Interesting organisations

==International Institutions== (These are the ones most likely used for Reference of Core-data)

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Social Accountability International - organisation behind the SA8000 social accountability system.

United Nations - Agenda: World peace and prosperity by getting heavily armed nation-states to cooperate.

United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) - Agenda: Environment and Human Settlements, Transport, Statistics, Economic Analysis, Population Analysis, Industrial Restructuring, Energy and Enterprise Development, Trade, Industry and Enterprise Development, Timber, Agricultural Standards, Coordinating Unit for Operational Activities, Transport, Health and Environment Pan-European Programme. 10 pages of different types of Apples, need I say more. Reference-quality stuff. See also UNECE

UN/LOCODE by UNECE UN/LOCODE provides code elements for more than 36.000 names of ports, airports, rail and road terminals, postal exchange offices, border crossing points and other locations used in trade and transport in 234 countries.

United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business - Tons and Tons of trade specifications/advisories. Reference-quality stuff.

United Nations Standard Products and Services Code (UNSPSC) - by United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Now technically managed by UCC.

International Organization for Standardization - They have a bad practice of charging lots of money for any reference-quality data.
- See ISO for more info on ISO and Consumerium
- See w:List of ISO standards for a quick overview of their scope

Fair Trade Labelling Organizations International (FLO)

EU institutions/sites

OHIM - The Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market
Eurodicautom - Official EU jargon terms translated from 12 languages to 12 languages. Useful in checking what is the widely used expression for something in English.

Consortiums

OASIS - Organization for Structured Information Standards, maker of ebXML

Foundations

Free Software Foundation - promoting Free Software and Open Content

Apache Software Foundation - an Open Source Code Consortium

Rocky Mountain Institute - promoting Natural Capitalism

International NGOs

Clean Clothes Campaign - Agenda: Worker's right

Human Rights Watch - Agenda: Human Rights

Amnesty International - Agenda: Human rights

Transparency International - Agenda: Fighting corruption, checkout their extensive links collection Lot's of good stuff on sustainable development, good corporate citizenship and lots more

Greenpeace - Agenda: Environmentalism, safe trade, oceans, climate, opposing dangerous technology
- http://act.greenpeace.org - Greenpeace cyber-activist community weblog, has hundreds of thousands of users, searches on almost any topic will yield something (Google searches will only show official documents). Active discussion of features for activist sites, how to integrate email chat and web, whether to use wikis or annotation, etc. Active discussion of many different projects. Probably the most advanced activist network anywhere on Earth - a good place to recruit trolls!

National NGOs by country

Africa

Asia

Australia

Europe

United Kingdom

Ethical Consumer - is the website of ECRA - the Ethical Consumer Research Association. Tons of practical advisories, research.

North America

US

Environmental Defense - They have organised the Scorecard.org service in which you can track polluters in the US

http://www.fairtradefederation.com/ - an association of fairtrade wholesalers, retailers, and producers

National Retail Federation / Association for Retail Technology Standards - Their XML schema covers the following issues: Item & Price Maintenance - Merchandise Flow Management - Inventory Management - Tender Control - Adminstration - Reporting - Ordering - Workforce Management - Customer Relationship Management (NEW)