Raymond C. Offenheiser, Principal of the Modernizing Foreign Assistance Network (MFAN) comments on the next U.S. Presidential Study Directive (PSD) and Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) in MFAN’s QDDR blog series.
A draft of the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MMC)’s Open Government Plan is available for comment until the end of March. The plan outlines how MCC, a U.S. Government development agency, will further increase transparency, participation and collaboration in its work towards a more open approach to government – specifically focussing on foreign assistance.
Publish What You Fund is excited and inspired by Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK). The first event in this initiative took place in Washington D.C. in November 2009, organised and and sponsored by NASA, Microsoft, Google and, Yahoo, SecondMuse and the World Bank. Bringing together disaster relief experts and software engineers, some great techie solutions to humanitarian emergencies were developed – examples can be found here.
The much anticipated AidData database was launched yesterday at a conference in Oxford. The project will be the largest of its kind, tracking donor aid flows and spotlighting funds from 36 under-reported countries, including Chile, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Publish What You Fund welcomes the Public Online Information Act which has been introduced to the House of Representatives in the U.S. by Representative Israel of New York 2nd District. This act requires executive branch agencies to publish all information online in a timely manner and accessible format.
Owen Barder, Director of the AidInfo project at Development Initiatives, speaks to the Center for Global Development about why aid transparency matters. The interview does an excellent job in explaining why aid transparency is needed, how it can be implemented, and what impacts it might have.
