2009/1/10 James Rigg jamesrigg1974@googlemail.com:
Hi
This is my first post to this list - I'm a thirtysomething newbie from England. After using Wikipedia for years without getting involved, I thought I should look more closely into how it all works - and possibly even join the project! However, as a strong believer in the importance of transparency to any organisation
I am increasingly concluding that the concept of organizational transparency can only be fully understood if one considers the concept of organizational responsiveness an important accompanying principle (whether one believes this to be an inherent subset of transparency or not). I consider them separate: it is possible to publish organizational internals but to never engage in dialogue; it is possible to engage in dialogue but to not publish facts.
Moreover, I believe that in order to best serve the public interest, both principles are necessary. Transparency, by itself, can facilitate necessary organizational changes if organizational flaws are made visible through media and the legal system. This, typically, only affects the deepest organizational flaws, and if the organization is not itself responsive to questions regarding its general practices, it is meaningless for most practical purposes. Moreover, poorly articulated raw information can lead to damaging misunderstandings which remain uncorrected.
As a practical example, we spent a lot of time this year drafting Q&As for documents like the Annual Plan and the Audited Financial Statements, to help people understand the meaning thereof. In addition, we are actively engaged in discussions like this one: many staff members and Board members participate in mailing lists with stakeholders (some of those lists are open to the general public, some of them have principles under which access is granted).
In this basic understanding, it's important to recognize that an organization's ability to respond to questions is not unlimited. In fact, it is highly limited (which was exactly the point of the phrase "23-people-organization" in an earlier e-mail of mine). While most people understand this principle in theory, in practice, any individual petitioner will often feel that surely their argument is important enough, surely their e-mail or request significant enough, to be heard and carefully responded to. When this is not the actual outcome, they will feel deeply injured by this neglect. That is human nature from the cradle to the grave.
An organization's ability to publish information in any meaningful fashion (i.e. with explanations that make it actually useful) is, of course, equally limited. With thousands of people taking an interest in organizational affairs, it is almost inevitable that some question will not have been anticipated, and some fact will not have been published.
Where an organization's limits are is partially determined by its overall human bandwidth, and partially by its allocation of internal resources to publishing information and responding to stakeholders. Does every staff member spend one hour a day on it? 4 hours? 8 hours? Ultimately the organization must weigh the public service it performs through its actual work against the important, but separate, function of talking about it.
Finally, there are limits to transparency which are not just defensible but in fact ethically necessary (privacy of individual human beings) or simply practical (most businesses and organizations don't operate at very high levels of transparency, and an organization is not an island - it has to be able to deal with other people's expectations in a reasonable manner in order to function).
In sum, * I believe transparency and organizational responsiveness must go hand in hand; * both are limited by an organization's capacity and must be balanced with its other priorities; * both are further limited by both ethical and practical considerations.
Where the Wikimedia Foundation is concerned, I consider it to be doing a pretty good job, but I hope we can publish and share even more information, and respond even more consistently, in the future. I know that WMF policies and documents, even its fundraising pages, are used as examples and templates by other non-profits, and I'd love to see more of that happening.
I would be interested to hear about organizations that are weighing and using their own resources in a fashion that better serves the public interest. I don't think WMF is a fully mature organization yet - we've only just gone through a year of "growing up" - but I would love to see it collaborate with other organizations and OD experts in eventually developing and evolving sets of best practices for organizations which support purpose-driven communities.