DEC–A goldmine of information locked behind a weak website

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Several years ago, USAID created a beautiful repository for all those progress reports, lessons learned reports, and technical studies that it generates: The Development Experience Clearinghouse. From its frontpage:

USAID's Development Experience Clearinghouse (DEC) is the largest online resource for USAID funded technical and program documentation, with over 62700documents available for electronic download.

The idea of the site is wonderful–to make all of the documents that are generated by USAID and its contractors publically available. I use it frequently when I need to research a new project or country. I love that my old reports are available through the site including quite a bibliography from our Hurricane Georges Project. I love getting the weekly email with the lists of all of the new titles. The variety is quite inspiring:

This past week's email contained around 130 titles. Sure, some of the reports are very specialized or just routine progress reports. However, there must be a lot of great information buried in this pile of reports. Unfortunately, it remains buried. I am intrequed to learn what was learned during the grassroots civic education project in Eygpt, but I fear that the report is just a routine, "we did what we promised to do" report. I don't have time to wade through 130 reports a week.

I would love to see one of two things happen:

  1. Have the DEC website switch to a youtube format: The information page for each report would include both a counter to show how popular it is and a place to leave comments. You could easily see which reports are most popular (and in theory most interesting) for any category or country. The comments would let you know what other people thought of the report (or the project).
  2. Have a New York Times  "Review of Books" style newsletter that also comes out each week. This review could highlight the best new reports and dig out some of the buried jewels. Alternately, this could be a great subject for a blog: The USAID Report Review. Ideally, you would have reviewers from the different fields and from different geographic areas. If the review or blog attracted enough attention, it could even improve the quality of the reports themselves as people actually competed to be highlighted in the blog. 

The options are not exclusive–the youtube-type site would make it easier to identify reports that needed a review. I doubt that USAID will take the chance of opening up the site to comments and ratings. However, what about starting a blog to review the USAID reports? Anyone intersested? 

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