[Foundation-l] About transparency

[Florence Devouard]

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