For some of us, Christmas is just around the corner. Which means some of
us will be little available in the next few days.
Being leaving you, I would like to share with you part of an article
(which you may find in a rather famous encyclopedia). I invite all of
you to read it carefully.
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Transparency, as used in the humanities, implies openness,
communication, and accountability.
Transparency is introduced as a means of holding public officials
accountable and fighting corruption. When government meetings are open
to the press and the public, when budgets and financial statements may
be reviewed by anyone, when laws, rules and decisions are open to
discussion, they are seen as transparent and there is less opportunity
for the authorities to abuse the system in their own interest.
Transparency cannot exist as a purely one-way communication though. If
the media and the public knows everything that happens in all
authorities and county administrations there will be a lot of questions,
protests and suggestions coming from media and the public. People who
are interested in a certain issue will try to influence the decisions.
Transparency creates an everyday participation in the political
processes by media and the public. One tool used to increase everyday
participation in political processes is Freedom of Information
legislation and requests.
Modern democracy builds on such participation of the people and media.
There are, for anybody who is interested, many ways to influence the
decisions at all levels in society.
The elections and referendums are no longer the prime or only way for
the people to rule itself. The democracy is working continuously, and
the elections are there just to make major changes in the political course.
While a liberal democracy can be a plutocracy, where decisions are taken
behind locked doors and the people have very small possibilities to
influence the politics between the elections, a participative democracy
is much closer connected to the will of the people.
Transparent procedures include open meetings, financial disclosure
statements, the freedom of information legislation, budgetary review,
audits, etc.
In government, politics, ethics, business, management, law, economics,
sociology, etc., transparency is the opposite of privacy; an activity is
transparent if all information about it is open and freely available.
Some organizations and networks, for example, Wikipedia, the GNU/Linux
community and Indymedia, insist that not only the ordinary information
of interest to the community is made freely available, but that all (or
nearly all) meta-levels of organizing and decision-making are themselves
also published. This is known as radical transparency.
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I think the last paragraph is interesting. Indeed, what some of you are
asking is radical transparency at the organization level. And radical
transparency is not really suitable for us, in most part because we are
in the eye-storm of the media interest and that any scandal (or
non-scandal actually) is likely to raise the interest of a journalist,
and likely to spread at light-speed all over the planet.
Why should we care ? Collectively, we are likely to mostly care because
of our economical system. We essentially rely on the goodwill of
donators, and donators are heavily sensitive to public displays of
disagreements, fights, errors, misestimates, major screw-ups.
Some of us also care for personal reasons. Either because public
displays of screw-ups will damage their public image and possibly their
income.
And perhaps should we also care because of a possible impact on the way
the quality of our products is perceived. But frankly, I do not believe
this impact is significant. People can see if a product is valuable or
not and will not necessarily care so much about the background story.
Since I became chair, the board did some mistakes of appreciation. More
than one. I can stand up for all the mistakes of appreciation I made. I
am not ashamed of what we did. We were not perfect, far from it. I do
not think anyone could have been perfect. The mistakes made may come
from various reasons. None of us are professionals. We are all dispersed
around the world, which makes it more difficult to communicate, share
opinions, simply see what is really going on in the office or imagine
what is going on in the head of a staff and board member. Mistakes were
also done because of lack of funds and because of insufficient human
resources, putting us on the verge of our own physical abilities. For
example, we are looking for a treasurer. Can we reasonably appoint
someone most of us have never met ? Likely not, but the next time we
will try to all meet together is february. Which means delaying any
appointment till then at least. Should we prefer to wait till february
or should we prefer to appoint someone some of us never met ?
Other mistakes, and these ones are much more difficult to forgive, were
made because of conflicts of interest.
I trust that most of you would generally agree that mistakes were
understandable, given the circonstances, IF you were fully informed of
the details.
Unfortunately, some of those mistakes are not, and will not, be
discussed publicly. And the main reason is not that we fear your
criticism, but is that we fear the consequences of a public display of
these mistakes, and do not necessarily want someone to be made a scapegoat.
However, in the recent weeks, my belief is that, we have seen
- a tendency to make things more and more private (to avoid information
leaking), eg, restricting access to our internal list or creating an
even more private list.
- a tendency to shut down requests and criticism, whether on this list
or even on private lists, in an attempt to canalize the nature of
information being made available
- a tendency to craft "authorized" messaging, accompanied with severe
criticism against trusted members deviating from this authorized messages
Not all ideas in these three tendencies are wrong. Standardization may
be a good idea in some circonstances and facilitate daily operations.
Privacy to discuss sensitive matters is obviously a good idea. And
speaking with a unique voice rather than a cloud of voices is strengthening.
But I would advise going too far on that path. It is not healthy
generally, it is frustrating many good contributors. In an environmental
situation which is very unstable with competitors, a rather
decentralized, flexible system, with plenty of opportunities to jump in
the system, is usually considered the best solution.
Ant
