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Yesterday, I had the chance to attend the public launch of a new government transparency and accountability funding mechanism – Making All Voices Count. Held at USAID headquarters, the discussion featured a veritable who’s who of open government and transparency practitioners in the Washington area; probably 250 people were packed into the room. (Announcing a…

Last week’s sentence of former Croatian Prime Minister Ivo Sanader (2003-2009) shows progress in the Croatian judiciary. He was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for taking bribes from two foreign companies. As the first jail sentence for corruption of a head of state or government in that part of the world, the case could potentially…

The UNDP launched an open data browser (open.undp.org) today, implementing its voluntary commitment to IATI, an initiative to make aid information easier to access, understand and use. Through mapping and visualizing $5.8+ billion in funding data across 6,000+ projects in 177 countries, users can search by any funding cataloger, country, and donor or recipient to…

This week, the Pakistani Ministry of Defense began a process of proposing new legislation for the country that would prohibit private mapping activities — the creation of non-governmental maps for personal, commercial, or humanitarian purposes — without prior registration with and consent from the Pakistani military (specifically, the Survey of Pakistan, a military mapping agency).…

In recent months I've done something that I swore years ago I would avoid: I’ve attended multiple large-scale conferences. I gave up on Big Conferences in the early 2000s after wasting so much time, energy, and money attending them that I began to really question their value and return on investment. Being thrust recently back…

We're looking for a technical partner to help us re-conceive and rebuild our flagship website, www.globalintegrity.org. Interested in learning more? Full details and how to submit a proposal are detailed in this formal RFP document. — Nathaniel Heller