Karin Christiansen gives a comprehensive overview of the aims of the Publish What You Fund campaign, specifically focussing on the role that innovative technologies will have in facilitating aid transparency.

Publish What You Fund aims to achieve a significant increase in the availability and accessibility of comprehensive, timely and comparable information about aid. For the increased disclosure of information to be taken advantage of, there must be technologies in place which will translate data into useful formats which we can all access, understand and use.

In order to address this element in our quest for accessible and comprehensive information, Publish What You Fund is running The Aid Information Challenge, which will take place as a series of BarCamps. These will be forums open to anyone interested in technology, aid transparency or data disclosure, and those who have use for such systems, such as NGOs.

The meetings will bring these communities together. Those who will want to access data will convey what they would like to be able to use these systems for, and the more technologically able can work out how these functions should be worked into a data registry; an exciting and stimulating project for all.

The BarCamps will be exploratory, the main aim being to demonstrate the technical feasibility of aid transparency andhow these technologies could be developed. The emergence of practical and useful applications for aid data is the end point for this effort. The initial BarCamps will run in Washington DC on March 12^th, hosted by the World Bank, and in London in early March, to be hosted by The Guardian. Stay tuned!

Watch Karin Christiansen speak about Publish What You Fund and the importance of technology in the campaign for aid transparency: http://www.mefeedia.com/watch/28219575