Focuss.info draws on the participation of development practitioners seeking to use the internet as a means to facilitate research and the sharing of knowledge amongst those working in the same field. It is is intended to serve as an alternative to traditional/generic search engines in that it indexes a specific choice of electronic resources that are selected by librarians, researchers, and practitioners working in participating institutions. The resources are selected based on their relevance for development studies and the quality of the information. Organisers are encouraging their peers to record their favourite websites related to international development - not on local computers, but in social bookmark accounts which are freely available on the internet. The goal is to draw upon others' online discoveries in an effort to automatically index the websites that have been saved by colleagues, and then to make the selected websites full-text-retrievable through the Focuss.info search engine.

The web-based initiative also features tools to customise content to each user's preferences. An interactive map enables visitors to the site to see where peers using the site are located. A discussion forum features topics such as "The Gender Dimension of Sustainable Development".