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