About a year ago, in the aftermath of the revolution that drove Muammar el-Qaddafi from power in Libya, journalists crowded into a press conference called by the transitional government’s Oil Ministry. Among the reporters was a small contingent of Libyan journalists. Yet it was only the foreigners who peppered a government minister with questions about when production would resume and other issues; the Libyans remained silent.

OpenOil

When colleagues asked the Libyans why they didn’t speak up, the general reply was, “Well, we don’t know what to ask,” said Zara Rahman, a freedom of information expert from the organization OpenOil who attended the event that day. It seems that information about Libya’s oil industry had long been hard to come by locally, leaving the reporters unprepared.

This information deficit, which often works to the benefit of oil companies, is what OpenOil seeks to remedy. Part energy consultancy, part publishing house, the Berlin-based organization focuses on countries with a so-called “resource curse,” meaning that most of their citizens remain poor despite plentiful local oil resources. Information about the dealings between governments and oil companies in such nations is often scarce.

So to help those citizens and, in some cases, the governments that came to power in the Arab Spring, OpenOil has just published a book that explains how oil contracts work. “Oil Contracts: How to Read and Understand Them” is based on the philosophy that “secrecy and corruption are kind of friends,” Ms. Rahman said,



The goal is to educate nonexperts about the flow of oil profits and the diverse impacts that oil production has on the economy and environment. “The focus is on resource-rich countries and making sure that citizens see the benefit” that they could reap, Ms. Rahman said.

Founded in 2010, the group first threw out its tendrils by creating a series of country-specific wikis, gathering information about the oil companies operating in each one, the role of the state, and what regulations are in place in one easily searchable platform.

OpenOil started with Iraq, followed by Libya. Since then wikis have been built for Colombia, Ghana, Iran, Niger, Sudan, South Sudan, and Syria, and one is in the works for Uganda. Some have been released as printed guides as well. The hope is that citizens and journalists will bone up on the facts, gaining a sense of where inequities or corruption may lie and how it might be addressed.

Crucial to the group’s approach in the new book is demystifying the contracts for the layman. Written by lawyers, industry experts and a representative from the Word Bank, chapters describe the actors in oil contracts, the economics of the deals, and the social, environmental, and health concerns associated with extraction. Finally, the book decodes the language of the contracts.

By using an innovative form of publishing called BookSprints, in which subject experts are brought together to rapidly produce a text, the group can produce a book in a week.

OpenOil is hoping the book will serve as a useful tool for governments in the negotiating stage. Oil companies typically have an overriding interest – profit – while governments ideally seek to balance an array of concerns, from jobs to wages to the potential for oil spills that foul towns and rivers. Should a government not understand the fine print, any semblance of equality with an oil company at the bargaining table is lost; OpenOil aims to restore some equilibrium.

“The main problem that this is trying to address is the information asymmetry,” Ms. Rahman said.

Ultimately the group hopes to publish versions of the oil-contracts book tailored to each country, supplementing the wikis. In the meantime, OpenOil is focusing on building a training curriculum based on the book.