Multinational financial organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can sometimes become insular, politicized, ponderous, and unaccountable. That is why Raghuram Rajan from the University of Chicago and Barry Eichengreen from the University of California, Berkeley, plan on establishing an independent "Council on International Monetary Reform" (CIMR) to monitor, advise, consult with, and critique the IMF. These two professors are among the world's most respected and engaged authorities on international financial and monetary economics. The CIMR will consist of fewer than 18 members representing a balanced variety of countries, ideologies, and economic approaches. The grant budget provides for a CIMR planning conference followed by three annual meetings. The Council will interact with senior IMF officials, with attendees at the main IMF meetings each fall, and with the media as well. Establishing this CIMR is just one component of the Sloan Foundation's developing initiative on international financial regulation. The goal of this entire initiative is to inform, prepare, and eventually institute significant reforms of the international financial and monetary system.

Surprisingly few ideas from the field of international economics have turned out to be useful either in the run-up to the recent financial upheaval or in its aftermath. To reinvigorate the field of international macroeconomics, Kristin Forbes of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Jeff Frankel of Harvard University are organizing a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) project on "The Global Financial Crisis." Pairing the two of them illustrates how their project, like everything NBER does, will be strictly non-partisan and aimed at developing fundamental understanding rather than explicit policy recommendation. For example, three basic research questions this project will concentrate on are: How did global imbalances contribute to the crisis? How was the crisis transmitted internationally? How has the global nature of the crisis affected macroeconomic policy ranging from fiscal and monetary policy to bank regulation and the role of the dollar? The plan is to issue a broad call for proposals to prepare and present papers on these topics, commission a dozen of the best submitted in the competitive solicitation, post them as working papers, and hold a pre-conference with assigned discussants to provide critiques. Refocusing and revitalizing research on international macroeconomics like this is just one component of the Sloan Foundation's developing initiative on international financial regulation. The goal of this entire initiative is to inform, prepare, and eventually institute significant reforms of the international financial and monetary system.

This is a request for Maura Marx, executive director of the Open Knowledge Commons (OKC), to build the organization's base and public profile, and to develop a national digital strategy that will appeal to policymakers as well as libraries. We created the Open Knowledge Commons out of a previous grant to the Internet Archive due to the need for strengthening existing partnerships and forging new alliances with libraries, archives, funders, legislators and the public behind a universal digital library. Maura Marx, recruited after a national search, spent her first year trying to work out a rapprochement with the Internet Archive and when that became unfeasible, recruiting a new Board of Directors and setting up a new not-for-profit organization, incorporated in Massachusetts. Marx now requests one year of support to help consolidate and expand the role of OKC in developing a blueprint for a national strategy for book digitization that will be useful to policy makers as well as the library community and to create demonstration projects that showcase the benefits of such a blueprint. OKC is the only organization devoted exclusively to this vision and it fills a very important gap. Marx proposes to move OKC to the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and to work to develop the intellectual, social and legal framework to foster the strengths of this new digital environment. We view the Open Knowledge Commons as a key vehicle to develop and implement our own program in digital information technology as we seek to create a realistic digital library with universal appeal.