Open Publishing Tracking Bilaterial Trade Agreements

It’s been apparent that much of the major trade agreements have moved out of the WTO since the collapse Seattle and Cancun Ministerials. They have been moving to bilaterial trade agreements such as NAFTA and FTAA.

So far i’ve found two good websites for tracking international trade issues from a critical or anti-globalization perspective. The first is the more stodgy Bretton Woods Project which tracks the WTO, IMF, WTO (GATT). The site is extensive in it’s coverage, but very wonky and has no participatory or open publishing features. The second site is the above mentioned bilaterals.org (via Steev) which is funded by the more savvy and grassroots XminY Fund in amsterdam.

bilaterals.org is interesting because it has a great collection of articles tracking the complicated and hard to follow secondary trade agreements. They collect and publish a lot of good articles. What’s cooler is that they have open publishing. It’s a great example of a topic specific site to track a complex issue. Instead of just being closed like commondreams where only the editorial team publishes articles, bilaterals.org is a collaborative site which allows for good research tied with a concept of driving people to be organizers. Beyond that, it’s nicely designed, clean and simple, no flashing animated gifs of rainbow chemtrails swirling across the sky.