For years, the fisheries regulators have met at international meetings and talked about clamping down on pirate fishing industry. One of the things everyone knows is needed is a global database of suspect fishing vessels - an industry blacklist. But somehow years went past and no one got around to setting it up.
So we went ahead and did it ourselves. It took about 10 weeks and cost about 5,000 euros to set the site up. We launched it today in Rome at a biannual UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's Fisheries Committee meeting. Apparently it caused quite a stir. : )
To go with the blacklist, we also set up a spoof site: fishing-vessel-whitelist.org, to point out that the world also needs a list of legitimate/legal fishing vessels. Our team at the meeting is passing out bookmarks with the blacklist address on one side and the whitelist on the other.
You can find the site at blacklist.greenpeace.org.
And read more here. Story behind the photo is here.