Hi. I just submitted a proposal to the USAID Development 2.0 Challenge called "Social Networking to Improve Advice on Development Priorities to Incoming Administration".  USAID rightly champions the principles of good governance as fundamental conditions for successful development - principles of transparency, participation of stakeholders in decision making, and access to information, for example.  I want your help to turn the spotlight back on USAID and give it the chance to bask in some governance goodness.  I think that social networking tools could help heighten the dialogue on priorities for foreign assistance in the US.

When a new Administration comes to Washington, development stakeholders, particularly beneficiaries of government largesse, seek to influence priorities. One tool is briefing papers, sometimes called white papers.  Wouldn't it be interesting to scrape recommendations from these papers and publish them online, in a forum for broader public discussion, with networking tools like tags and ranks?  Perhaps the format that NetSquared uses for its challenges would be the way to go.  My proposal is something of a "meta-project" - not delivering on the ground results but facilitating the way priorities get discussed. Americans tend to be poorly informed about foreign assistance - how much we pay, what it achieves etc.  Perhaps with more outreach using social networking, we can recover our role as a leader in global development.

Whether or not this merits inclusion in the competition, I could sure use the advice of social networking community in order to refine the approach.  If you have ideas, please leave me a comment!

best,

John Waugh