discussing them with friends.

ROUND 1. I asked, "What are you going to do?" (not just "what change would you like to bring about?") and "How is this different from existing efforts?" If the answer wasn't quickly and immediately clear, see ya. If the summary had some other obvious-seeming problem that it didn't acknowledge, see ya. Almost all projects I eliminated in this round fell neatly into one of 8 categories (details below). This narrowed the field from 148 (I skipped late submissions) to 22.

ROUND 2. I read the full project proposals carefully. 6 projects had proposals that just weren't thoughtful: they didn't seem to have a clear idea of what the project is and what it isn't, or they left obvious questions (like "why can't this be commercial?" or "who is going to use this?") unaddressed. I was surprised at how few projects I knocked out in this way, but again – people who have true passion and competence think things through, so it makes sense that good quick-take vision statements generally were backed up good full proposals.

ROUND 3. A couple friends were over and I made them go over the proposals with me. We didn't just look at the proposals – wherever possible we looked at the websites behind them. We weren't looking for polished websites or fully functional products, but we were looking for projects that already do on a small scale what they promise to do on a large one. We used the products as though we were the intended audience, and though we were forgiving about low content (we weren't trying to reward older or famouser projects), we weren't about unusable design. We graded each project on both excitement factor (if this worked, how good for the world would it be?) and execution (do these people seem to know what they're doing?)

Now for more specifics on the kind of projects I eliminated early on:

23 proposals named a goal, but not a clear plan. It isn't enough to know what someone wants to accomplish. The plan of action, and how it differs from existing approaches, must be front and center. Any proposals calling for a "creative solution" to something without specifying what the solution was fell in this category.

48 proposals had me asking, "Isn't this already pretty much done?" and not getting answered. Of these, 37 were specifically proposing to create a "nonprofit version" of some existing tool, without specifying why nonprofit-specific needs call for a nonprofit-specific version. 27 of these 37 were proposing to create a social network for a particular kind of party, or for people interested in a particular kind of issue … there are already great tools for like-minded people to find each other (MySpace and Ning among others), so connecting people based on their interest in X is not enough. A specialized (not Ning-ized) social network shouldn't be created unless there is a clear need for something Ning can't provide.

8 proposals weren't ideas for new projects, but rather large existing projects planning to add a technology feature of some kind. They weren't looking to innovate, just to upgrade to something that already exists.

12 proposals were looking to educate disadvantaged people in existing technology. Using existing technology in a novel way is one thing; simply bringing blogging to a particular region of the world doesn't do it for me. I'm not saying these proposals aren't worthwhile – in fact I initially marked all of them for followup, but after seeing how many there were (and how many more must be out there, given the simplicity of the "Bring X technology to Y region" formula) I realized I should look for innovations, not aid projects.

On a related note, 5 projects simply looked irrelevant: charities, not innovative projects. I like charities a lot and as our proposal should make clear, I love helping people in ways that are already proven, effective, and scalable. This just isn't the time or the place for such things.

5 proposals were artistic in nature, to the point where the worthiness of the project depended entirely on their artistic abilities. Again, not the time or the place.

4 proposals want to make it easier and smoother for nonprofits to fundraise online. Sorry, but I think the ease of donating online is already around 9.8/10. If a charity can't get its donors excited enough to spend 5 minutes making a PayPal transaction … I'm not optimistic about what'll happen when it gets the wait down to 3 minutes. If a charity can't get people to its website, I'm not optimistic about a widget.

Part of this is that I'm just not excited about donors and "activists" with extremely short attention spans. Some people will disagree strongly with me on this, which is why I'm making it explicit, but I'm more interested in helping passionate people get things done than finding ways to shave seconds off of totally disengaged people's time commitments.

That brings me to the final category, 18 ideas I felt very unexcited about. Most of them are targeting people I'm not excited about getting involved in improving the world – including people who spend a ton of time on video games and people who don't want to spend more than 5 minutes at a time on anything. Some of these ideas were also in the category of "If this goes perfectly I still won't consider it an improvement to the world," because I saw their goals as inconsistent with mine or simply insignificant.

I haven't given specific criticisms of individual projects, only because it would take time I don't have to give them and to get involved in the debates. But if you'd really like my feedback on a particular project, leave a comment and if time permits I'll discuss it openly with you.

You'll notice a skeptical tone here. It isn't that I'm not impressed by the number and quality of these proposals – NetSquared has obviously pulled in a lot of talent. But changing the world is incredibly hard. It takes a huge commitment of time, energy and talent, not just a cool idea. It takes thinking something through, not just noticing that it isn't already done. So I don't agree with the people who have said there are "too many great projects to choose from." I think very few of these projects have any chance to really change the world. But I've done my very best to find the ones with the best shot, trying to be thoughtful without spending inordinate amounts of time, and I've explained what I did and didn't do to get at this question. I hope others do the same, and that we end up in San Jose with our 20 best chances to do some great work, because there is a lot of it to be done.