The anticipation and excitement has long since passed. There is still no USAID Administrator and many in the development community are concerned about the lack in leadership. Paul Farmer marked a clear example of how the vetting process got in the way of bringing in a candidate many supported. Nicholas Kristof in his blog suggested that we "throw the vetters overboard." MFAN has taken it into their own hands to conduct a public online vote for the next USAIDS Administrator. You can visit MFAN's website and vote yourself for who the next Administrator should be. In their blog, there is space to make comments on how you voted and why.

Spitfire Strategies' July/Aug 2009 newsletter, Spitfire Sparks, is packed with incredibly useful tips on communications strategies. One in particular that caught our eye takes a closer look at how to best identify your audience. In our own advocacy evaluation work, we ask advocates to identify the narrowest possible audience and tailor their campaigns accordingly. Hollis Calhoun of Spitfire Strategies reminds readers that it's not about you- your message must reflect your audience. Her 5 tips are as follows:

1. 1. It's not about you. A key Spitfire principle is that the message must reflect the values of your primary audience. The same goes for your title. Who is the primary audience for the piece and what does that audience care about? What is important to them? What piece of your report will they find the most relevant and motivating? Identify this, and incorporate it into your title.
2. 2. What's the big idea? Be creative with your title, but make sure you highlight the core message of the piece. Veering too far off course risks misleading your audience about what they are going to read. This will frustrate your readers and cause them to lose interest. Worse, it could harm your organization's credibility. Instead of just identifying the topic (i.e. second-hand smoke and cancer), reference the main finding of your report (i.e., second-hand smoke linked to increased cancer rates).
3. 3. Short and sweet. Resist the temptation to summarize the entire report with your title. Lengthy titles are confusing and alienating, and increase the likelihood that your readers won't make it past the first few words. Pick the issue most important to your readership, and focus on that. Same goes for the subtitle. Avoid subtitles that read like a laundry list and focus instead on the main idea.
4. 4. Make it memorable. Link it to a current event, use a play on words, or reword a popular quote, book or movie title. Have fun with it. Scan the opinion pages of national newspapers on any given day and you'll see creative, catchy titles that grab your eye and keep you reading.
5. 5. Get a fresh set of eyes on your work. Use the tips above to brainstorm some potential titles. Then share them with others - whether colleagues in your organization or outsiders who aren't as familiar with your issue. Get their feedback, and adjust as necessary.

Read the rest of the newsletter here.

Celebrity stalking? Check. Updating friends on what you had for dinner? Check. Organizing a large-scale protest against unfair election results, and informing the world about human rights violations happening in your country? Check and check.

Throughout the length of its lifespan, Twitter has become all kinds of things for all kinds of people. And now, it can add another title to its ever-evolving list of uses: peacekeeper/law enforcer. Time Magazine just published an article on the London police force's attempt to use Twitter as part of an effort to promote better transparency to the public, as well as to help enforce peace during a planned environmental protest:

Environmental campaigners had announced plans to set up a 3,000-person-strong "camp for climate action" in the British capital on Aug. 26. In the days leading up to the event, police and protesters both promised to start tweeting information to ensure its peaceful running. "We set up a Twitter site specifically," says Chief Superintendent Helen Ball, the Met officer charged with explaining the purportedly high-tech, low-visibility operational policy. "The use of Twitter is within a range of different communication methods, improving understanding of why police are doing what they're doing."

Although they were hoping to actively use the social networking site in their attempts to keep the event as orderly as possible, the London police force still seems to be easing into the idea of publicizing their movements and intentions:

Despite having trumpeted the role Twitter would play in operations, the Met emitted only three terse tweets during the first day of the camp. "Mobile police station, for help or info, is in Wat Tyler Road," read @CO11MetPolice's last tweet of the evening.

Using Twitter really is a two-way street. In addition to providing the public with information on their activities, the London Metropolitan Police can now use the online service to track the activities of those who utilitze Twitter to organize their protests. Or as the author puts it:

Who needs undercover policing when activists document everything they do on Twitter?

With Twitter slowly conquering the law enforcement world, where will it go next? We will just have to wait and see.

The current healthcare debates on prevention versus treatment have made it clear that either someone is lying or that we are all defining prevention a bit differently. Charles Krauthammer argues in a recent Washington Post op-ed that the price of prevention will never be cheaper than treatment. He cautions readers to be wary of President Obama's claims that focusing on prevention will save both lives and money. Krauthammer sketches out an example:

Think of it this way. Assume that a screening test for disease X costs $500 and finding it early averts $10,000 of costly treatment at a later stage. Are you saving money? Well, if one in 10 of those who are screened tests positive, society is saving $5,000. But if only one in 100 would get that disease, society is shelling out $40,000 more than it would without the preventive care.

Larry Cohen, of the Prevention Institute in Oakland, CA has a different take on how we should approach prevention. His response to Krauthammer's piece was posted in the Chicago Tribune:

Preventive medicine - the statins and diabetes tests Mr. Krauthammer describes - is necessary but not sufficient. Community prevention, absent from his commentary, means investing in the creation of healthy communities to prevent disease before it occurs. Community prevention efforts such as sidewalks and farmers' markets support physical activity and access to healthful foods, keeping people out of the doctor's office in the first place and reducing health-care costs for everyone.

Health reform must include the kind of community prevention strategies, such as those used to reduce smoking, that have historically documented cost savings and will contain skyrocketing chronic disease rates and costs.

In Cohen's world, and that of the Prevention Institute, prevention does actually save money and save lives. Check out their list of resources and talking points for advocates.

This Sunday, The New York Times is releasing an issue of its Sunday magazine dedicated solely to discussing the issues surrounding women's rights. The main article, written by tireless women's rights advocates Nick Kristof and his wife, Sheryl WuDunn, discusses the ways in which making women and girls a priority in aid efforts could spur development and give aid organizations the best 'bang for the buck.' Before they delve deeply into that point, they begin the article by outlining some heartbreaking truths about the condition of a majority of the world's women:

Another huge burden for women in poor countries is maternal mortality, with one woman dying in childbirth around the world every minute. In the West African country Niger, a woman stands a one-in-seven chance of dying in childbirth at some point in her life. (These statistics are all somewhat dubious, because maternal mortality isn't considered significant enough to require good data collection.) For all of India's shiny new high-rises, a woman there still has a 1-in-70 lifetime chance of dying in childbirth. In contrast, the lifetime risk in the United States is 1 in 4,800; in Ireland, it is 1 in 47,600. The reason for the gap is not that we don't know how to save lives of women in poor countries. It's simply that poor, uneducated women in Africa and Asia have never been a priority either in their own countries or to donor nations.

Foreign Policy recently profiled the rise of increasingly prolific blogger, Nasim Fekrat, who is the creator of the blog Afghan Lord. Fekrat, frustrated that Afghanistan was seen merely as a breeding ground for extremism, wanted to show the world a different side to his homeland:

"People outside of Afghanistan have no idea what really exists here," a deep-voiced 26-year-old blogger named Nasim Fekrat says. "I was searching for Helmand [on the Internet] the other day. The only things that came up were about terrorists and suicide and bombs. But there is another side to Helmand, another face. There is agriculture, art, museums, culture."

On his groundbreaking blog, Afghan Lord, Fekrat hopes to tell that to the world. Writing in Farsi as well as self-taught English, he has taken it upon himself to show Afghanistan's softer, more genuine face. Until recently, he feels, this face was nearly impossible to find.

The blog not only documents what is happening in Afghanistan, but also reveals the extent to which the power of the internet can be harnessed to bring people together. With the popularity of Fekrat's blog rising, many would-be Afghan bloggers, eager to have their voices heard, are rushing to his blog school to learn how to navigate the sprawling world of the internet. With someone like Fekrat advocating the proliferation of internet use in Afghanistan, the possibilities for change in the country are limitless:

"People have realized that there is an audience, and there is a way to [disperse] information. Everybody here knows about what happened in the Iran election, and they know how the Internet and blogs changed it."

Of course, Afghanistan is facing an election of its own, and the growing Afghan blogosphere will have a role to play, however small in a country where only one in 30 has Internet access. "Before, people always had to ask 'What is a blog?', and that is changing," Fekrat says.

In the meantime, Fekrat's mission remains showing Afghanistan to the world -- and spurring Afghanistan to put itself online. I asked him what he hopes to achieve with his journalism and community-building in the next year. "We are people and we need connection. For you, Annie, to understand me as a human being, as an Afghan, as a human being who has feelings, love, hatred, and culture, is listening to the same music as Annie listens to."

What is a comprehensive global health strategy? Bill Frist, US Senate majority leader from 2003 to 2007 and member of the Millennium Challenge Corporation's board of directors expressed his clear vision for holistic solutions to fight world poverty in the Boston Globe (a big task). Frist frames his argument by cautioning on the interpretation of indicators: benchmarks such as HIV/AIDS patients treated or bed nets distributed are hard measurements but in no way sufficient to evaluating the impact of global health programs. Frist writes:

This new thinking - led by a strong example and commitment from the United States - should look at global health investments as interconnected parts of a complex system of care. While the 25.3 million Africans infected with HIV/AIDS certainly need treatment now, they also need an integrated approach to their illness that ensures they have passable roads to reach clinics for care and access to clean water so they do not contract other diseases to complicate their already-compromised health. Treating people can only do so much if they risk death on unsafe roads or cannot sell their goods to support their families.

This translates to building in-country capacities, training more health care professionals who choose to stay in their countries, fighting corruption to ensure that money makes its way into the healthcare sector, evaluating immunization rates, examining total public expenditure on health, and other alternative approaches to traditional global health policies and measures. Frist makes a good argument for the value of good policies that will ultimately lead to sustainable results and target global poverty most effectively.

Radiohead's poignant tribute to Harry Patch reminds us not to forget the lasting and tragic impacts of war. Thom of Radiohead prefaced the inspired song lyrics with a short note:

Recently the last remaining UK veteran of the 1st world war Harry Patch died at the age of 111. I had heard a very emotional interview with him a few years ago on the Today program on Radio4. The way he talked about war had a profound effect on me. It became the inspiration for a song that we happened to record a few weeks before his death. It was done live in an abbey. The strings were arranged by Jonny. I very much hope the song does justice to his memory as the last survivor. It would be very easy for our generation to forget the true horror of war, without the likes of Harry to remind us. I hope we do not forget. As Harry himself said: "Irrespective of the uniforms we wore, we were all victims". This morning the Today program played the song for the first time and now it is available to download from our website.

Harry Patch (In Memory Of)
"i am the only one that got through
the others died where ever they fell
it was an ambush
they came up from all sides
give your leaders each a gun and then let them fight it out themselves
i've seen devils coming up from the ground
i've seen hell upon this earth
the next will be chemical but they will never learn"

The Netroots Nation conference is being held August 13-16. The convention will bring together progressive organizations and politicians who use new media to exchange ideas on how technology can better influence the public and the U.S. government. The best part for those of us who can't make it out to Pittsburgh is that these international experts, training sessions, and workshops are all available online, many of which are live broadcasted. With keynote speakers such as President Bill Clinton's, the videos are worth checking out.

Our apologies for a lack of weekly updates in your inboxes last week. Our staff, for once, managed to abandon our beloved computers and enjoy the joys...and fears of hiking in the mountains. In fact, such adventures were made even more appropriate with Nicholas Kristof's recent column encouraging his readers to go take a hike. His 10 wise hiking tips fail to address the danger of illegal Ukrainian marmot-hunters with shotguns, an unexpected circumstance I stumbled upon in the Cascade Mountains of Washington. With a breath of fresh mountain air, and somewhat safely rejuvenated (only a few polite bear encounters), we are glad to be back and blogging.

A few days ago, CARE USA and the CSIS Global Health Policy Center teamed up to send policymakers, government officials, and global health experts on a fact finding mission to Kenya. Through this Learning Tour, this group was hoping to "look at the successes and challenges of U.S. funded global health programs," especially focusing on maternal health and child health programs.

Throughout the trip, Representative Keith Ellison has been tweeting updates on all that he has seen, giving his readers a sense of being right there with him. His narratives are all the more compelling due to his skill at weaving touching stories with 'bigger picture' contextual factoids. (hard enough to do without a 140-figure limit!):

Nr Kisumu: Left a woman's home who's son died in Kenya's post-election violence, 08. 1500 killed. Grave on-site.

Find a screenshot of his entries from Kenya here.

Along with talks about the most successful means to fight terrorism through an integrated development approach, there are hang-ups around what should and should not get funded with American dollars. More specifically USAID dollars. A recent Washington Post article by Column Lynch article touched on creative alternatives to fighting terrorism and why they were shot down:

Three years ago, while working for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Kyrgyzstan, Clifford H. Brown came across an idea that he thought could help stem the spread of radical Islam in the Central Asian nation.

The University of Montana had proposed translating Islamic writings from Persian and Arabic into the local Uzbek and Kyrgyz languages. Brown hoped the translations could have a moderating influence at a time when a conservative Islamist group, Hizb ut-Tahrir, was expanding its influence in the region.

"Islam has a large body of moderate literature saying, for example, that suicide is a sin against Allah," he later wrote in a paper describing his efforts to fund the initiative. "Not a bad idea, I thought at the time."

But USAID lawyers rejected the proposal, saying that using taxpayer funds would violate a provision in the First Amendment barring the government's promotion of religion. The agency also prohibited Brown from publishing the opinion piece, which laid out his case for the proposal, according to Brown and a senior USAID official. A USAID lawyer said publication of the paper would have violated government restrictions on disclosure of privileged information.

The problem with such restrictive laws over foreign assistance is that now the fight against terrorism is deeply linked to religion. When the buildings that are in need of reconstruction overseas are mosques, do they get funding because they are linked to religion? How intertwined is development and religion? And could USAID work around its restrictions to finance development projects that also decrease radical Islam?

Walking along Connecticut Avenue everyday to get to work, I not only get to meet my share of street canvassers (employed by various aid and other do-good organizations), but also have the chance to hear other people's responses to these requests for donations. Most often (when they actually take the time to listen to these pitches), a number of people are reluctant to donate because they do not know where this money would go, and what impact it would even have.

It is a difficult question that many organizations have to contend with: what exactly do you do with all this cash, and will you even have an impact in the long run?

The journalists at The Guardian in partnership with the African Medical and Research Foundation (Amref) and Farm-Africa, are striving to answer these questions, providing the public with a clearer picture of what development and aid organizations actually do. For three years, the Katine Project, named for a village in Uganda, will document every aspect of life in Katine and the surrounding region, the challenges that Amref encounters while working toward the project's goals and their efforts to overcome them, and the real impact that this project have on the inhabitants of Katine:

The project is focusing on five key areas, and improvements in each will be recorded in dedicated sections on the site. So, you can find out about the project goals and catch up on progress in education, health, water, governance and livelihoods at the click of a button.

An important part of the Katine project is listening to its residents - finding out about their lives and giving them a forum to express their views, not only on the work of Amref and Farm-Africa in their communities, but also on the decisions made by Ugandan politicians in Kampala that could impact their lives. The NGO Panos, which works to strengthen media, debate and information in developing countries, will hopefully help empower locals to tell their stories, which you can read in our village voices section.

Throughout the project we will be attempting to put the work going on in Katine into context by reporting on Uganda's history and politics, including the war being waged in the north of the country by the Lord's Resistance Army, a war that has directly affected Katine.

We will also explore the wider issues of international development in our aid and development section.

Also harkening back to what we do over here at GII, the page also includes reports by the project evaluator, who examines the project's goals and strategies and see if they are making progress in a timely manner. Chock-full of pictures, videos, news stories, backgrounders, financial reports, and more, this page is rich with resources for aid organizations and the public alike.

As Twitter ventures into new mediums, the debate around its value in relaying quality messages continues. What is, in fact, the value of a tweet? Is it simply the exploration of new forms of messaging that intrigue users or is there a substantive and uniquely new value or message that can be found in social media such as Twitter?

Anne Midgette of The Washington Post reported on an unexpected Twitter user: the National Symphony Orchestra, in hopes of bridging the long standing divide between classical music lovers and new technology, sent out tweets throughout its performance last night:

Here's what will happen: The orchestra will use the micro-blogging site Twitter to send text messages of 140 characters or fewer from conductor Emil de Cou during the performance. (Example: "In my score Beethoven has printed Nightingale = flute Quail = oboe Cuckoo = clarinet -- a mini concerto for woodwind/birds.")

The idea is that those interested will sit in a designated area on the Wolf Trap lawn with their BlackBerrys, iPhones or other mobile devices and, by following the Twitter user NSOatWolfTrap, gain a new perspective on the score. Of course, you can also follow along without actually being at Wolf Trap at all.

This raises the question: what is tweeting actually doing to provide added quality to listeners' experience at the concert? Does this form of messaging work in such a classical context? By tweeting, more information about a musical piece is communicated to a wider audience at the appropriate moment during the performance so that its message becomes more understandable than if it were simply written at program notes and read before the music begins. Certain conductors have been known in the past to talk to their audience during a concert for this very reason. And other similar attempts have been made:

The NSO's Twitter experiment... strongly resembles a project started around 2004 (before Twitter) called the Concert Companion, which involved sending text messages to hand-held devices during orchestral concerts.

Many of the people who used the devices were enthusiastic. One longtime subscriber said he had heard "Petroushka" numerous times, but had never actually understood so much about what was going on. But others found it tiring because following a piece with the Concert Companion called for a greater level of concentration on the music than they were used to: It made them listen more, not less. Those who were up in arms against the thing generally didn't try it out at all because they were so certain that it represented egregious dumbing down. (One problem the project ran into is that the hand-held devices kept getting stolen; so much for the refinement of classical music audiences.)

But the success or failure of the Twitter experiment -- the question of whether this can emerge as a viable enhancement of the concert experience -- will ride primarily on the quality of the tweets, and whether they're interesting enough to compel an audience. What classical music audiences and administrators too often forget is that all these new technologies are mediums, not messages: How well they work depends entirely on how intelligently they're used in the service of what they're trying to communicate. The real point is that the message -- the quality of the music, not some watered-down version of it -- deserves to be disseminated widely, by any means possible.

With hundreds of new iPhone apps being introduced into the marketplace every week, it is hard to determine what is worth looking into and what should be ignored. Since the iPhone's launch, apps have ranged from the phenomenally inappropriate and useless to the ingeniously practical.

A wonderful new iPhone app and website that may be worth investing in is the GoodGuide. Launched only last September by Dara O'Rourke, professor of environmental and labor policy at the University of California, Berkeley, the GoodGuide evaluates and rates products for not only their health and environmental impacts, but their social impacts as well. With products all competing to "out-green" themselves, it is almost impossible to distinguish between marketing ploys and true "green-ness."

"What we're trying to do is flip the whole marketing world on its head," said Mr. O'Rourke. "Instead of companies telling you what to believe, customers are making the statements to the marketers about what they care about."

A few years ago, Mr. O'Rourke noticed that at the end of his lectures, audience members were raising their hands to ask which kind of laptop or sneaker or lotion to buy. Americans are becoming increasingly interested in what is in the stuff they buy.

With this tool in hand, we can all make socially conscious, as well as healthy and environmentally friendly decisions every time we shop.