As everyone has mentioned, picking just a few selections from the excellent proposals to nominate for the NetSquared Technology Innovation Fund is very hard, given the quality of the proposals — I can't imagine anyone will be voting for fewer than 10!

I helped to develop the Genocide Intervention Network's proposal — An Anti-Genocide Community: Building the Political Will to End Genocide — and thus one of my ten votes will be going to that project.

I had a few qualifications in building my list — criteria that encompass our own proposal:

• At least half of the projects I nominated would be located in the Global South, because of the large divide that already exists between technology in the Global North and the Global South — and NetSquared's position to help alter this.
• The projects I nominated would be grounded in community concerns or community initiatives. For me, that is broad enough to encompass a "community" of human rights workers or even, potentially, nonprofits. But I wanted to see a demonstrated need for the technology or service.
• Needless to say, the projects I nominated would be involved in innovative community-building and/or social networking. A number of projects seemed like very worthwhile charities but outside the scope of this particular conference/fund.