humanitarian.info

The UN says many things, although unfortunately not many of them are comprehensible. Sam Smith has taken it upon himself to rectify this. Brave man.

Brave, but not stupid. Sam has form, particularly through his involvement with MySociety. Applying the lessons that MySociety has learnt through its projects, Sam has come up with two gems.

First, The UN Says is an “Unofficial blog of briefings by the Office of the Spokesperson for the Secretary-General”, i.e. steal the feed and make it easy to read. Great idea – makes it possible to see what the “official” line of the UN is on critical issues.

Second, UNdemocracy is perhaps the more useful (and disruptive) of the two. It has documents from the last 13 years of UN meetings, all organised and laid out in an easy-to-use form, scraping every last drop of goodness from the damn organisation.

Projects like these make the workings of the UN more accessible, and therefore more transparent. Frankly, the UN itself could learn from what Sam has managed to achieve (although the UN is not legendary for being a learning organisation of any kind). The question is, how can we leverage this type of information in our day-to-day work? What does it mean if we expose the workings of the organisation to more scrutiny? After all, this isn’t like normal government – although this makes them more transparent, it doesn’t make them any more accountable…

I need to think about that one. Go to the sites and see for yourself.

UPDATE: Sam corrects me: “UNdemocracy.com isn’t my project – it belongs to Julian Todd, one of the people behind publicwhip.org.uk. While I’m involved in a small way, I can take no credit for any of it. “  All my comments above should be taken to include Julian as well.