Hello,
I want to introduce myself to you. I think what you are doing is very important. I have worked in government for most of my career as an applied social scientist, grant maker and grantee. I was a Visiting Fellow at Justice/COPS with the challenging task of retrospectively evaluating all the Advancing Community Policing Grants. Justice published a book about the project. I was also the recipient of a $3M Community Partnership Grant from HHS which we used to focus on the nature of collaboration, program planning for results, & qualitative evaluation in applied settings.

I have many experiences in government, including testifying to Congress regarding the risk and resiliency research for the prevention of drug abuse, crime, etc. My interest is the convergence between applied setting work and social media. I am convinced that the effective use of these tools will make a big difference in outcomes. I know this is because I have developed a successful social network for dog lovers www.pdxdog.com in Portland, Oregon (we are dog crazy). Using the Ning platform this network has become viral and very organic.

Using my skills and integrating them into the dog network has given me a light bulb of clarity. I am positive this platform can be integrated into grant programs and seriously change how grant administrators communicate and organize their grantees. At the same time it would help with difficult communication and geographic challenges, create community and collaboration, etc. I want to make sure that new ideas for social media policy include the application of social networking within government and agencies as well as between them. Using the Ning technology would be more controlled as membership would be limited to those communities or agencies receiving specific grant money for a program or service. I do not work for Ning. I would love some feedback and I could write a lot about this subject if it is of interest to anyone.

Andrea