Forum One co-sponsored the Open Development Barcamp at the World Bank on Friday. Over 100 people showed up to talk about how we can make aid more transparent and do a better job of sharing knowledge and lessons learned across organizations, projects, topics, and countries. Owen Barder of Aidinfo (www.aidinfo.org) kicked off the day, watch or read his remarks.

From my standpoint, it was great to get together with such a wide range of key players to brainstorm about this important topic. So what exactly is open development? Here's my take, I think it involves several complementary activities:

1 - Better transparency of aid spending. The International Aid Transparency Initiative is a new initiative which aims to make information about aid spending easier to access, use and understand. Most of the key donors are involved in this and we should all be promoting, cajoling, and explaining this to help build momentum around it. IDML or International Development Markup Language is an emerging XML standard for aid information. It seemed dormant for a while but apparently this still has legs as a possible standard that organizations could use to publish aid information in a standard format.

2 - More coherent information about aid projects. The Development Gateway's AiDA project is the largest online directory of development activities, and provides information about who is doing what in international development, where they are doing it, and with what funds. Project Level Aid (PLAID) is a related effort compile the most comprehensive and consistent collection of data on development finance.

3 - Improved linkages of results and outcomes back to activities and dollars spent. This includes, for example, making the wealth of information buried in monitoring and evaluation reports more accessible and structured in a way where information can be gleaned across projects, activities, and yes, donors. Wouldn't it be great to be able to look across all the recent donor funded projects on a particular issue or in a particular country and quickly look across results to see which activities worked well and why (and at least as important, which didn't work well, and why)?

4 - Making in the vast amount of development knowledge and experience easier to find, organize, mash up and use. We badly need an open standard for publishing web content: reports, tools, resources, case studies, blog posts, etc. so that development professionals can search across topics and countries and not have to go on fishing expeditions to stove-piped project and organizational web sites and repositories. One possibility for this is using an extended version of RSS. Agrifeeds is a good example of how this approach makes it possible to aggregate and organize content by topic and country accross many donors and projects.

I came away from the meeting feeling like we are on the cusp of very exciting changes that are going to make all of this possible. First, there seems to be real momentum at the very top across donors that improving transparency and making aid information across donors more coherent is critical. At the same time, tangible examples of what is possible are emerging to illustrate the power of these ideas. Taken together, I think we will see real progress over the next few years.