Interesting organisations

International Institutions

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

If you are not sure if a new link belongs here, please check Other Links for other alternatives.

• 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) see also: FLO

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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.

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Consortiums

• OASIS - Organization for Structured Information Standards, maker of ebXML

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Foundations

• Free Software Foundation - promoting Free Software and Open Content

• Apache Software Foundation - an Open Source Code Consortium

• Rocky Mountain Institute - promoting Natural Capitalism

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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!

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National NGOs by country

Europe

Pan European

• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Foundation for A Free Information Infrastructure

United Kingdom

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

Belgium

• Association Electronic Libre
• Wiki of AEL

Austria

• Privatkopie Austria

North America

US

• Worldwatch Institute - An independent research organization working for an environmentally sustainable and socially just society. Special: Check out their Consumption portal

• 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)

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See also

• Interesting projects - Non-commercial, Non-institutional links that are useful for Consumerium
• Interesting companies - Commercial links