‘Publishing What We Learned’, recently written by Mabel van Oranje and Henry Parham, discusses the origins and evolution of Publish What You Pay from 2002 to 2007. The Publish What You Pay coalition was founded in 2002 by a small, ad hoc group of London-based NGO representatives to tackle the ‘resource curse’ by campaigning for greater transparency and accountability in the management of revenues from the oil, gas and mining industries.  

This year’s Open Knowledge Conference (OKCon) is taking place in London on 24th April 2010. There are still tickets left – and you can register at the following link:

An interesting AidData blog entry uses standardisation of boat signals to explain the International Aid Transparency Initiative (IATI)’s function in the aid transparency agenda. ‘The standard […] is the set of internationally agreed-upon rules that govern the way that ships now all communicate.’ In other words, IATI’s standard is something to get all countries to talk about aid in the same language, and ‘enables data aggregators and other users of aid information to compare and merge aid information to get a clearer picture of the aid world.’