On Sat, Jan 10, 2009 at 8:43 AM, James Rigg jamesrigg1974@googlemail.com wrote:
I think transparency *is* about making everything public, and that the Foundation is merely a semi-transparent organisation, and should at least be open about not being a completely open. I don't know enough about the Foundation and non-profit law to say whether the Foundation could or should be truly transparent, but I do think it is wrong for it to trade on the kudos of transparency when it is merely semi-transparent. And similarly for the claims I read of it being anti-hierarchical.
I think it may be worth drawing a distinction between the Foundation and the work product.
Wikipedia, for example, engages in radical transparency [1] to a high degree of approximation. Every change to every article is recorded and open for review. Every discussion about every article is likewise recorded. And any individual has the right to question why anything was done.
I would say that the wiki process strives to be fully transparent.
The Foundation on the other hand is not as open, but it is certainly more transparent than your average corporation. Whether one wants to describe that as "translucent", "semi-transparent", or "transparent" strikes me as mostly a semantic distinction (i.e. an argument over how transparent is good enough for each word to apply).
The more important thing to take-away though is that the Foundation does shoot for a culture of "openness, communication, and accountability" [2], even if it is not always up to the "radical transparency" standards that some people would want.
-Robert Rohde
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_transparency [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transparency_(behavior)