[Foundation-l] About transparency

[Fruggo]

Thank you SJ, for your e-mail, it states exactly how I feel. I have been
greatly disturbed with the way we (?) appear to be dealing with formal
things nowadays. I have always felt that the Foundation was a very open
organisation, and people were trusted just because of that openness. The
last few weeks several people (that is, board and staff members of the
Foundation) have stated that the Foundation can't be that open and
transparent anymore, because we are growing up as an organisation. If the
secretiveness that has been displayed the last few weeks (months?) really is
a necessary part of growing up, I'd rather that we did not... However, I
don't think that growing up has anything to do with getting less
transparant. Rather the opposite: I believe that a professional organisation
can be more succesfull when it's transparant, because then it appears (and
is?) more trustworthy.

-Fruggo

---

SJ Klein wrote:

A fairly long reply to Florence and Sebastian.

On Sat, 22 Dec 2007, Florence Devouard wrote:

> 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.

Thank you for sharing.


> 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.
>
> ---------
>
> 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

I regret that you feel this way.  Are you deeply resolved that this is
right?  You who always stood up for the rights of the unwanted on the
projects?  The power of such transparency is being greatly undervalued --
indeed, even in this email on transparency, you do not once mention the
value of transparency explicitly.  When did we start doubting this basic
truth?

I have always had the utmost faith in you as a board member, and then as
Chair, precisely because you have such a strong sense of openness and
propriety.  So it disturbs me to read such muted overtones in this letter
of yours.

-knip-