There is an exciting technical standard called "microformats" which is evolving and offers interesting ways for organizations to more widely disseminate their content across the web and to more efficiently aggregate content from others across the web. I think there are some very powerful ways that this can benefit issues-focused organizations - enabling closer coordination between people within a sector, more rapid dissemination of knowledge, and new tools to make policy professionals more effective in their work.

To date microformats have been developed and are in use for events, reviews, contacts, social networking, and a few other types of core content - as listed and explained on the valuable site and wiki for the Microformats organization.

This lay person's explanation of microformats is that they can make what is otherwise static text on a page visible and usable to others by assigning to a nugget of content some standard attributes that describe what it is about. These attributes, plus some nifty technical things like "pinging", can mean that my movie review (or my situation report from the field in Darfur) can be spotted by other web sites and then aggregated with other reviews or situation reports. Why should a policy/service organization care about doing this? Because there is a big difference in people having to come to your own little web site to read your content, versus having your content picked up and posted more widely on other web sites.

Some ideas I have for microformat standards and utilization for groups working on international development issues include:

-humanitarian relief work jobs service: humanitarian groups could publish their job offerings on their own web sites (using a few extra lines of code to turn it into microformat) and then other organizations can aggregate and slice and dice those listings, to provide, for example, a listing of "engineering jobs in humanitarian work in Africa".
-global health policy case studies: groups working on global health issues like malaria, TB and HIV/AIDS could publish their case studies in a consistent microformat standard on their own web sites, allowing others to track and aggregate those cases.

Other suggestions?

Some examples of microformats in use include:
The October 2006 Nobel Conference uses hCalendar for its conference schedule
And the Technorati microformats search engine shows some of the aggregation possibilities, for example.

And, using a form of microformats, here are some Technorati tags for this post:
microformats
global health
humanitarian relief

More reading on microformats:
Tantek Çelik's blog