The goal of the Initiative is to provide students, researchers and practitioners from the "southern" and "northern" hemispheres high quality resource discovery on global development cooperation by means of a domain specific research tool.   The unique value proposition of the Initiative lies in the following facts:

    1. It uses state of the art technology that is available around the globe
    2. It builds on traditional collection development for an interdisciplinary domain
    3. It combines the strength of librarians, practitioners, students and researchers
    4. It draws on forces from academia and NGOs
    5. It focuses on collaboration rather than on technology development

As a result, the quality of this community generated content within Focuss.Info will result in the wow-factor in comparison with the quality of search results within generic search engines such as Google, Live or Yahoo.
 
The Initiative is trying to tackle various problems. Firstly, the amount of information on the Internet is increasing and our peers in the field of global development cooperation are increasingly using generic content search engines to try to find quality information.   However, generic content search engine are more about the quantity of websites rather than the quality of websites.   This Initiative aims to offer an alternative research tool for the field of global development cooperation: a specific content search engine.

Secondly, this Initiative also aims to solve the problem of connectivity between the Global South and Global North in general and the brain drain of developing countries to developed countries in particular by using Web 2.0 technologies. Web 2.0 technologies give the possibility of equal contribution of information for the creation of a content-rich collection in the field of global development cooperation.

Thirdly, this Initiative also aims to educate the students, researchers and individual practitioners from the Global South and Global North in the use of the Web 2.0 technologies that are free of charge. This is referred to as information literacy. Information literacy will induce people from the Global South and Global North to locate, access, and use information in today's societies.   For the UNESCO, information literacy is an important action as it provides "people with the skills and abilities for critical reception, assessment and use of information and media in the professional and personal lives".   This Initiative gives access to information and knowledge, and building an inclusive knowledge society which are the prerequisite of the empowerment of people.

Fourthly, the Initiative merges personal knowledge bases from the Global South and Global North which leads to knowledge exchange without any borders or limitations.

The Focuss.Info Initiative strengthens universities and academic capabilities in the Global South and Global North in the field of global development cooperation.   One of the reasons is that the Focuss.Info serves as a model for other public and university libraries in the Global South and Global North that want to create a content-rich collection without financial or spatial limitations. Where traditional libraries are restricted between the walls of the building and a certain amount of money, the future library within the Global South and Global North with Focuss.Info as best practice case does not encounter any of these limitations.   Thus, by promoting the usage of social bookmarking among peers in the Global South as well as the Global North, this Initiative is bringing learners and information workers together to aggregate their new knowledge of valuable e-resources in a way that makes the whole the community ultimately greater than the sum of the parts the individual social bookmark accounts with the individual selected favorite Internet resources.

The strengths and skills of the Focuss.Info Initiative is already being appreciated and acknowledged by many global and local institutions from the southern as well as the northern hemisphere.   Within one year the Initiative grew out from a collaboration with mainly European Institutions, researchers and individual practitioners, to a global collaboration with great interests from African and Eurasia countries.   As a result, a Kenyan partner organization is saving valuable Internet resources about local initiatives and a British partner organization is saving valuable Internet resources about global initiatives.   By sharing these local and global knowledge bases of valuable Internet resources, Focuss.Info encourages sharing and creating new ideas which leads to innovation in the field of global development cooperation because the more local knowledge interacts with global knowledge, or vice versa, the more likely they will affect each other.

After applying for a grant successfully, we preferably look for an Information Professional from the Global South to lead the Focuss.Info Initiative. This person will induce and promote new Web technologies in favor of community building in global development cooperation.   However, if this recruitment is not feasible, the current coordinators of the Focuss.Info Initiative will recruit somebody from the Global North. This will result in two different scenarios: a grant for the scenario to fund an information professional from the Global South, or a grant for the scenario to fund an information professional from the Global North. The current coordinators of Focuss.Info are favoring the scenario with an information professional from the Global South.   Within this scenario, the Initiative is able to pro-actively encourage and mobilize partner organization and individual practitioners from the more local areas in sub-Saharan Africa and Eurasia. Additionally, it gives these areas the possibility of professionally working with the issue: knowledge creation and sharing.