Scaling Up ~ Sharing Experience ~ Tapping Local Knowledge ~ Creating Sums Greater than the Parts ~ Replicating Success. The international development community has pursued these goals for decades with a lack of visible impact, and not for want of trying.

Why have these goals been so elusive? Perhaps because most efforts to reach them have been designed and orchestrated from the top down. The Development Practitioners Forum is different. We start in the field, where practitioners are searching for practical knowledge, seeking new ways to collaborate, and testing new approaches, and we build from there.

The Forum’s goal is to create connective tissue across the “Development 2.0” ecosystem so that its full promise can be realized. We empower practitioners through our mission of building and strengthening online and offline knowledge networks in ways that tap their knowledge, preserve it, and put it to practical use.

This site is a hub for knowledge sharing.  Materials are fed into this site from complementary online and offline platforms:

InfoSpring is a Q&A web platform that enables users to post questions and answers, tag topics, rate content, and collaborate to solve problems. The site is democratic in spirit and user-driven. Content currently on the site encompasses sustainable agriculture, food security, climate change and natural resource management, and will be expanded to cover related themes that influence development practice as the community demands. InfoSpring also has a built-in translation feature for 60 languages. Click here to open InfoSpring.

Country chapters are designed to extend the Forum’s reach to practitioners who work primarily or exclusively offline. Important knowledge related to development program design, implementation and evaluation typically remains in the field.  We hope to amplify the voices from the field and bring this valuable asset to the global development practitioner community.   Our first chapter opens this April in Liberia, and a second one is planned for Kenya in mid-2010.  Chapter activities will take shape around informal, open-invitation practitioner sessions to build person-to-person networks with a culture of candor, shared learning, and practical problem solving. Visit our country chapter page to see read blogs and reports on chapter events, and interact with practitioners’ in the field.