On broken donor promises

Promises by donor countries should be rated by credit rating agencies, to shame those who promise lightly; and the poor countries should be able to hedge these promises in the IMF.

This way, a broken promise will not fall on the shoulders of the poor countries least able to afford it, but on the shoulders of the IMF and this way, presumably, the possibilities of the promises being broken will also be reduced.

Sunshine should not blind us.

March 19 ending “Sunshine Week” I attended the forum “Building Transparency” organized by Openthegovernment.org. There I stated the following:

As it is not the natural thing for governments to give out the public information data we would really want to have access to when we need it, they could perhaps respond by, unwittingly, trying to drown us in data, or blind us with too much sunshine.

Therefore we should request that all public information data should carry appended to it a link that would lead us to all others who, voluntarily, want to disclose they are massaging precisely that same data, and so that all interested in precisely that same data, do not have to waste their time unnecessarily massaging all over again precisely the same data and, most importantly, so that we can all know all other citizens who belong to precisely the same network of interest.