Juror Ruth Levine, director of programs and senior fellow at the Center for Global Development and a former World Bank staffer with deep experience in health planning and financing, offers these thoughts on how to improve Development Marketplace. Her thoughts tie in with what Bart Weetjens said in an earlier blog. Here are Ruth's suggestions:

Since Tuesday, when I watched some of the most worthy health and development projects I've seen for a good long fade away into the Development Marketplace "out" pile, I have been worried that we missed some big opportunities and perhaps let the sizzle of the DM overwhelm the steak. What I mean is that there are large expenses involved with the DM infrastructure: the call for projects, the meetings and reviews, the travel of finalists, the display area...and all the rest. And with that, the DM is able to do something really incredible: get a very large number of high-quality, innovative project ideas, along with their passionate proponents, in Washington for a week or so. That's the sizzle. But when the jurors chose projects, the total amount to allocate covered a small fraction of the total, leaving many highly rated projects on the cutting room floor. The steak, in the end, was more like a hamburger.

I am not necessarily advocating a much larger event, but rather an event where the trappings -- important as they are -- are scaled in better proportion to the substance. In the end, I think we'd all be much happier if the vast majority of the money ended up going to support these projects.

And there is yet another alternative to consider, to make the most of the enterprise. How about a deal with GlobalGiving.org, which Dennis Whittle and Mari Kuraishi set up after they worked on an original version of Development Marketplace, as a sort of eBay to connect social entrepreneurs to individual investors? DM gets first cut at the projects; those that are highly rated but cannot be accommodated in the DM budget get referred to GlobalGiving.org.